A Year in Books 2019

A few years ago I started logging my reading on www.goodreads.com so that I could look back over what I had read, but also so that I could try and keep some sort of handle on my book buying. All too often I was coming back with a new purchase only to find I’d already bought the book weeks, months or years ago – I’m willing to admit that this aspect of things has only been a partial success.

The last few years I have set myself the 52 book challenge, wherein I try and read at least 52 books in a calendar year. By and large, I’ve managed to hit this goal, though usually only just, and this has led to quite a wider range of books getting read than I might normally manage. I’m not repeating the challenge this year though; it certainly had its plusses but too often I was turning down reading books I wanted to get stuck into because they might drop me back on my pace and jeopardise that important Fifty Two goal.

All that said, I now have a good quantity of books to look back on from last year and wanted to pick out just a few that have particularly stood out for one reason or another.

The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell

A writer I’d heard a great deal about but never actually read, David Mitchell has been a huge discovery for me this year. I know, how behind the times am I? There are just too many brilliant writers to stay on the cusp of every great thing in the literary world. The Bone Clocks attracted me far more, as a starting novel for Mitchell’s body of work than many of his other works primarily because of the setting. With a great deal of the story taking place in and around the marshlands of Kent, this was a setting that was very familiar to me from my childhood – sneaking into Rochester, fruit farms on the Isle of Sheppey – the protagonist’s youth, although displaced in years from my own, was almost uncannily evoked. Once that familiarity had drawn me in the story unravelled in a masterful fashion.

Whilst ostensibly a supernatural or fantasy story the book never felt as though it strayed far from its firmly human and almost parochial setting. Of all the complex detail and rich, involved characters that Mitchell constructs, I found I was particularly struck by how convincingly he could conjure images of fantastic realms and immortal begins and yet ground them thoroughly in the world which we readers inhabit. This commingling of the mundane and the extraordinary is a thread that is present whether woven subtly into the background or being thrummed as the central theme and carries the narrative inexorably forward. Of course, I’ve now been swept up into much more of Mitchell’s writing and read Slade House straight after this along with gathering up several more of his books for future reading, but I think Bone Clocks will hold a special place, imaginatively, for me as a first encounter this remarkable writer.

Essays in Idleness - Yoshida Kenkō

I’ve taught a little non-western philosophy and have come into contact, albeit briefly, with elements of Zen from time to time, but the writings of Yoshida Kenkō are entirely new to me.

Yoshida Kenkō, a thirteenth-century Buddhist monk who, amongst his writings, penned a collection known as Essays in Idleness from which these selections come. Written in a style I have since learned is called zuihitsu, meaning follow-the-brush, the essays are personal, idiosyncratic and unstructured explorations of events, moments, ideas and interests of Kenkō’s. It struck me when reading Kenkō that the only writer I’d come across who had anything similar in terms of style and content was my old favourite, Montaigne. Both Montaigne and Kenkō possess a curious mind, keen to explore and question, that wanders over any and all topics that happen to pass through the writer's mind. Kenkō’s writing takes on a typically Zen character, with ideas pared down to their simplest form, a lean written aesthetic gives a light but utterly mesmerising touch to his essays.

Kenkō himself, like Montaigne, is self-consciously aware of the oddity of writing down one’s thoughts to no particular end. Kenkō says,

“What strange folly, to beguile the tedious hours like this all day before my ink stone, jotting down at random the idle thoughts that cross my mind.” 

A thought I think would very much be echoed in Montaigne. However, like Montaigne, we would miss much if we were to simply write this off as the idle musings of an insignificant figure. In both writers, I’ve found a voice that speaks across the years between reader and author and which is so entirely human, so unashamedly open, that in reading we can be taken from thoughts on everyday events to having singingly beautiful insights of a deeply philosophical character appear as if from nowhere and it is there that lies the joy of these writers. As Kenkō puts it,

 “To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is pleasure beyond compare.”

Butcher’s Crossing - John Williams

I read Williams’ extraordinary novel Stoner a year or two back and have had Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus sitting, and waiting, since then. Stoner had a profound effect on me and has remained a complete conundrum of a book since. I can roughly explain the story, and I can give an idea of the style, yet I’ve no idea how these two, both of which are remarkably, deceptively, simple, give rise to such a deeply moving book. William’s manages to construct achingly real worlds from the simplest of materials and does so as though the entire endeavour where utterly effortless. The same is, unshakeably, true of Butcher’s Crossing. Telling the story of Will Andrews who heads out to join a hunting party, shooting and skinning buffalo in the cold reaches of Colorado, little happens in the book, certainly in terms of what we might normally think of a narrative. The team meet in the town of Butcher’s Crossing, secure supplies, journey for a few weeks to where the buffalo are, shoot and skin great swathes of the hair beasts, are then brutally snowed in for the winter and eventually return to discover no one is much interested in buffalo hide anymore.

The journey that we follow isn’t, of course, that of the men travelling to and from the buffalo plains of Colorado, it is the journey of a man’s life, the interior life of our protagonist and this Williams gives us in unflinching detail. Simple, sparse language, mimicking the wide, barren land is carefully and deftly used to draw in nuance, and subtle shade, the interior life, and journey of Andrews and it is as hard and cold a journey as anything the men undertake. This is not a sentimental book, not for the places or people or ways of life that Williams writes of, but it is still a book of great sentiment. Williams cares deeply for people and knows much of the quiet, hard and often pained life that many live. It is, all told, a very harsh book but not through its treatment of its characters nor through the often brutal scenes, which Williams shows us unadorned, that were part of the life of these wilderness men, but is harsh in its profoundly unflinching exposure of the existential angst that sits in many souls.