Books of the Year

This is my top ten this year. A lot of memoirs, I suddenly realise. Fairly early on in the year I read Dave Hill’s ‘So Here It Is’ – about his life in Slade: a band for whom it’s always 1973. And what a brave and warm book it is. He’s a kind of bumbling Glam Rocker, brilliantly placed to observe the world of pub rockers as they got older and older and refused to give in. The actual, heart-breaking story behind Slade’s classic Christmas hit and what they actually went through during the latter half of 1973 is a revelation. There has to be a biopic, and I’d like to write it.

I also loved Lucy Mangan’s ‘Bookworm’, which conjures up many of the kids’ books I love and pieces together the shape of a childhood and the developing  character and readerly tastes of a writer. I found it compelling and lovely – though came away wondering if she mightn’t be a little bit pleased with herself… She’s not quite so self-deprecating as the funny-looking bassist out of Slade.

What else..? Michele Roberts’ ‘Paper Houses’ is a memoir of her 1970s, and her coming to maturity as a writer in the world. She moves from book to book as she moves from house to house: each new novel a chance to reinvent the form, and each new home an opportunity to try a new way to live. It’s a time when everything is up for grabs, where nothing is set in stone. It’s a really beautiful book that I have come to late, but found myself reading at just the right time.

David Sedaris’s new volume of essay’s ‘Calypso’ reminded me just why I’ve been reading him for twenty years or more. I’ve read everything and, though I was less than chuffed with his animal fables and his gloomy old journals, his snappy and perverse essays always keep me coming back. This volume is more chronological than usual. We get to spend longer with his crazy extended family, his lovely-sounding partner and his loopy, obsessive self. The story of what he wanted to keep in the freezer to feed a hideously deformed turtle doesn’t bear repeating here. But I loved this book.

A lovely find from long ago: ‘Truman Capote’ a memoir by John Malcolm Brinnin. It’s from the Sixties and from, we gather, an old lover and admirer: another writer, an academic whom Capote meets during a writerly residential at the start of his career. Brinnin and he are clearly carrying on a sexy friendship at odd moments right from the start, and they keep bumping into each other in various ways down the years – and Brinnin tries to save the daft, impossible, brilliant fool from his own crazy, dark excesses right up until the end. It’s a fantastic memoir. I was expecting it to be dry, I think – and it’s anything but.

Novels… What was there..? Well, I loved the new Anne Tyler, ‘Clock Dance’, just as I always love a new book by her. I think she’s found a new wind, though. She’s turning the dial on her old themes and amplifying them; ratcheting up the tension that surrounds those characters who find the strength to simply walk out on their old lives and into the new. This time her heroine is absolutely right to start all over again, and we are in no doubt of that. We fall in love with all the new people she meets and we want to live among them with her.

Judy Blume’s recent-ish adult novel ‘In the Unlikely Event’ is an astonishing book that encapsulates a whole New Jersey town and all its inhabitants. All those voices come leaping off the page and if the book has a downside, it’s keeping track of who relates to who and how. (But there’s a table of characters to help with that.) I can’t really say what happens without giving too much away, but it’s a book about undermining the idea that it’s impossible for lightning to strike more than once, or even twice. There are some breathtaking and savage narrative tricks she plays here.

I loved the teen novel, ‘The Unknowns’ by Shirley-Anne Macmillan: the second novel by this Northern Irish writer, who really gets under the skins of her characters and shows young people with complex, interesting inner lives right at the ends of their tethers. Her stories are often about good kids veering off into what other people might think is the bad, or falling under the wrong influences. Here we get Tilly, who falls in with a glamorous and exciting delinquent subculture… and we go right along with her for the ride. More and more these days, I wonder why we call these things Teen Novels. It seems a limiting term. This is just a good novel with heroes who happen to be in their teens. It’s for everyone.

And poetry! I’m actually choosing a book of poems for my top ten. Another book I missed when it was published – ‘Indelible, Miraculous’ – a Collected Poems by Julia Darling, a writer I really loved, whatever she wrote. Her poems are like postcards straight from her, though, much more than her stories or novels. These are dispatches on the hoof, beautifully crafted, sent from hospitals and quiet spots and all the places she could find to sit and spin out these intricate, colourful pieces. I loved just spending time with her again, when I wasn’t expecting to.

And lastly – another surprise book. Who’d a thought it? That they would briefly revive Target books and have Steven Moffat et al novelise some of their own Dr Who scripts as slim paperbacks with pulpy cover paintings, just like they used to in the old days. Just like the books that got so many of us hooked on reading in the first place. I have been arguing passionately since Day One of the series coming back that novelizations would be required by a new generation of young fans. DVDs don’t cut it. That’s just a replay. A novelisation is an expansion, and an enlargement of an adventure. It’s days and days spent in the company of the Doctor. It’s a universe you can carry in your coat pocket and it’s time you can control with the blink of an eye. Steven Moffat has great fun with ‘The Day of the Doctor’: re-ordering and cutting and pasting his story, supplementing cameo appearances and withholding chapters and dizzying us with erudition and being daft. I love the fact that he withholds the identity of his narrator until the very end, and provides outrageous, offhand explanations for Peter Cushing and the reason that the 60s were black and white. It’s irreverent, all of it – and precisely what we need in such earnest times.

So – those are my favourite books this year. How about you?