Extremely long overdue, and not even fully complete because I no longer possess some of these books at hand and can no longer recall what drew me to each book: I present the Top Ten Book List of 2010 (in no particular order). There's a 11A and 11B this time (thus 13 books on the list), because each book alone was not quite enough to make me want it to be on the list, and I had quite forgotten I had read the remarkable A Clockwork Orange last year until I had fully typed out the details of 11A and 11B. My memory's not quite what it used to be, it seems.
Cheers.
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1. After Dark - Haruki Murakami
Eyes mark the shape of the city.
Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature-or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flickr and flair up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.
This was the first Haruki Murakami book I read, and it's setting left a deep impression on me. As seen in previous years (2009/2008), I have a soft spot for the underbellies of Asian cities, particularly Japanese ones. No one does noir-ish stuff as good as Japanese writers, somehow. I would and could launch into a pseudo-cultural commentary here about the reasons why Japan is so potent with this sort of stuff, but I shall refrain.
After Dark essentially follows a young woman around Japan (literally) after dark, when the last metro trains for the suburbs leave central Tokyo. She meets a whole host of characters of the nocturnal sort, cafe waitresses, musicians and even love hotel workers/working girls as she struggles to come to terms with her own feelings about her supernaturally comatose sister. I was left feeling with a strange sense of unease at the end, and didn't really like the supernatural bits about the sister. Still it was an overall transfixing narrative.
2. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. The year was 1924 and China was in chaos. Much of it, including Manchuria, where my grandmother lived, was ruled by warlords. The liaison was arranged by her father, a police officer in the provincial town of Yixian in southwest Manchuria, about a hundred miles north of the Great Wall and 250 miles northeast of Peking.
2010 also marks the introduction of non-fiction books into the list, the next being Jon Ronson's Them. I remember lugging the super thick and battered copy of Wild Swans all the way to work, in hopes of a slow day as M/s A when I worked for them last year so I could read instead. A wonderfully told story of three generations of her family, following the ups and downs of the past few decades of Chinese history, this is a must to gain a first-person understanding of China during the Maoist era. The sheer scale and length of the narrative alone makes it a true, modern day epic.
I just don't trust her take on Mao from a historical point of view.
3. Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Do not set foot in my office. That's Dad's rule. But the phone'd rung twenty-five times. Normal people give up after ten or eleven, unless it's a matter of life or death. Don't they? Dad's got an answering machine like James Garner's in The Rockford Files with big reels of tape. But he's stopped leaving it switched on recently. Thirty rings the phone got to. Julia couldn't hear it up in her converted attic 'cause "Don't You Want Me?" by the Human League was thumping out dead loud. Forty rings. Mum couldn't hear 'cause the washing machine was on berserk cycle and she was hoovering the living room. Fifty rings. That was just not normal. S'pose Dad had been mangled by a juggernaut on the M5 and the police only had this phone number 'cause all his other ID's got charred? We could lose out our final chance to see our charred father in the terminal ward.
I loved Black Swan Green. I love David Mitchell. There is just something to his writing that sweeps me away, the way he writes is so clear and concise, yet the words still maintain a musicality. Little bits of the book jumped out at me, like being amused about that his father works for Greenland, a grocery store in the UK (hahaha, Iceland anyone?). Then there was the story about how Black Swan Green got it's name: the locals thought it'd be ironic. But there were the wonderfully crafted scenes of the slow breakdown of relations between his parents. The fight about the rockery was so perfectly crafted, conveying the strain between his parents, about how people fight seemingly little battles as a front to larger ones. The fight about the rockery was essentially one of a power struggle between his parents, with an extremely comedically tragic ending as the expensive koi gets eaten by a heron. Then of course there's the father's affair. Black Swan Green is not just a novel about Jason, the young protagonist, but about his parents and their struggle to find meaning in their middle ages.
4. Such a Long Journey - Rohinton Mistry
The first light in the morning barely illuminated the sky as Gustard Noble faced eastwards to offer his orisons to Ahura Mazda. The hour was approaching six, and up in the compound's solitary tree the sparrows began to call. Gustard listened to their chirping every morning while reciting his kusti prayers. There was something reassuring about it. Always, the sparrows were first; the cawing of crows came later.
Rohinton Mistry, is another master storyteller. Marrying a straightforward prose style, it made all the disturbing icky bits all the more clear an image in one's mind. Especially when it came to Tehmul and the doll, I remember having to put down the book and walk away for a while because I couldn't take the imagery. I replicate bits of it here for your pleasure:-
"Dilnavaz began undressing the doll… the pearl necklace, shoes, stockings, came off one by one, as Tehmul watched, fascinated. When she started to unbutton the dress, he became quite restless.
'OK Tehmul, pay attention,' said Gustard. 'You know what to do with this?' But Tehmul was engrossed in the undressing of the doll. Dilnavaz was down to the underclothing when a trickle of saliva started to descend from one corner of his mouth.
…On the way out he hesitated. The doll was stripped down to it's anatomically vague pink plaster. 'Ohhhh.' His nostrils flared; his mouth began to move in a manner of a ruminant's; a hand reached out."
Then there was the bit about Tehmul and him begging the prostitutes:-
"Pleasepleaseonceonly. Onceonlyonce. Fastfastrubbingpleaseonceonly. Pleasetakemoneypleaseplease. Letmetouchletmepressonceonly."
I died reading that. Rohinton Mistry wrote it so well. It's like watching a train wreck, but in prose form.
There were also a lot of memorable, strand out scenes in the book which struck me. There was the bit about the chicken, where Gustard fails at an attempt to relieve his childhood by killing a chicken because his children start to see it as a pet. Then there's his fight with his oldest son, Sohrab. Then his best friend Dinshawji's behaviour and his subsequent death. Dilvanaz's attempts to right her family problems through magic limes given to her by the neighbour, Miss Kutpitia. So many different intersecting strands of narrative, all sewn up together so well.
5. Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
A classic well deserving of it's status in literature, The Great Gatsby married both a wonderfully written narrative with a simple story. Same can't be said for Tender is the Night, which I read in Dec 2010 and absolutely hated.
6. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the back of the cab as it lurches forward in traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Peirce & Peirce and twenty six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
One of the most disturbing pieces of literature I have ever read in my life, American Psycho nonetheless stands out for it's sheer ability to get to the heart of the darkest human psyches, and darkly compared the to the modern capitalist world. Bret Easton Ellis manages to craft Patrick Bateman, the literal American Psycho, into a character one can sympathise (but not empathise!) with. His brutal murders of prostitutes (HORRIFYING) are contrasted with insights into a deeply fractured mind. Easton Ellis' characterisations of Bateman's panic attacks are altogether so perfect and on the dot, and the way Bateman uses music as a numbing tool to block out his mind when he's using a chainsaw to saw someone to death, is sheer literary genius. Definitely one of the most memorable books on this list.
7. The Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
After her mother's death, Ruma's father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he'd never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most recently Italy. There were package tours, traveling in the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn't been a plane crash anywhere in the world
Jhumpa Lahiri's words and chosen language are unremarkable in their accessibility and mundanity, but these only serve as a backdrop, a reflector even, in the stories she tells. How her words reach deep inside into your emotions, caress them and make you empathise as much as you were the characters themselves. She is a magical weaver of worlds, with the material of the common man. Definitely one of the only writers of short stories that I trust.
8. A Short History of Tractors in Ukaranian - Marina Lewycka
Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed up memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.
I give this book, and highly recommend it, to all my close friends. This was also, coincidentally the first book I read of the year, and I read it on Pulau Sibu when I was on a holiday with my parents over the 2009/2010 new year. It was not even my book: the sea wind battered copy was borrowed from the little hotel's roving bookshelf. It apparently first belonged to the owner, who then left it there for the pleasure of the guests. My dad first stumbled upon it when he gave up reading Nicholas Spark's The Notebook, and he recommended it to me after I had tore through Ha Jin's War Trash (see 2009's list).
It was absolutely hilarious and heartwarming, all rolled into a ball. I was introduced to a world of Toshiba Apples, Botticellian Breasts and Lada cars, complete with an actual history of tractors. I literally rolled over with laughter at multiple parts. Somehow, Lewycka's first novel proved to be the best written of all her present novels.
9. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
'What's it gonna be then, eh?'
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what theses mestos were like, things changing so skorry theses days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog and All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with.
This was another book that was hard to read, for it's extremely violent content. Of course compared to American Psycho, reading this while on my trip to Amsterdam was comparatively much easier. Nonetheless the senseless acts of violence was quite jarring, and I especially felt horrid when I read about them attacking the old man. At least Patrick Bateman attacked bums and prostitutes quickly, much unlike this lot which enjoyed violence for violence's sake. Still, Burgess managed to create in Alex a likeable enough character - you see his love for music, the power struggle within his group, his attempts at redemption. What really struck me the most through was the role of the Priest/Pastor (I forget which now) in the book: he maintains that by the authorities forcibly removing Alex's ability to commit violence, they are taking away his humanity, his ability to make decisions no matter how reprehensible.
Throught provoking.
10. Them: Adventures with Extremists - Jon Ronson
It was a balmy Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square in summertime, and Omar Bakri Mohammed was declaring Holy War on Britain. He stood on a podium at the front of Nelson's Column and announced that he would not rest until he saw the Black Flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. There was much cheering. The space had been rented out to him by Westminister Council.
And thus so begins Them, with one of the most awesome beginning paragraphs I have read in my 21 odd years. Ronson managed to put a hilarious spin to what could've arguably been a very dry topic. Instead the way he documents his encounters with the extremists, like Omar Bakri giving out flyers at Holborn station, another's insistence that the world is secretly run by alien lizards, plus interviews with the modern KKK, is hilarious. Then there are the sobering bits, of governments gone simply mad and eliminating viewed extremists with no prejudice. What emerges is a rollicking ball of amusement. Next to Tractors, this is one of the other books I have made a point to give to friends as a gift, because it is simply worth reading. Such a hidden gem, considering I bought it for £2 for my favourite bookshop in Oxford.
11A. We Are All Made of Glue - Marina Lewycka
The first time I met Wonder Boy, he pissed on me. I suppose he was trying to warn me off, which was quite prescient when you consider how things turned out.
One afternoon in late October, somewhere between Stoke Newington and Highbury, I'd ventured into an unfamiliar street, and come across and entrance of a cobbled lane that led in between two high garden walls. After about fifty metres the lane opened out into a grassy circle and I found myself standing in front of a big double-fronted house, half derelict and smothered in ivy, so completely tucked away behind the gardens of the neighbouring houses that you'd never have guessed it was there, crouched behind a straggly privet hedge and a thicket of self-seeded ash and maple saplings. I assumed it was uninhabited - who could live in a place like this? Something was carved on the gatepost. I pulled the ivy aside and read: Canaan house. Canaan - even the name exuded a musty whiff of holiness.
Dealing with the protagonist, Georgie, undergoing a new separation from her husband. As she fights her own heartbreak and geriatrics for the discounted Sainsbury food, she runs into a host of new characters in her life - most significantly her elderly neighbour Naomi. Some bits made me cry, some bits made me laugh like mad. Some bits struck me with their meaning. But yet somehow, the ending made me feel a little dissatisfied. Hence We Are All Made of Glue barely made the list, and pales far in comparison to Tractors.
11B. The Way Things Look to Me - Roopa Farooki
Asif Declan Kalil Murphy has a brooding resentment of his name, and by extension, of his deceased parents, although he resents them for many more things than his name, up to and including their untimely departure from life. The trouble with his name he thinks, is that it promises so much more - it promises that he will be interesting and exotic, larger than life, Irish charm and whimsy blended with South Asian mysticism and romance. Asif finds it impossible to live up to his shining name, and so shudders moth-like just behind it; avoiding introductions and hiding behind initials.
I was drawn to this book because one of the characters in the story is a high functioning autistic. I smiled at the bits of her I recognised in my brother. Rather, this book was about the impact of the autistic child on the family's relations, one of the more honest bits of writing about autism I've seen to be honest. In the bitter sister, I recognised bits of myself growing up. In the brother, I recognised the role I'd soon have to undertake as sole caregiver. The characters were likeable enough, yet somehow as a whole it rang slightly hollow at the end.
Disappointments
1. Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami): spent most of the end bits of the book going WTF?!
2. Tender is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald): felt that Fitzgerald was being overly self-indulgent, too needlessly wordy
3. Two Caravans (Marina Lewycka): narrative too scattered and messy
4. Possession (A. S. Byatt): extreme and gratuitous literary wanking, stopped reading 1/3 through lest I act on my impulse to immolate the book and it's annoying characters
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I'll attempt to be more conscientious with this year's list, hahaha.
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