Bloggery

Wednesday 21st Sep 2011

Nic Bottomley

Nic's Reading Year So Far

As many of my regular customers know my 2010 bid to read classics that everyone would have assumed a bookshop owner had already read lost all its momentum in mid-March at the hands of “Wuthering Heights”. Suffice to say, I was not a fan.

My 2011 reading challenge barely fared any better, but this time not due to any book failures. I think I just have to face up to the fact that it’s impossible to set oneself an “exclusive” themed reading challenge if you work in a bookshop. First there’s the temptation of all the new stock which has you itching to break your reading theme and secondly there’s the pleasant need to be on top of all the reading for any events that we put on.

My aim to gradually read my way around the world starting in Louisiana (the setting for Ed’s all-time-fave Tim Gautreaux’s “The Missing” which I finally got round to reading at New Year) stalled a few states up the road. I was trying to move from one country to the next (and state-to-state in the U.S.) reading books either about the given country, set there or by an author from there. What happened in reality though was that I pootled around Southern American states for half-a-dozen books before getting distracted by a sequence of books set in Britain, France, Italy, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Rhodesia, Korea and Bangladesh. And I wouldn’t change a thing, for I’ve had a cracking run of luck with recent reads, from Andrew Miller’s gothic but upbeat look at C17th Paris in “Pure”, Philip Connors’ nature/travel/philosophy ode to wilderness solitude, “Fire Season” and an Afghan/Pakistani book oozing a peculiar brutal nobility, “Wandering Falcon” by Jamil Ahmad.

I still love the idea of literature with a sense of place and almost all of the books I’ve read have encompassed that in some way. And my obsession with small-town American fiction mean that I’ve just adjusted my aims as far as reading my way around the U.S. goes. I’m going to try ultimately to read 2 books per state (not counting anything I read before Jan 1^st 2011) and see how long it takes me to fill the map – but no sequential rules apply and no deadlines!  

Here’s my full list of books read in 2011 with a few primary location and other notes thrown in. Clicking on the book title should take you to my review of it in our online shop (if I’ve written it yet!). From now on I’ll blog as I read wherever my reading takes me!

1)     “The Missing” by Tim Gautreaux (Fiction. The bestselling book in the history of Mr B’s, See Ed’s page for more on that front! Louisiana, USA.)

2)    “Roads” by Larry McMurty (Travel writing and ode to books by legendary Texan screenwriter and novelist, USA.)

3)    “End Zone” by Don DeLillo (Fiction with a dollop of sports writing. Texas, USA.)

4)    “The Dog of the South” by Charles Portis (Fiction from the man who wrote “True Grit”. Arkansas, USA and Belize.)

5)    “The Last Picture Show” by Larry McMurty (Fiction. Because I had to read one of McMurtry’s masterpieces having read “Roads”. Texas #2, USA.)

6)    “The Blackbirder” by Dorothy B. Hughes (Fiction. Pacey pulp WW2 thriller. New Mexico, USA.)
 
7)    “Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry” by B.S.Johnson (Fiction. Crazed office worker goes a bit postal when he applies double-entry accounting to his entire life. You can see why this tempted me away from the flow of my reading year! UK.)

8)    “Mr. Phillips” by John Lanchester (Fiction. Man in denial about job loss wanders London getting into trouble. UK.)

9)    “How I Lost the War” by Filippo Bologna (Fiction translated from the Italian. Contemporary novel set in Tuscan town facing upheaval from spa developers. Italy.)

10)    “The Good Soldier” by Ford Maddox Ford (Fiction. A modern and modernist classic as adultery tears apart lives and friendships. Europe.)

11)    “Utz” by Bruce Chatwin (Fiction. Porcelain obsessive repeatedly spurns chance to leave Communist Prague in order to stay with his collection. Czechoslovakia.)

12)    “The Break” by Pietro Grossi (Fiction. A man in a small Tuscan town is forced to face up to his responsibilities. Italy.)

13)    “The Surrendered” by Chang-Rae Lee (Fiction set during and in the immediate and distant aftermath of the Korean war tracing its impact on three central characters. Korea).

14)    “The Good Muslim” by Tahmima Anam (Fiction set in the aftermath of the Bangladeshi war of independence as one sibling helps affected women and the other turns to religion. Bangladesh.)

15)    “Fire Season” by Philip Connors (Biography, Travel Writing, Nature Writing, Philosophy and a hint of History too. A bookseller’s categorisation nightmare. Superb account of life as one of America’s few remaining wildfire spotters. New Mexico #2, USA.)

16)    “Pure” by Andrew Miller (Fiction from seventeenth century Paris featuring an ambitious engineer tasked with removing a cemetery but surrounded by suspicious characters. France.)

17)    “Mendelssohn is on the Roof” by Jiri Weil (Fiction. Darkly humorous take of Nazi-occupied Prague beginning with an SS Officer’s hopeless attempt to correctly identify the statue of the Jewish composer Mendelssohn that he’s supposed to be removing. Czechoslovakia.)

18)    “The Milkman in the Night” by Andrey Kurkov (Fiction packed full of sinister and comic episodes in modern-day Kiev. Ukraine.)

19)    “The Wandering Falcon” by Jamil Ahmad (Fiction. Nine short stories connected by one character explore the blood feuds and other tribal traditions and their uneasy fit with modernising cities. Afghanistan/Pakistan.)

20)    “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree-of-Forgetfulness” by Alexandra Fuller (Biography of the author’s remarkable mother who raised her family through multiple personal tragedies and African conflict. Kenya, Zambia, Rhodesia.)

21)    “The Devil All the Time” by Donald Ray Pollock (Fiction, and unremittingly dark fiction at that, with various incredibly evil characters praying on the naïve in a violent but brilliant novel promising but seldom giving redemption and spanning twenty years from the end of WW2. West Virginia and Ohio, USA.)