The Top 10 of 2010: Back To The Herd Mentality

New Year's Eve is upon us and so it is time for me to unveil my favourite ten books of the year. As I've said before it was a rather patchy one for literature. A few great authors released passable but not particularly good books. Many an ordinary debut saw the light of day. Someone even told me that they had lost faith in fiction this year.

As for me, I read a lot of excellent books but very few of them were published in 2010. Indeed, when looking back over the 155 books I managed to get through, there were only 12 that deserved a place on this list. One I cut because, although it was translated for the first time in 2010, it is in fact 58 years old (Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key). The other, Keith Richards's Life, was edged off the list by an arguably greater musical legend.

Overall, it seems comedy was the big winner, taking five of the ten spots. There were also three debut novels, which is always a good sign for things to come. Yet it was a French author of whom I was only peripherally aware who came in at number one. And so, without further ado, I bring you the Bait For Bookworms Top 10 of 2010:

1. Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel. A lowly bureaucratic functionary is sent into a small town to investigate the murder of a mysterious stranger. What he discovers will quite literally take your breath away. Brodeck's Report is one of the most astounding books about wartime guilt and complicity ever written. A murder mystery, artistic meditation and revelation all rolled into one. Simply brilliant.

2. Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahariar Mandanipour. This amazing story of two students pursuing their forbidden love through the pages of great Persian and world literature continues to resonate with me eleven months after I first read it. I'm not usually one for romance, but when it came to Sara and Dara I have to admit I swooned! It is also harrowing in its portrayal of life in a totalitarian state. Almost perfect on every level.

3. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. This hilarious debut novel drove a great metal barb through the heart of the pretentious print media world. Documenting the rise and slow demise of a semi-fictional English language newspaper in Rome, its pastiche of journo-stereotypes, some snooty others pitiable, had me laughing out loud, and not only because I recognised half of my friends drowning in the mix.

4. How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu. A year of heavy reading was topped off by this hilarious celebration of the scientifically absurd. Whether you are a certified brainiac or, like me, a total grognard this is the funniest book that you are likely to encounter in any universe, including this one. In comic terms, it seems there is nothing funnier than a time machine repairman in love.

5. Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes. Britain's king of quirk struck gold again with this deliciously nasty gem. Creepy, hilarious and unexpectedly tender it kept me smiling even while my skin crawled.

6. Nemesis by Philip Roth. These days Roth is as patchy as he is prolific, but this powerful tale of a polio epidemic in 1940's New Jersey really hit the mark. The combination of a decidedly non-Roth protagonist and some brilliant metaphorical social commentary about the economic collapse and the perceived terrorist threat make Nemesis his best book since Indignation.

7. The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. This very worthy winner of the Man Booker Prize shone an excoriating light (if there is such a thing) on the triumphs, insecurities and downright absurdities of Diaspora Jewry. High Lit that makes you laugh and cringe at the same time.

8. C by Tom McCarthy. Forget the experimental tag! C was a complex and mesmerising examination of the way in which we communicate from a writer who is shaping up to be one of our generation's greatest commentators. And yes, it had a conventional plot.

9. Solar by Ian McEwan. Sure, it had the cookie-cutter McEwan plot device but this foray into deep science, petty academic jealousies and the indignities of ageing disgracefully was a real winner. I never thought McEwan had it in him to make us laugh. I also thought he was well past his prime. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

10. Just Kids by Patti Smith. Yes, a non-fiction book made it to my Top 10. Who'd a thunk it? This double eulogy for Robert Mapplethorpe and the heyday of New York counterculture is 300-odd pages of pure street prose poetry. The only book that made me cry this year.

So there you have it. An unexpectedly eclectic top ten for my first year of lit-blogging.

Happy New Year! Here's hoping 2011 brings us all a library (being my collective noun for books) of great reads!

Reality Check: My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write. Thomas Bernhard, he of the impenetrable yet addictive literary sludge was actually a really funny guy. Laugh out loud, double over, try to catch your breath funny. Not that you would have known it from his novels. Dreary, depressing, sure. But not funny. Turns out it was all a ruse. In this short collection of reflections, Bernhard tells us what he really thought of the various prizes he won. Needless to say, he doesn't hold back and I suspect that pretty much every institution that saw fit to give him an award later came to regret it. Some might brand Bernhard a sore winner, but for me it was refreshing to see a person whose misanthropy could transcend his ego.

There are those, I suppose, who collect accolades
Though others prefer that they went to their graves
Integrity shining not once selling out
Here Bernhard makes quite clear what he was about
Dark and obsessive in print, when loquacious
He's spiteful, sardonic and wholly ungracious!

And yes, i realise I was supposed to read the new Chinua Achebe book for this challenge, but after the great disappointment of the Gunter Grass I felt it was okay to cheat a little and do the old bait and switch. Yet again Bernhard saves the day!

2010: Secondary Stars and Other Satellites

Only a few days before I unveil my top 10 for 2010, but in the meantime here are the honourable mentions. I've gone out on a bit of a limb this year and added a couple of less literary categories. My therapist suggested that it would make me seem like a more 'well-rounded' person. Or I'm sure they would have had I actually had a therapist.

Close But No Cigar (The Ones That Almost Made It)

The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. A daring and oddly plausible rendering of the Jesus mythos, Pullman pissed off a lot of believers but garnered significant praise from pretty much everyone else.

Light Boxes by Shane Jones. A little gem about a town at war with the month of February, Light Boxes was testament to the oft-underappreciated brilliance of independent publishing.

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel. Generally panned by the critics, this much-anticipated follow-up to Life of Pi was a morally complex and enjoyably absurd take on genocide. But for its overly neat ending, I really couldn't see why it was so viciously savaged.

The Elephant's Journey by Jose Saramago. Saramago was always at his best when writing about animals, and this was no exception. A wonderful novel from the late great Nobel curmudgeon.

Books I'm Sure I Would Have Loved Had I Gotten Around to Reading Them

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. Supposedly one of the great novels of the Vietnam War, this debut came out of nowhere to universally glowing reviews. A must read sometime later in life...

To the End of the Land by David Grossman. Grossman is one of my favourite Israeli writers, as much for his politics as his stories, and this is supposedly his masterpiece. Hopefully I'll get the chance to read it before he is given the Nobel.

The Wind-Up Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi. Sci-fi is my guilty pleasure and, if we are to believe the hype, The Wind-Up Girl is the most exciting book to grace the genre in years. Some have gone so far as to dub Bacigalupi the new William Gibson. High praise indeed.

The Soundtrack to my 2010 Downtime (Yep, this is a list of albums, not books)

1. The Gamits - Parts. Reformations are all the go at the moment, and these punk legends did it in style. Can't quite work out what Chris Fogal has been gargling in his downtime, but the new gruffness of his vocals added another dimension of greatness to an already kick-arse band.

2. Foxy Shazam - Foxy Shazam. Plastic, bombastic and goddamned fantastic, Foxy Shazam have the spirit of Freddie Mercury shining down on them in all its sequinned glory.

3. AC4 - AC4. Bite-sized hardcore chunks from the latest incarnation of Refused's Denis Blixen.

4. Smoke or Fire - The Speakeasy. These guys just keep getting better. Neon Light is a strong contender for my favourite song of the year.

5. Manic Street Preachers - Postcards From a Young Man. MSP are a very hit and miss affair, but Postcards saw them in full flight. Catchy, literary and thought provoking guitar pop, an almost complete 180 turn from their last effort, the drudgery that was Journal For Plague Lovers.

Book Podcasts That Helped Me Survive the Long Drives and City Traffic

1. KCRW's Bookworm - Michael Silverblat might have the most annoying nasal voice imaginable, but he can dissect a book like nobody else. It is little wonder the great authors literally line up to be on his show.

2. New York Times Book Review - Editor Sam Tennenhaus fleshes out a select few articles from each edition of the NYTBR. Always interesting listening, no matter how obscure the topic, it is Tannenhaus's rapier wit and willingness to look a gift horse in the mouth (and usually tell it its breath stinks) that makes this an absolute podcasting treasure.

3. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast - Each month a notable writer comes in and reads their favourite short story from The New Yorker short story archive. A brilliant way to rediscover some lost literary masterpieces.

4. Slate's Audio Book Club - I've always avoided joining a book club, but listening to this mob makes it sound kind of fun. They're not all lit wankers either, so the podcast is refreshingly accessible to anyone interested in reading.

5. Book on the Nightstand - Two Random House Reps shoot the breeze in this light-hearted, convivial gabfest. Sometimes it verges on the twee, but for the most part it is an enjoyable escape when you find yourself stuck in traffic.

Well, that's it for the honourable mentions. Stay tuned for the Top 10...

2010: The Shelf of Shame

Festivus is upon us which means we can count the number of days left in the year on one hand (that is assuming, like a guy I went to school with, you were born with a superfluous finger). I, for one, am getting into the Listmas spirit, looking over my 2010 reading catalog while sipping non-alcoholic egg nog (read: an egg). Rather than doing a strict repeat of last year's lists and lumping you with one massive blog post on December 31, I've decided to break my year in review down into a number of categories. I started a few days ago (unwittingly) with the best books I had read that weren't first published in 2010. Now I want to continue with The Shelf of Shame, the dishonourable mentions for what was a very patchy publishing year.

Most Overrated Books of The Year

Room by Emma Donoghue. It's not that this story of a kid trapped in a shed with his mother was a terrible book but the hysteria that surrounded its release was close on Beatlemania. The execution is fair, the kid is likeable if a little cutesy, but at the end of the day it seemed like a decent concept for a short story or, at best, novella stretched laboriously over 300-odd pages. Its descent into the pits of sentimentality had my gag-reflex working overtime. Maybe if Donoghue had trimmed the schmaltz it would have been better.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. A passably entertaining riff on future love in the great melting pot of Cybermerica, quite a few reviewers went gaga over this, the follow-up to the rather wonderful Absurdistan. I thought it was alright, but Charles Yu did it far better.

Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett. Critics were hailing this as the first great American novel of the decade and the most ingenious artistic representation of Global Financial Crisis we were ever likely to read. The David and Goliath tale of a big-business land grab verged on the cheesy and was annoyingly predictable.

Boxer Beatle by Ned Beauman. A fair few lit snobs were heralding the arrival of a major new talent and, sure, this had many elements that ought to have made it a ripper. But strip away the exuberant cartoonish flair of the writing and you were left with a pretty stock standard Nazi-relic hunting story.

Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt. The other debut over which people went nuts in 2010, Hunt took Winston Churchill's well-documented fight with depression and imagined it, quite literally, as a big black dog. Fantastic premise, but she faltered somewhat in the execution. Don't get me wrong, it was still a good book. But I felt that the secondary romantic plot made the whole thing a bit twee and not really deserving of the adulation it garnered.

Biggest Disappointments

Great House by Nicole Krauss. The History of Love is one of my favourite books of the past 10 years. With this one, I got the feeling Krauss was doing an experimental rehash, but with a cast of characters for whom I didn't particularly care. To put it bluntly, by midway through the book it had completely fizzled. Also, the central premise was done to much better effect almost fifteen years ago by Tibor Fischer in The Collector Collector.

Sunset Park by Paul Auster. This was not a terrible book by any stretch of the imagination but I continue to hold out hope that Auster will recapture his former brilliance and this just did not. A decent pastiche of character sketches in search, to paraphrase Pirandello, of a novel.

In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut. I go weak at the knees for The Good Doctor, and have liked pretty much every novel Galgut has published. But this surreal travelogue was hardly a novel, despite what the Booker committee would have us believe. Three reasonably engaging reminiscences pasted together does not a coherent whole make!

Point Omega by Don Delillo. Ever since the Twin Towers collapsed, Delillo has struggled to recapture his almost prophetic prescience of old. Point Omega started well, and had echoes of White Noise bouncing around between the lines, but it never really went anywhere and ended without any meaningful resolution. Like with Auster, it wasn't a bad book but hardly worthy of the great writer who penned Underworld.

The Box by Gunter Grass. It only managed to slip in at the end, but the sheer laboriousness of this, the latest instalment of Grass's memoirs, made its 150 pages seem like War and Peace. A pointless exercise that shed no new light on the great author's life.

Flat Out Worst Books I Read in 2010

Admittedly none of these were published in 2010, but throughout my year of challenges I forced myself to read some pretty awful books. I shan't dignify them with a blurb, but the top 5 (or is that bottom 5?) were:
1. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
2. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.
3. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
4. Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard
5. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

And in case you want to know what was that worst book I read that was published in 2010, well that's easy. Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris. Hands down. A pile of try-hard technocrap. One of the few books I've ever read where I was actually embarrassed for its author.

Agree? Think I'm a totally illiterate moron? Have a couple of your own to add to these lists? Let me know!

Reality Check: Life by Keith Richards

If Patti Smith's book verged on poetic high art, Keith Richards has cranked out its gutter-dwelling, drug-addled little cousin. Which isn't to say that Life isn't also high art, though of a very different kind. It all makes me feel even more inadequate as I continue to lump you with these annoying rhymes. I just don't know how Dr. Seuss lived with himself...

Oh, well, stuff this in your hat:

From somewhere beneath a dark heroin haze
Ol' Keef takes a look back on halcyon days
It's brutal and honest and dripping with swagger
And his sympathy lies with the devil, that's Jagger
Though hefty this book left me scratching my head
After all he's consumed how the hell's he not dead?

Reality Check: The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

I grew up on true crime books. The Stranger Beside Me, Hunting The Devil, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. I just couldn't get enough. So obsessed was I that my parents were called into school a number of times so that my teachers could voice their concerns. Most notable was dear Mrs. Begley, who found expressions of extreme violence in my creative writing output. She famously told my mum that "he writes very well, but couldn't he just once write about flowers and hills?" So next story I wrote for her class (hilariously named Writing For Young Authors - the class, not the story!) had someone murdered on a hill and their body sprinkled with flowers.

When it came to putting together the list of books I would attempt for the December Challenge I figured it would be a good opportunity for me to check out what's making it big in the genre these days. Preston and Spezi's investigation into the Monster of Florence serial killings (which, if you like literary trivia, were the inspiration for Thomas Harris's final Hannibal Lecter book) had been getting some serious raves so I thought I'd give it a go.

Pull up your green eggs and ham, folks. Here's what I thought:

Somewhere near Florence in picturesque hills
There lurks a monster who viciously kills
To this day unsolved by detectives inept
These journos turned up on the list of suspects
Point as they might to Sardinian trails
Frustrated, it ends with them chasing their tails

Reality Check: Regions of the Great Heresy by Jerzy Ficowski

He might only have had the chance to crank out two short story collections before being brutally murdered as an act of revenge against his Nazi protector, but Bruno Schulz is one of the towering figures of mid-20th European century literature. I became obsessed with him after seeing a Theatre de Complicite production of Street of Crocodiles and quickly hunted down the two slim volumes, devouring them with a sense of sheer wonder. Surreal, harrowing and completely other-worldly, they are amongst the greatest story cycles ever to be published. In this biographical meditation, Ficowski goes a long way to demystify the enigma that has sprouted from Schulz's unmarked grave.

Or, as Dr. Seuss would put it:

For the pilgrims who flock to the great Kafka's grave
There's another, unmarked and ignored I'm afraid
A disciple now digs and tries to resurrect
To give voice, and give ink and to piece back the flesh
Indignant he holds high his art to the end
A shot in the arm for one shot in the head

Five for 2011

Late December always gets me salivating as I look into my crystal ball to see what lies ahead in the world of literature. 2010 proved a very good reading year (though not quite as good as 2009), with several of my favourite writers cranking out excellent new novels. Even better, I discovered a few new names to put on my "Drop Everything And Read" list; I am gagging for something new by Tom Rachman and can't wait to see what Charles Yu does next.

2011 is looking a little quieter but there are still a few books I can't wait to get my hands on. Here's the top 5 as I see them at the moment:

1. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Whether you love him or think he was a pompous, literary masturbator, you cannot deny that DFW's untimely death was a great loss to American literature. His hefty masterwork, Infinite Jest, kept me company throughout the year I was writing my Honours thesis and so I feel forever in his debt and remain ever eager to pick up his latest offering. From what I gather, Pale King looks like another hyperactive skewering of our modern existence, though hopefully it will be sans tennis. Some have been complaining that publishing this unfinished work amounts to exploitation, cashing in on his death with something he never had the chance to properly polish. But who cares if he was only part way through The Pale King when he killed himself? Infinite Jest finished mid-sentence, unresolved, at the end of over a thousand pages and it was still a corker!

2. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer. The draw here isn't that it's a new book by JSF but, rather, that it is a re-imagining of and meditation on the work of one my all-time favourite writers, Bruno Schulz. I look forward to seeing what Safran Foer does with the source material but from what I hear it is a mind-bending experiment that actually works. Plus, it is apparently a beautifully packaged volume to boot and I'm a sucker for anything that looks spectacular on my shelf.

3. AnimalInside by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. No book has infuriated me more with its impenetrability than Krasznohorkai's best known novel, The Melancholy of Resistance. It took five false starts before I hit my stride and got through it. However, I like a good literary arm-wrestle and so was quite excited to hear another of his books is being translated and will be released in April. I have no idea what to expect from it, but I know it certainly won't be boring.

4. Never Any End To Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas. Regular readers of B4BW are probably well-aware by now that Vila-Matas's madcap literary treasure hunt, Montano's Malady, was one of my favourite books of the past few years. I think Vila-Matas is the most exciting writer around these days and can't wait to have him bend my mind again with another dose of his absurd jigsaw plotting.

5. Something new from Michael Chabon. No revelations here I'm afraid. But he's been teasing us for a couple of years now, so I'm going to state here that I want 2011 to be the year of the new Chabon. Is that too much to ask?

Not This Year In Review!

I thought I'd start my end of year roundups with something of a non-list. Or, rather, a list with little relevance to the past twelve months. I figure that it makes no sense to include books that weren't published in 2010 in a "Best of 2010" list, but it would be equally silly of me to ignore them altogether. After all, fair few of my favourite books of 2010 were not published this year.

And so, with less than two weeks to go until we celebrate the arbitrary distinction that is the new year, I bring you my alternative list; my favourite non-2010 books of the year. Obviously I'll exclude everything from my Dog Bite Degustation challenge, seeing as they were my top 10 books of all time and would make this endeavour redundant.

So pretending that we are not really counting from 11, and naming them in no particular order, I loved:

The Rehearsal - Eleanor Catton (2009)
The Book of Chameleons - Jose Eduardo Agualusa (2004)
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (1949)
Saville by David Storey (1976)
Mephisto - Klaus Mann (1936)
The Education of a Stoic - Fernando Pessoa (tr. 2004)
The Cremator - Ladislav Fuks (1967)
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes(1605)
The Mahabharata (ummm....)
The Behaviour of Moths - Poppy Adams (2008)

Stay tuned for my Best of 2010... Coming soon (most likely on December 30... I'm holding out for a last minute supernova)

Reality Check: The Box by Gunter Grass

I was pretty excited to get my hands on the latest instalment of Gunter Grass's memoirs, even more so because I had heard that this volume was stylistically more interesting, perhaps even with a fictional flourish. Alas, halfway through this short (especially short given the heftiness of Peeling The Onion) curiosity of a book, I was struck by a Solzhenitsyn-inspired Eureka moment. I actually don't really like Gunter Grass. Sure, I waxed lyrical in the past about The Tin Drum but, at the end of the day, he is kind of boring. Sorry Professor Graewe (my fantastic German Literature lecturer of yore), I want to like your hero but I just can't. And not because of his past, I don't really care about that. It's just that his turgid meanderings put me to sleep. I get it, Mr. Grass. You screwed around, had eight kids and wrote books of which you are rather proud. But this added nothing to your canon. When all is said and done, The Box will be a minor footnote, if it even makes it that far.

So without further adieu, here is The Box as rhyming verse.

I've come to believe the Nobel is a curse
For all of its winners grow gradually worse
After great revelations of Wafen SS
Grass comes in again and wants us to assess
Through the lens of his camera, an old fashioned box
This life in eight pieces is slight and a flop