#allenderreadinglist2018

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In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

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Well, I read some truly cracking books this year. Check out the list below! Full disclosure: I didn’t finish the BS Johnson biography (it’s very long!), the book of Will Oldham’s lyrics (I gave it to a friend which I am totally fine about!), the John Cheever short stories (there are about 500 in that edition!), the Beastie Boys book (I only just got it!) and Finnegans Wake (it’s not written in English!). But a good haul nevertheless. 2018 was the year in which I discovered the Backlisted podcast which I highly recommend. It’s inspiring, accessible, funny, and has introduced me to numerous life-changing books that I would never have heard about otherwise.

Classic Scrapes – James Acaster Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor Collected Stories – John Cheever The Dark Portal – Robin Jarvis The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times – Xan Brooks Stag’s Leap – Sharon Olds All the Devils are Here – David Seabrook A Month in the Country – J. L. Carr The Argonauts – Maggie Nelson The Gallows Pole – Benjamin Myers The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society – Andy Miller Le grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier Red Shift – Alan Garner Mothers – Chris Power Wetlands – Charlotte Roche Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son – Gordon Burn The Abandoned Settlements – James Sheard Three Poems – Hannah Sullivan The Owl Service – Alan Garner The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead States of Desire – Edmund White La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One – Philip Pullman Less – Andrew Sean Greer My Purple Scented Novel – Ian McEwan Transit – Rachel Cusk Neon in Daylight – Hermione Hoby How to Break Up With Your Phone – Catherine Price The Only Story – Julian Barnes Mortal Causes – Ian Rankin Crudo – Olivia Laing Normal People – Sally Rooney (book of the year)  Last Stories – William Trevor Like a Fiery Elephant – Jonathan Coe The Holy Vible – Elis James & John Robins Songs of Love and Horror – Will Oldham Murmur – Will Eaves Ulverton – Adam Thorpe The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark Autumn Journal – Louis MacNeice How Not to Be a Boy – Robert Webb (who has since become [even more] insufferable) Beastie Boys Book – Michael Diamond & Adam Horowitz The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger Middle England – Jonathan Coe Finnegans Wake – James Joyce

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This is truly a book for our times. If anything captures our manic internet-addled age it’s Olivia Laing’s first novel. Crudo is written in the voice of the American writer Kathy Acker, who died in 1997, and is permeated with quotations from her, used to imagine how she would make sense of our chaotic world: social media, Trump, Brexit, and the ‘endless malice of the polite right’.

I remember seeing a documentary about the artist Patrick Heron where he spoke about how you could tell certain brushstrokes were made quickly – a quality of the line and the texture of the paint. There’s something of that in Crudo, you feel it was written in a frenzy, a desperate attempt to keep up with the constantly scrolling content of our world, ‘the whole sumptuous parade’, pushing against the limitations of the novel, ‘that hopeless apparatus of guesswork and supposition’.

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Is this the great Brexit novel? In many ways, yes, although at times it all feels a bit too neat (but then again, Coe is probably our neatest author; ever a prog-apologist, his plotting is an intricate as a Rick Wakeman keyboard solo). In Middle England the characters are articulate in their range of opinions (no matter how disagreeable), whereas what’s notable about Brexit is the inarticulacy of its proponents, the chaos and confusion of its aims, the vapidity and meaninglessness of its soundbites. 

Olivia Laing’s Crudo probably does a better job of articulating (and emulating) that chaos, and the endless torrent of misinformation that enabled the referendum result. But Middle England is a different kind of book to that. Coe gets to the heart of how Brexit happened, starting with Gordon Brown’s ‘bigot’ comment, navigating through the 2011 riots, the 2012 Olympics (in a very moving chapter), the growing influence and omniscience of social media, the general election of 2015 – to the point where a spectrum of nuanced opinions hardened into the absurd binary opposition of that ballot paper in 2016, and the ‘incredible fault line running through British society’ was revealed. 

the unspeakable truth: that Sophie (and everyone like her) and Helena (and everyone like her) might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes, and these universes were separated by a wall, infinitely high, impermeable, a wall built out of fear and suspicion and even – perhaps – a little bit of those most English of all qualities, shame and embarrassment.

(If you are interested, I have previously posted about Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 and Expo 58 on this blog.)

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Looking forward to tucking into both of these terrific birthday presents! 🎤🎤🎤

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the passing of past generations resounds in all its invisible ghostliness

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A beautiful cover for a beautiful book. Murmur is a highly imaginative novelisation of Alan Turing’s final years as he suffered the appalling ‘treatment’ he was subjected to as punishment for his homosexuality. The novel dramatises his inner turmoil – his dreams, memories and hallucinations. 

There is no justice in the world and we are alone. The depressed are onto something. What they are apt to miss, thereby, is the spontaneous feeling that dawns all over the place – the aptness of a bird on just that branch and not another, the miniaturised sun in the drop of water on that leaf. Who could have foreseen them?

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A song can help transform wild optimism into blessed reality.

I saw Alasdair Roberts performing a selection of Will Oldham songs the other day and they were selling this book on the merch stand. Seeing those old songs performed live and reading these lyrics has been a reminder of what first drew me to Oldham’s music: the strange familiarity of the language. Hearing the line, ‘dread and fear should not be confused, by dread I’m inspired by fear I’m amused,’ on John Peel was one of those revelatory moments you get from music sometimes. I’ve been going back over the early Palace albums this week (particularly Arise, Therefore and Viva Last Blues) and I’m amazed by the spontaneity of the performances (a lot of them are first takes with the band not really knowing the song!) and the wonderfully charged language: ‘A lover’s laugh, a bleeding calf, a dog out in the harbour’. Anyway, this book is very much worth getting your hands on. There’s a brilliant introduction (‘If something is too specific, its light burns out quickly, if the words are exceedingly oblique then the light never catches’) and a little gnomic commentary after each song, which will often leave you more puzzled than you were before. Which I think is as it should be. 

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Very excited to come home to my preview copy of The Holy Vible (which came with a packet of Space Raiders). Super proud of the boys for writing this and very flattered to be mentioned in it (extensively in the chapter on Oxford pub crawls). To the past!

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B. S. Johnson was such a badass. I’m currently reading Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan Coe’s masterful biography of the ‘experimental’ writer, from which this letter to an American publisher is taken. Johnson isn’t read so much nowadays, but he was a significant figure in the literary world of 60s and 70s Britain and was regarded by some (himself included) as the heir to Joyce and Beckett. He believed that, ‘Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.’ His novels signal their own artifice and attempt to reflect the randomness of reality: Alberto Angelo has holes cut in the pages so that you can read through to see what happens next; The Unfortunates is a series of separately bound chapters in a box which can be read in any order. I’m excited to read more of Johnson’s work, particularly Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (which was featured on Backlisted). Also, I’m looking forward to reading Jonathan Coe’s new novel, Middle England, which is published next month! 

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It’s going to be hard not to sound too effusive with this but... Normal People is easily the best contemporary novel I can remember reading. You just know from the first page that Rooney has got it, she has a narrative voice you just trust. Marianne and Connell are so real that I found myself worrying about them when I wasn’t reading the book. You feel the intensity of their love. Rooney is such a brilliant observer of the way people talk and behave, she sees it all – the way young people grapple with sincerity and irony – and she’s somehow above it all, decoding it. She’s so good at exploring those weird marginal areas of our characters where we don’t know why we’re behaving the way we find ourselves behaving. OK, I haven’t really slept and I haven’t articulated exactly what I wanted to say... but I loved it and I think you should definitely read it! 

Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world.

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I was waiting for a friend in Chums the other day (best pub in Bristol by the way) and plucked this off the bookshelf there. Started reading it and got hooked (haha) so bought a copy when I got home. I love Ian Rankin’s books but wish the murders would stop getting in the way of those lovely descriptions of Edinburgh pubs. This is actually a really astute and well written one about Northern Ireland. Can anyone recommend any other good ones? (Also, I wish the covers were better.)

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Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can’t change.

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Will always make time for a coming of age novel set in New York. This reminds me of a slightly less dour Gwendoline Riley (don’t get me wrong – I love Riley’s books because they’re dour). Echoes of Ben Lerner too.

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‘The brain is so wrong, all the time,’ she says, turning to the dark landscape again. ‘Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.’

Decided to choose a hugely unrepresentative passage from this brilliantly funny novel.

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This was in our Airbnb in Margate. Started reading it there and bought a copy when I got home. As a book on America it’s a beautiful travelogue, full of camera-like thumbnail sketches of its landscapes and characters. As a study of gay culture it’s insightful and compassionate (and poignant – the book was written before the AIDS crisis).