Books of 2020

So this was a funny year. Enough has been said about that in many other places, but compiling the list of books I've read this year brought the message home again; the virus and the following lockdown had their effect on the books I've read this year too. Funny how you don't notice that when you're in the middle of things.
I read 29 books this year, which is slightly higher than my average of the past years. Some of these were pretty lengthy, but to compensate I read some really short ones too, so the overall page number should be comparable. The amount of rereads is much higher than it was in other years, and I think there you can see the corona effect; most of the year it was impossible to just wander into a bookshop and browse, so I had to make do with what was already on my bookshelves. 

Anyway, before I dive into the analysis, let's first look at the complete list:

1 Sweet Sorrow

2 Levels of Life

3 Koning van Katoren

4 Northanger Abbey

5 Girl, Woman, Other

6 Het wonder van Frieswijk

7 One Day

8 The Count of Monte Christo

9 Spring

10 Dune

11 The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying up

12 Leah on the Off Beat

13 How to be both

14 Pleidooi tegen enthousiasme

15 Het water komt

16 Piep

17 Wild

18 Eat pray love

19 The Accidental

20 Grote Verwachtingen

21 The Bone Clocks

22 The Testaments

23 Stoorzender

24 The Underground Railroad

25 Het recht van de snelste

26 Just like you

27 Pride & Prejudice and Misletoe

28 Me & Mr Darcy

29 The Rosie Project

Wow, I did not end on a high note, that's for sure. The stream of reread romantic novels stems from the illness I had in the beginning of December, which drove me to reading quick and easy novels. Not that one should make excuses for reading something light every now and then, but seeing three of them grouped together looks a bit sorry.

Anyway, more rereads than ever, as I said; Koning van Katoren, Northanger Abbey, One Day, Eat pray love, The Bone Clocks, and the final 3 romantic novels make 8 rereads in total. Only one 'classic' novel, The Count of Monte Christo, which in page number probably equals all the rereads. Unless you want to count Dune amongst the classics too, of course. Lots of Ali Smith (Spring, How to be both and The Accidental), which is probably no surprise since I put her as my best 'new' author of 2019. I was planning on ready more from Anna Burns too, but I didn't get her first novel until Christmas, so she will have to wait until 2021.

Best English novel

1 Spring

2 How to be both

3 Girl, Woman, Other

This category was pretty hard this year, mainly because I read so many rereads, non-fiction works and plainly bad books. But there were some great ones in there too. 

Spring is of course by the lovely Ali Smith, the third instalment of her seasonal novels. I am very much looking forward to the final novel (which is already out but not in the edition I need to complete my quartet), as I read an interview with her in which she states all the connections between the novels should become clear then (apart from some references to Shakespeare, classical musicians and contemporary artists that she already pointed out in the article and which I've missed so far anyway). How to be both is also by Ali Smith, making it the first time two novels from the same author find their way into my top 3. But Spring is definitely the better of the two. I read Girl, Woman, Other first of all these novels, which puts it in danger of slipping away in the mind, which it sort of did. It was one of the Man Booker prize winners of 2019 (look for the other one down below) so maybe it should have stuck with me more than it did. Anyway, it was still a great novel, a female view on contemporary Britain.

Honourable mention goes out to Just Like You by Nick Hornby, who just didn't make the cut.

I've just had a quick look back, and this is the first year that all novels in my top 3 were written by a woman. This may be a reflection of my changes in reading preferences, or it may be a reflection of me not buying books that have come out by male authors I usually love to read, such as Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes or State of the Union by Nick Hornby.

Best Dutch novel

The only Dutch novel I read that could go in this category is Koning van Katoren, which is a reread (Het Wonder van Frieswijk is also a Dutch children's book but it is so thin it is more a novella). All the other Dutch books I read this year were non-fiction.

Best classic

1 The Count of Monte Christo

If you only read one classic novel, the outcome is easily predicted. But I really liked this novel, as I've written before; despite the huge number of pages I flew through. Must really read more by Dumas in next year.

Best non-fiction

1 Grote Verwachtingen

2 Piep

3 Stoorzender

So these are all Dutch and wildly differing in their topic and size; Grote Verwachtingen is a pretty sizeable book on the years 2000-2019, which I started somewhere in 2019 and just finished this year. It is a nice read, a good follow-up to In Europa 1900-2000, but it took me a while to get through. Piep on the other hand is a really small collection of stories by biologist Midas Dekkers, in which he combines biology and (Dutch) literature; two of my favourite things. Stoorzender is an autobiography of one my favourite comedians (to name just one of the categories you can put him in) Arjen Lubach. Funnily enough, when the theatres were open, I heard several bits of this book spoken aloud by him without even knowing there was a book coming up. The bits he read out were the best bits of the book, it must be said. 

I have been reading three non-fiction books in English for the last couple of weeks, I put them down because of the illness but will probably finish them sometime early 2021, so next year this list will probably include more English titles.

Best short-story collection

I read no short story collections at all this year, something I just realised when putting in this category. I have several ready to read now, so this will be amended next year, but it is a sad realisation.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Dune

Again, if you only read one... But this novel too was better than expected; really one of the classics in terms of character/society/plot building.

Best 'new' author

1 Bernardine Evaristo

Again, this was not a good year for finding new novels or authors. But I really liked Girl, Woman, Other from Bernardine Evaristo and have bought several of her older novels. So she is still a good new addition to my literary perspective.

Most disappointing novel

1 The Testaments

2 Sweet Sorrow

3 The Underground Railroad

So this was a toss up between the first two. I've written about my disappointment with The Testaments and Sweet Sorrow before, so I won't repeat myself except to say that Atwood gets first place because I expected so much more from her novel. I've read not-so-great novels by David Nicholls before, but never a novel by Atwood that was this bad. It makes me sad, putting two authors I generally like in the disappointing pile, but I've done the same in 2018 and 2019, so maybe their writing styles and my tastes are starting to grow apart somewhat. The Underground Railroad makes third place not because it was so bad, but because it could have been so much better. Again, it is all to do with the expectations you have; The Nickel Boys was my favourite novel of 2019 and Whitehead was in my list of best 'new' authors.

Honourable mention goes out to Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, which I haven't written about, had actually forgotten I'd read until I started to compile this list and then had to look up for what it was about. This is not a good sign, for a novel and a novelist that I've enjoyed so much before.

Authors I read more than once

Ali Smith (3x)

David Nicholls (2x)

Just Like You

A new novel by Nick Hornby! Or rather; a second new novel by Nick Hornby, since I've somehow missed his State of the Union novel that came out last year. But I asked both that one and Just Like You, his 2020 novel, for my birthday and got the latter. Fate, it would seem, wants me to read the last novel first.
The title gave me a momentary flashback to Machines Like You, the Ian McEwan disappointment of 2019, but luckily this novel is also about something current but at the same time completely different; Brexit. This is strangely topical again, even though the novel is set mostly in 2016 (which only makes you realise how long that whole process has taken). However, Brexit is merely the background against which the novel plays out, so I can see why there isn't a play on that word in the title, which is of course a song reference (no Hornby novel is without music). 

The actual story is a romance between two people as unalike as possible; a twenty-something working class black guy and a forty-something middle class white woman. If that sounds like a hard pill to swallow, you don't know Nick Hornby; he has written novels about the most painful of subjects that are still light-hearted and fun while carrying a deeper message underneath.

Another apt title for this novel could have been Pride & Prejudice in the 21st Century. The combination of younger man and older woman is one I haven't read that often (the same can not be said for the other way around) and this novel brought home how ingrained class differences still are in the UK. Added to that, the racial stereotyping is far worse than I've ever experienced myself, going from this novel. But maybe that is just me speaking from my privileged bubble. Anyway, the characters themselves are not exempt from stereotyping, hard as they try not to give in to it (reading the title as "That is just like you!"). Lucy is disappointed that Joseph's church doesn't come with gospel singing and dancing. Joseph is sure Lucy's dinner party will be boring as he will have nothing in common with the people there. But it's mostly the people around them making a fuss, almost everybody has an opinion about the situation save Lucy's two sons, who are happy to just play FIFA with Joseph and not be bothered about his age, race or social class.

Lucy and Joseph fall in love without either of them really knowing it; Hornby is a master of the 'show, don't tell' craft. They encounter the predictable bumps in the road, some of which exist more in their own minds than in reality, but overall they see mainly the things that connect them (reading the title as "I feel just like you!"). This is the light-hearted, happy part of the novel.

Things go a bit sour when Hornby himself steps in some stereotyping traps; some characters are flat as a board, only existing to serve as contrast to others. Brexit is one such topic where everything is either black or white; all Josephs circle vote leave, while everybody Lucy knows is a Remainer. I cannot help but think that surely there were shades of grey in between there somewhere? Josephs solution, to vote both sides just to not disappoint anyone, is maybe one Nick Hornby himself could have taken on several occasions where he turns up the contrast a bit to high.

But in the end Brexit is merely a backdrop against which a unique and ultimately pretty believable romance plays out. This is the saving grace of the novel; how Lucy and Joseph feel like people you might actually meet, with all their insecurities and doubts, people you are rooting for to make it together.

ETA: I just discovered that the Dutch translation of the novel is called 'Op het eerste gezicht', which translates as 'At first sight'. Or if you want to be more poetical; 'First Impressions', which is the original title Jane Austen gave to Pride & Prejudice. And so it all comes full circle.

Films of 2018

For a couple of years I've been writing a 'Books of...' post (the 2018 edition will be upcoming) but with the end of the year nearing and lots of other lists appearing in various media, I wondered why I wouldn't make a 'Films of ...' version as well. In an average year, I watch many more films than I read books, because films are shorter, cheaper, and watching a film is a shared experience. Because I have a membership card at the biggest cinema of my city, I can watch any film I want for a fixed price per month. Also, this cinema actually remembers all the films I watched there in an nifty app, thus giving me the below overview with just one click. I watched many more films than these, of course; arthouse films at the arthouse cinema, Netflix original films, films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and Hongerige Wolf festival, older films that found their way to my screen in some other way (in the past month alone I saw Twelve Angry Men from 1957 and Mary Poppins from 1964). But to include all would be impossible. So I will stick with the list my cinema provides me with; the new films I saw in 2018, excluding re-releases (I saw Grease on its 40 anniversary), Disney special weeks and the in-house pre-premieres.

These were:
1 Breathe
2 The Greatest Showman
3 Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
4 Darkest Hour
5 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
6 Taal is zeg maar echt mijn ding
7 The Maze Runner: Death Cure
8 Game Night
9 Every Day
10 Mary Magdalene
11 Ready Player One
12 Hostiles
13 Phantom Thread
14 Midnight Sun
15 Avengers: Inifinity War
16 De Matchmaker
17 Isle of Dogs
18 Deadpool 2
19 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
20 Love, Simon
21 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
22 Incedibles 2
23 Ocean's 8
24 Tag
25 Mission Impossible: Fallout
26 Adrift
27 On Chesil Beach
28 Blackkklansman
29 A Simple Favour
30 Venom
31 Juliet, Naked
32 A Star is Born
33 First Man
34 Bohemian Rhapsody
35 The Children Act
36 Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
37 Robin Hood
38 The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
39 Ralph Breaks the Internet
40 Mary Poppins Returns

A pretty varied list, if I say so myself. Some Marvel, some arthouse, some YA, some action films. Some comedy, lots of drama, a couple of Dutch romcoms; my film habits are more diverse than my reading habits.
So, because one list is not enough, let's break this down into some neat little lists:

Best English film
1 On Chesil Beach
2 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
3 First Man
Right, so this is always the last list I write (even though it is the top one) because it is the most difficult. What do I put here? The films that moved me the most? The films that surprised me? The films that are beautifully made? In the end, I put the films that made the strongest impression, the films that I will remember some years into the future. On Chesil Beach is a film adaptation of one of my favourite Ian McEwan novels. It stars Saoirse Ronan, who is one of my favourite actresses. I cried my eyes out in the cinema; the story is heartbreaking to read, but to see it played out on the screen is somehow even more moving. Nothing much happens, it is set in one afternoon and evening, but whole lives can change in just that short amount of time. Not sure why it received lukewarm reviews, to me it was one of the highlights of the film year. The same is true for Three Billboards, although that is of course a wildly different film. This film is filled with raw emotion without becoming overly dramatic. Frances McDormand won a deserved Oscar; she plays a very strong woman, without being the perfect hero we we see in so many films. She makes impulsive, sometimes somewhat stupid, choices; she is human in her rage. With two strong female leads the third film may be somewhat of a surprise, but First Man also made an impression, not because of Ryan Gosling's performance as Neil Armstrong (although he was great as always) but because of the whole madness of actually sending people into space in metal boxes atop giant fuel tanks that almost shake apart on the start. Again, we have a dramatic story without overt drama. Also, Claire Foy fills the strong female role here. Three films to watch again.

Best Dutch film
I'd love to do a list here, but I only saw one proper Dutch film; De Matchmaker, which apart from the article you may be forgiven for thinking was actually an English film. It was pretty good, great actors make all the difference (even though some of them were type cast in the same role they've played for at least 5 years now, practice apparently makes perfect).

Best animation
1 Isle of Dogs
2 Ralph Breaks the Internet
3 Incredibles 2
No argument here; Isle of Dogs is hands down one of the best films of 2018. It is beautifully made, with lots of attention to detail, the story is moving and whacky at the same time, as are the characters the style reminded me of my earlier love of Kubo and the Two Strings and it just gives you an overall feeling of having seen a work of beauty. Ralph Breaks the Internet is a bit of an odd one, as I never actually saw Wreck-it Ralph, but it was fun and creative, with good characters and a nice (if somewhat predictable and long) plot. The only reason it wins from Incredibles 2 is that I can actually remember what happened in Ralph, whereas the Incredibles seem to have disappeared from my mind all together. I did see the original Incredibles film and liked that more than its sequel.

Best book adaptation
1 On Chesil Beach
2 Juliet, Naked
3 Adrift
In 2018 I was lucky enough to see film adaptations of several favourite novels come out; On Chesil Beach and The Children Act by Ian McEwan, and Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. The first is one of the best films I saw all year, the second sadly made the 'most disappointing' list. Juliet, Naked was a bit of a surprise: the novel translated to screen better than I'd expected. Adrift isn't just a film adaptation of a book, but a 'based on true events' film (Tami Oldham wrote a book about her experience of being adrift on sea for 41 days). This could have been a overly dramatic survival story, but the film is beautifully made, cutting away from the couple on their broken boat to how they met and the hours before the storm, thus giving a great tension build-up. Not a film I expected to like, but one I will remember for some time to come.

Best sequel
1 Mary Poppins Returns
2 Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
3 Avengers: Inifinity War
Soooo many sequels this year. So, so many. Not all of them good, mind you. But the Mary Poppins sequel, which took 54 years to come about, was actually really great. I hadn't seen the original until about a week ago, so I am new to the fandom, but I loved the original and the sequel. Emily Blunt makes for a great Mary, it is amazing to see how many different roles she has already done. I felt the same happiness about the Jumanji sequel; it took a long time arriving, but it was really nicely done. I think this may be the first The Rock film I actually enjoyed. Also; Jack Black. Then there are lots of lesser souls in the sequel universe; Mission Impossible, Jurassic Park, The Maze Runner, but the Avengers film steals third place. I will not mention the Fantastic Beasts sequel here (see below).

Best Marvel
1 Avengers: Inifinity War
2 Deadpool 2
3 Venom
(I'm just putting Marvel adaptations here, not worrying whether they are actually part of the MCU. Also, no, I didn't see Black Panther or Ant-Man and the Wasp). It wasn't a great Marvel year, this year. Sure, Infinity War was pretty nice, but it is not a film in and of itself, the open ending drove me nuts. Also, too many characters crammed into one move. Deadpool and Venom were disappointments story-wise and character-wise. Maybe I should have gone to the Marvels I didn't see, which would make this sad list my own fault, but the overall feeling is just; meh.

Best young adult
1 Love, Simon
2 Every Day
3 Midnight Sun
Okay, so Yong Adult must be everybody's guilty pleasure, except for actual young adults, who think that there is finally a film that understands them. Love, Simon should be nobody's guilty pleasure, but a film you proudly proclaim loving. It is almost un-American in its realism (somewhat like Atypical), with of course the necessary dose of drama added. But the story is sweet and feelgood, the characters are believable and the message is great. (I should probably have gone to see Call me by your name as well, but I just read the book and couldn't stand destroying the image in my mind with the film adaptation.) Every Day and Midnight Sun are more stock 'nobody but you understands me' YA fare, but still nice enough to inculde on the list. The final Maze Runner film never stood a chance.

Most disappointing film
1 The Children Act
2 Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
3 The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
This is a painful list. By definition, it only includes films I actually had high hopes for. I mean, when I visit Tag or Game Night I don't expect any great artistic revelations (although they were both better than expected). So my hopes were really high for The Children Act, especially as McEwan wrote the screenplay himself (as which On Chesil Beach, which is in the first list), but this was such a disappointment. Emma Thompson is acting her heart out, but the story is just so flat, the characters are flat, their development and thought process is non-existent and the main message or point is just completely lost. When I explained how the characters are in the novel to my baffled friend (who hadn't read the book) she exclaimed: why didn't they film that instead? My thoughts exactly. Second major disappointment is the Fantastic Beasts sequel; the first film was so lovingly made, centred around Newt and his beasts, and now we get an in-betweeny with way too many characters, no coherent plot to speak of, too many action scenes thrown together, no actual Grindelwald crimes (as promised by the title) and to make things worse; no beasts to speak of (also; as promised by the title). Eddie Redmayne is wasted on this film. The third film in this list is there because it was just a major disappointment overall. I love The Nutcracker, I will visit the ballet in a couple of days, but this film just had nothing to do with that story or anything else. There was no proper plot, no characters to relate to, just... nothing. The only good thing about it was Matthew Macfayden (to end this somewhat downer ending on a positive note).

Books of 2017

Another year in books has flown by. After my book challenge in 2015, I've been keeping lists of all the books I read through 2016 and this year. As in previous years, I'm always surprised to find which books I read not even half a year ago; amazing how quickly you forget when it was that you read something. On the other hand, some novels I feel like I've just finished them while that turns out to have been more than a year ago.
No reading goals, just keeping up the numbers. I read 23 books this year, which is 2 up from last year. Mainly, I think, because I didn't tackle any big literary reads (like Anna Karenina last year) and there were some rereads, which are always faster. As always, some books have already been discussed at length, while others may have their first mention on this blog right below.

The complete list for 2017:

1 The High Mountains of Portugal
2 The Sellout
3 Juliet, naked
4 Black Swan Green
5 The Outrun
6 Last Orders
7 The Handmaid's Tale
8 How to be good
9 The Jane Austen book club
10 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
11 Hag-Seed
12 The Joy Luck Club
13 England and other stories
14 Mijn Meneer
15 The Light Years
16 The North Water
17 Marking Time
18 Here I am
19 Confusion
20 The Best of Adam Sharp
21 Cloud Atlas
22 Exit West
23 Casting Off

So, five rereads; Juliet, naked, Black Swan Green, The Jane Austen bookclub, Harry Potter, and Cloud Atlas, two of which are by the ever-popular David Mitchell. The Joy Fowler and JK Rowling were because there was a bit in the summer where I wanted to read but not invest actual brainpower into the reading, so I went back to some really easy rereads. Only one Dutch book, which is also the only non-fiction title on the list (although it is partly fictionalized, it is the autobiographical account of Ted van Lieshout's youth). Technically only one short story collection (England and other stories), although one could count The Joy Luck Club as short stories (I read one of the chapters as a 'separate' short story during my studies). No classics at all. I was going to say 'no Americans' until I realised both The Sellout and Here I Am are written by Americans; somehow they both disappeared from my mind pretty quickly. No new novels by Ian McEwan, or David Mitchell, or any of my other popular authors, simply because there weren't any. Actually, now that I think of it: no Ian McEwan at all this year. After the triple McEwan there may have been a slight overdose, but still; this must be the first time in about 10 years that I read no novel by Ian McEwan for a whole year. This will surely be rectified in 2018.

Let's break the novels that I did read down into some lists:

Best English novel
1 Exit West
2 Last Orders
3 The Handmaid's Tale
A difficult choice this year! Exit West is clearly the winner; another Mohsin Hamid novel that I dearly loved. It is a very contemporary novel, featuring a couple from a unspecified Middle Eastern country fleeing through one of the mysterious doors that keep opening up all over the world, leading to other places. It is both mystical and very realistic, and I'm sad it didn't make Man Booker this year, as it would have been a deserved winner (I've just started reading the novel that did win, and Exit West would beat it with its hands tied behind its back at this point). Do read something by Hamid!
Last Orders is Graham Swift's Man Booker 1996 winning novel, which gave me the combined emotions of a WWII novel and The Full Monty, with it's 'band of brothers'-like bantering and the emotions simmering under a surface of beer and beautiful language. Same goes for The Handmaid's Tale; it's old, it's great, I've written all you need to know when I read it. Funnily enough, both Last Orders and The Handmaid's Tale could count as my 'classics' this year; they are both over 20 years old, and still very current.

Best Dutch novel/classics
Non-existent this year. Strange, as I did get lots of new novels, and have a pretty long backlog in both these categories. They must never have been at the top of the to-read list.

Best non-fiction/best short story collection
Only one novel in each of these categories this year, so not really lists to speak of.

Best fantasy/scifi novel
1 Exit West
2 The Handmaid's Tale
3 The High Mountains of Portugal
Not a lot of these to go around either, but I would of course have put in Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green if they hadn't been rereads. Two of these also feature in my Best English novel list, but The High Mountains of Portual deserves special mention. Yann Martel, like Mohsin Hamid and David Mitchell, can capture you with a world that is very much like ours, but than turns out to be slightly unlike ours in a magical way, and your suspension of disbelief just goes with that until you find yourself in their made-up world still fully believing that these things could really happen here and now. Realistic fantasy, a true escape into literature.

Best 'new' author
1 Elizabeth Jane Howard
2 Graham Swift
3 Margaret Atwood
Only Elizabeth Jane Howard is really a 'new' author for 2017, and I've written enough about her novels in my previous blog post. But Graham Swift and Margaret Atwood are some of my recent discoveries of whom I want to read more. I'd read my first novel by Swift, Mothering Sunday, as one of my last novels in 2016 and this year I continued with Last Orders and his short-story collection England and other stories. I'd have wanted Wish you were here on the list as well, but it went into reprint just as I ordered it, so that will have to go for 2018 (when I wrote about Last Orders in March it had also disappeared from view in the bookshop, so I'll have to look into that...). Margaret Atwood is not really a 'new' author for me, as I read Oryx & Crake during my English studies, but she is one of the authors I've put on my 'must read more' list. This year I read The Handmaid's Tale and Hag-seed, both of which are great in their own way. I got The Heart goes Last a couple of weeks ago, so she will also feature in the 2018 list.

Most disappointing novel
1 How to be good
2 The Sellout
3 The Outrun
(4 The Best of Adam Sharp)
Wow, this was really the easiest category to fill this year. Not a good sign. I was looking forward to How to be good, one of the few Hornby novels I'd never read, but it was thoroughly disappointing. Moralistic, full of angry relationship issues, with a wavering plot and unlikeable characters. The Sellout was the Man Booker winner of 2016, so naturally I read it, but I didn't like it at all. It is supposed to be a funny social commentary on contemporary America, but I can't remember finding any bit of it funny. The main character struck me as pathetic, his backstory was unbelievable and the plot even more so. The Outrun appeared to be good at first; girl returns to small town Orkney life after her big-city London life blows up in her face, but in the end it didn't really go anywhere, the character didn't come to life for me as in so many of these 'woman retreats to find herself' novels. Special mention for The Best of Adam Sharp, again a novel by Graeme Simpsion that disappointed. It felt like a slight do-over of The Rosie Project, with some High Fidelity elements thrown in. He really turned out only one good novel, his first, and I will now stop reading whatever else he writes until the recommendations tell me it really is too great to miss.

Authors I read more than once
- Elizabeth Jane Howard (4x)
- Margaret Atwood (2x)
- Graham Swift (2x)
- Nick Hornby (2x, one reread and one new)
- David Mitchell (2x, both rereads)

Juliet, Naked

Whenever I stand in front of my bookcases thinking 'I have nothing to read', I feel a bit like one of those stereotypical women who have tried out a dozen outfits and decide that they have 'nothing to wear'. I have over 200 books in my house, surely, I have more than enough to read? The point is, of course, that I don't have the book that I want to/need to read right at that moment. About once or twice a year I get into a weird mood, book-wise; a mood in which I just cannot find the book that fits. Usually, I then reread novels I have already read. Getting started in a new book would only spoil the new book because I will invariably not 'get into it', and throw it aside after a couple of chapters. Rereading familiar stories is a safer bet.
After finishing The Sellout, which put me in a bit of a gloomy mood, I was looking for something lighthearted. Interestingly, I do not own many lighthearted novels. Even the ones that I do have, such as the Jasper Fforde novels, or anything by David Nicholls, have a serious literary undertone. I usually take to rereading Bridget Jones's Diary, but the new film has put me somewhat off. So my safest bet was Nick Hornby.
I love almost everything Nick Hornby has written, be it novels, short stories, reviews, or screenplays. You have probably seen a movie adaptation of one of his novels (High Fidelity or About a Boy) or one of the films he actually wrote (An Education, Wild, Brooklyn). I own all of his novels with the exception of How to be Good, for reasons I cannot explain. This time, I settled on Juliet, Naked.
Now I mentioned that I was looking for something lighthearted, and Nick Hornby may not be the first person that comes to mind. Almost all of his novels are populated by characters that are lonely, suicidal, depressed, and generally unsure what direction their life is supposed to take (A Long Way Down, one of my other favourites, is a good example: four people meet at the top of a building because they all planned to commit suicide by jumping off it). So why call it lighthearted? Because he brings these subjects with a funny note, not ha-ha funny but with a lightness and an irony that cannot help but bring a smile to your face. His novels deal with very heavy subjects, but they do not feel heavy, they feel light and manageable.
Juliet, Naked centers around Duncan and Annie, a couple in their late thirties living in a small seaside town in the north of England. Duncan is a great fan of Tucker Crowe, a has-been singer from the eighties who has mysteriously disappeared after his last album, Juliet. Annie is not that big of a fan, but for the past fifteen years she has let herself being dragged along in Duncan's obsession. However, when Tucker suddenly releases a new album, Juliet, Naked, their opinions clash and they both have to reconsider what it is they want out of life. Needless to say, things don't end that well between them. Breaking up a fifteen year relationship because of a music album? This is all very real in a Nick Hornby novel.
However, the Duncan/Annie story is just half of the novel. The other half is about Tucker himself. And this is where the novel got a bit more personal than Nick Hornby's other novels. Tucker, by now, is in his late fifties, no longer an alcoholic, no longer an artist, and basically living off the latest wife that thinks she will be able to sort him out and put him back to rights. He has a six year old son, who is constantly worried that his father will suddenly drop dead on him. This existential angst somehow creeps into Tucker's mind too, especially when more and more of his forgotten children try to find their way back into his life. Tucker Crowe is by far the oldest main character a Nick Hornby novel has ever had, and the whole feeling of 'my youth is now truly over' permeates throughout the novel. When he wrote it, he was nowhere near sixty, but he is advancing upon that age pretty quickly now. The Tucker Crowe storyline felt, upon rereading, as one of his most realistic and heartfelt in all of his novels.
So did I get my lighthearted distraction novel? In a way, yes. But somehow, the 'I don't know what I want to read' mood hasn't been lifted, so I will continue to reread until I find myself looking for something new. I may end up diving into The Hunger Games or Harry Potter just to snap out of it, but for now I'll stick to one of my favourite David Mitchells. Desperate times...

52 Books Challenge - The lists

Now I'm not normally a person for lists or ratings or 'highlights of the past year' or something, but given that I have 41 books which I can group into a couple of meaningful categories, I'm going to give it a go in this instance. These are the things that popped into my head while looking over the books I'd read this year.

Best English novel
1 The Children Act
2 Black Swan Green
3 One Day
Pretty typical, in a year where I'm reading only new novels, that my favourite novels still come from that group of male British authors that I've loved over the years. Must be my style. Also, the only Ian McEwan novel I read all year (and the first novel I read this year) is still a firm number 1. New to this list is of course Dave Nicholls, who I hadn't read before this year, but am now a really big fan of.

Best Dutch novel
1 Tongkat
2 Kom hier dat ik u kus
3 De Aanslag
This was a pretty hard choice between Tongkat and Kom hier dat ik u kus, because they are both beautiful, wonderful novels in their own way. But Tongkat is just so special, I cannot really get my head around it (I will reread it in the near future).

Best non-fiction (whichever language)
1 Dit kan niet waar zijn
2 My Brief History
3 Gratis geld voor iedereen
Three widely divergent books, but all three good in their own way, and all three containing lots of personal notes/touches/stories of the author.

Best short story collection
1 Speaking with the angel
2 The Beautifull Cassandra
3 The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
I didn't read that many short story collections, and none of them were really brilliant, but still, a top 3. Also, my only Jane Austen reading of this year is in there.

Best WWI/II novel
1 The Narrow Road to the Deep North
2 All Quiet on the Western Front
3 Slaughterhouse 5
As always, I read a lot of War novels this year, and some stand out. The Narrow Road... won the Man Booker for a reason; it is a beautifully written, deeply haunting novel about WWII in Asia. Nr 2 and 3 are classics in the genre, and for a good reason. I've said it before, and I will say it again; if everybody would read these horribly fantastic novels, no one would ever start a war again.

Best comic novel
1 Shades of Grey
2 Funny Girl
3 Starter for Ten
I don't often read funny novels, but when I do, they're usually by Nick Hornby or Jasper Fforde, who find themselves high on this list. And then there's another Dave Nicholls, of course.

Classics (whichever language)
1 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
2 Brideshead Revisited
3 De Aanslag
Brideshead Revisited and De Aanslag are technically both also WWII novels, but when looking at them as classics, they somehow rank higher than some of the other WW novels. And the John le Carre novel just blew me away - I will definitely read more by him in 2016.

Most disappointing novels
1 The Rosie Effect
2 All the Light we cannot See
3 The Book of Lost Things
Not everything was good. I was really looking forward to The Rosie Effect, because I loved The Rosie Project, but this was one of the most disappointing sequels I've ever read. All the Light we cannot See won the Pullizer, but really, it's such a hyped-up American WWII novel, I couldn't care for it in any way. And The Book of Lost Things is one of the worst fairy tale retellings I've ever read. If you want to read a good one, go for The Sleeper and The Spindle (my only Neil Gaiman novel, which I couldn't fit anywhere else).

And to complete the list craze, not a top 3 but another neat list:

Authors I read more than once
- David Mitchell (3x)
- Dave Nicholls (3x)
- Rutger Bregman (2x)
- John le Carre (2x)
- Harry Mulisch (2x)
- Nick Hornby (2x)
Again, some of my all time favourites are also recurring reads. I could do you a top 3 of Mitchell novels (Black Swan Green, The Bone Clocks, Number9dream) and Dave Nicholls (One Day, A Starter for Ten, Us), but that would be stretching things.

52 book challenge - August

My holidays didn't go quite as planned, something I may or may not talk about more here. But the net result is that I didn't read half as many books as I'd planned, and that I still can't really focus on any book for any length of time.
What I did read:
28 Speaking with the Angel - various authors (edited by Nick Hornby)
29 Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight) - Jan Wolkers
30 Tongkat - Peter Verhelst
31 Het Exacte Verhaal - Ionica Smeets

Not really my typical month: 2 books in Dutch, one informal book about scientific journalism, and one short story collection. I'm nearly finished with The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (I always seem to be 'nearly finished' with something at the end of a month, I really should plan these things better), but nearly isn't the real thing, so this will have to be one of the weirdest months with respect to books as well.
The short stories were nice, but nothing special, although it did contain a story by Colin Firth (followed by a story by Helen Fielding, which is a nice touch). Turkish Delight is one of those Dutch classics anyone should really read; I liked it, and I will now have to read more by Jan Wolkers. Tongkat is a beautiful fantasy story, although you can't really call it a story because it is more poetic than that, in beautiful Flemish Dutch. I will have to reread that one, because I feel like I've only scratched the surface of its complexity, but that will have to wait until 2016. Het Exacte Verhaal explains why scientists should engage in scientific journalism, and how. It's a fun read, especially if you have biologists and other scientists writing schoolbooks, but it caters to a niche market.
So, I won't be all optimistic about how things will be better in september, because I don't think they will, but we'll see how it goes.

Films galore

There are times, when you really really want to go to the cinema to watch a movie, but there is really nothing good on, so you end up going to a film you didn't really want to see just to be inside a cinema.
And then there are times when there are so many (potentially) good films about that you can't find the time to watch them all.
In the last two weeks, we flipped from situation 1 to situation 2, the quickest positive trend in film on offer for a long time.
Firstly, there was The Grand Budapest Hotel, which we saw in the art cinema last Sunday. Great film, quite strange, but in a good way. In the previews we saw the trailer of August: Osage County, which I have been meaning to watch since the Oscar nominations came through, and I want to watch even more after reading a very positive review on it. There was also a preview of The Book Thief, based on a young adult novel that is quite popular (writing this sentence made me realise that English is lacking a term for 'boekverfilming', the Dutch word used to describe films based on books. In the past, most Dutch films were based on books as funding is hard to come by otherwise, but the English-speaking world is quickly catching up, with most films now based on books or 'true stories'...). The film got some pretty bad reviews but still looks good anyway. The same is true for A Long Way Down, based on my favourite Nick Hornby novel. Most reviews say the film has done anything possible to wreck the great atmosphere of the novel, but still, I love the story and I will have to see it for myself.
So that made for 4 films, only 1 of which I have already seen.
But then yesterday's paper had even more film reviews, and they were quite positive about The Invisible Woman, which is a portrayal of one of the darker parts of Charles Dickens's life. Another literature film! I will have to see it. On the next page over was a review of Kill Your Darlings, the film starring Daniel Radcliffe and dealing with Alan Ginsberg's younger years. I am not a fan of the Beat generation, partly because I gave a horrible presentation on them once, and partly because I think the stuff they wrote is just too far-fetched, but this also looks like quite a nice film.
So, 5 films I need to watch, 4 of them literature-related. What more can a person ask for, apart from better cinema-going weather. It's going to be sunny and warm for the next few days, so I will have to put my film-cravings on hold for a little while, as great weather is even harder to come by than great films!

The Polysyllabic Spree

The Polysyllabic Spree is a literary column that Nick Hornby wrote from 2004 until 2006. At that time, I was studying biology and thus completely uninterested in "Stuff I've Been Reading", but even if I had been interested, the columns were published in the Believer, a literary magazine published in the US and (according to Hornby) only read by men.
But thankfully, his columns have also been published, which gives me in an insight into the difference between writing reviews and writing about literature and writing about reading. And has also made me realise that what I generally do is write about reading, whereas in my essays for English, I wrote about literature. Which is good, in a way, because way too many people write way too many things about literature as it is, and also, I couldn't actually say that I know enough about literature to say anything sensible about it without having the whole university library to use as a source.
It is also quite a depressing read, as the first book I actually recognised and read appears on page 86 (We need to talk about Kevin, which I only read because of a course I was taking), there is 1 mention of Jane Austen in the whole thing (to state that in her days, it was perfectly normal for cousins to marry), and only one mention of a McEwan novel (Saturday, I haven't yet reached the part where he discusses reading this, but I'm already dreading the moment). But as Hornby buys about 10 books each month, and reads about the same amount (usually different novels from the one he's bought), I think the most important conclusion from reading this book will be: I still have a lot left to read.
Which is partly depressing but also good, because I've been filling up my birthday wish list with "want to read this one day but haven't really gotten round to buying, let alone reading, it" novels.
The second conclusion is that Nick Hornby is a fun writer whatever he writes, be it novels or autobiographies or columns, and that if you are a good writer you can make people enjoy reading about books they haven't actually read themselves.
But generally, reading about another person reading novels is ever only interesting for people who read a lot themselves, and want to read more. The same group of people who actually read author's biographies and letters, and listen to the director's commentary on DVDs. I'm just happy that I found something that caters to this pretty peculiar obsession of mine.