- The novel most enjoyed: new (to me) writers:
M John Harrison: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise; Conor O’Callaghan: We Are Not in the World; Douglas Stuart: Shuggie Bain
- The novels most enjoyed: older writers:
Richard Flanagan: Gould’s Book of Fish (a novel in twelve fish); Cormac McCarthy: The Border Trilogy; Willy Vlautin: Don’t Skip Out On Me
- The most striking non-fiction work:
Laura Bates: Men Who Hate Women
Leon Trotsky: The History of the Russian Revolution
- Any novel that disappointed, or simply didn’t like:
Bohumil Hrabal: All My Cats; also, Coupland’s Generation X has not aged well
- The year’s most striking fictional character:
Elena and Lila from Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels; Horace Hopper from Don’t Skip Out On Me
- …and the most-dastardly villain(s):
“The System”: the patriarchy, the racist, capitalist, climate change denying system.
- The best authors encountered for the first time this year:
Conor O’Callaghan and Douglas Stuart
- The most beautifully written novel:
Shuggie Bain & Gould’s Book of Fish; some sections of Waymaking were transcendent
- Poetry most enjoyed:
Introducing my own second sub-section (as I am allowed to do in my own list), then the most urgent poetry I read last year was Caleb Femi’s Poor, which has so much to recommend it, that I don’t know where to start.
Discounting people I know / count as friends (which is quite a few in this year’s list), it would be Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa and Li Po’s Selected, in the runners-up slots, but by far my favourite was Stephen Watts’ Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds.
- Memorable passages from books read this year; #75 from Republic of Dogs…
“The flock of starlings burst from the rowan again and set up new geometries in the static air. And they tried to establish new speech patterns and remembered a protest song.
Then a solitary heron flew in from the moor with the breath-pulse of its wing beat and another looked up from its fish-watch down on the wrack. And two cormorants flew straight out of the sun – black, black, black, charred pieces of air and veered past the convening rock and looked back and swerved their bodies out towards the nesting cliffs and clamour. Young ones in the nests fell out and sank in the lake. High above great gulls wheeled in slow circles and still higher brent geese barked out their reports; the state of a besieged city, the burning of libraries worldwide, the migration of whole peoples, the bandaged sun, and all the farcical haloes of inane cruelty.
Lapwings from their moor meadow’s hollows, oyster catchers with their long orange beaks and gulls from their nests on tiny tidal islands would whorl about and dive intruders’ heads to save their young and their eggs. And the return to peck at the herbs or the wrack. Sandpipers and avocets, long-legged waders and even the hidden corncrake came in to say their beakful. The snow owl and the passing whooper swan, the wild merganser with its orange ring, the wrens and the water wagtails, the cuckoo and the crow that had its taste for lambs and their tiny tongues, the raven, carrier of seed from island to island.
Skuas and Arctic terns, their paper wings bouncing on the tides of air. And then a gannet with its superb design, with its unrepeatable, aerodynamics, with its beak and its wing-tips dipped in yellow, fell into the sea, wings strained backwards, and came up to the surface again with its food fish in the straightforward triumph of its everyday action.
A wind got up and had words with the still calm air.
The wren came back and cocked its head, to listen to what might be being said.
Hawks and choughs and other birds that need have no dealings with us.
In that place cleared of people, their republic was their own. Their language was the language of birds.
And they were their own republic under the sun.”
BOOKS 2021
Fiction
Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander: The Passenger
Coupland, Douglas: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Crace, Jim: Quarantine
DeLillo, Don: The Silence
Diaz, Junot: Drown
Diop, David: At Night All Blood is Black
Ditlevsen, Tove: The Faces
Ferrante, Elena: The Lying Life of Adults; My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name
Flanagan, Richard: Gould’s Book of Fish (a novel in twelve fish)
Forster, EM: Maurice
Harrison, M John: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise
Himes, Chester: Lonely Crusade
Hrabal, Bohumil: All My Cats
Hunter, Megan: The End We Start From, The Harpy
Jansson, Tove: The Summer Book
Kawakami, Meiko: Heaven
Mars-Jones, Adam: Box Hill
McCarthy, Cormac: All the Pretty Horses; The Crossing; Cities of the Plain
Mishima, Yukio: The Frolic of the Beasts
Mort, Helen: Exire
Myers, Benjamin: Turning Blue
Newsham, John: Killing the Horses
O’Callaghan, Conor: We Are Not in the World; Nothing on Earth
O’Farrell, Maggie: Hamnet
Okri, Ben: The Famished Road
Porter, Max: The Death of Francis Bacon
Rankin, Ian: Standing in Another Man’s Grave
Roth, Philip: Everyman
Ryan, Donal: The Spinning Heart; From a Low and Quiet Sea
Stuart, Douglas: Shuggie Bain
Tillman, Lynne: Weird Fucks
Trevor, William: Cheating at Canasta
Trocchi, Alexander: Young Adam
Tuomainen, Antti: Little Siberia
Vlautin, Willy: Don’t Skip Out On Me
Zamyatin, Yevgeny: We
Poetry
Anthology of women’s adventure writing, poetry and art: Waymaking
Morag Anderson: Sin is Due to Open in a Room Above Kitty’s
Colin Bancroft: Impermanence
Rachel Bower: These Mothers of Gods
Jo Burns: Brink
Anne Caldwell: Alice and the North
Aziz Dixon: Because of the War
Lorna Faye Dunsire: Fiery Daughters
TS Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-35
Steve Ely: The European Eel
Mike Farren: Smithereens
Caleb Femi: Poor
Anna Greki: The Streets of Algiers
Seamus Heaney: The Aeneid VI
Ted Hughes: Remains of Elmet
Amanda Huggins: The Collective Noun for Birds
Ilya Kaminsky: Dancing in Odessa
Harry Man & Endre Ruset: Utoya Thereafter
Andrew McMillan: Pandemonium
Helen Mort & Katrina Naomi: Same But Different
Ian Parks: Citizens
Don Paterson: The Landing Light
Jill Penny: In Your Absence
Li Po: Selected
Pauline Rowe: The Ghost Hospital
Sophie Sparham: The Man Who Ate 50,000 Weetabix
Stephen Watts: Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds
Neil Young: After The Riot
Nidhi Zak / Aria Eipe: Auguries of a Minor God
Non-Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche: Notes on Grief
Akala: Natives
Laura Bates: Men Who Hate Women
Extinction Rebellion: This is not a Drill
Christiane Ritter: A Woman in the Polar Night
Sophie Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia
Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time
Maria Stepanova: In Memory of Memory
Olivia Sudjic: Exposure
Leon Trotsky: The History of the Russian Revolution (Vol 1, 2 & 3)
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