Books for 2007

I have been asked to publish the list of books I intend to read in 2007 in advance. So far I have a pile of books on my desk that I intend to read (and write about) on the next few months. Here they are in no particular order:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

The Master by Colm Tóibín

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The Passion by Jeanette Winterton

The Light of Day by Graham Swift

At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Accidental by Ali Smith

The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

As you can see, the list is quite varied and mainly reflects my personal interest in contemporary literature. Mostly, I will be reading 20th and 21st century books although readers will find the occasional 19th century novels like Jane Eyre.

This list is not intended to be a suggestion - I would never suggest books I haven't read. It is merely some information I was asked to make public by one of you.

Happy 2007 and happy reading!

Looking back: 2006

These are the best books I've read since August this year:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Hours by Micheal Cunnigham
Enduring Love, Saturday and Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Howards End by E. M.Forster

Contemporary Reads: Amsterdam

Amsterdam (1998) is the Booker Prize winner by Ian McEwan. A highly enjoyable novel set in contemporary Britain which, like all of the writer's novels I've read to date, is full of twists and doesn't disappoint.

Acclaimed composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Hallyday have been friends for years. The novel starts with those two central characters assisting the funeral of their one-time lover Molly.

Molly had other lovers, among them the Foreign Secretary and would-be Prime Minister Julian Garmony a man for whom both Clive and Vernon share great contempt due his reactionary political ideas. Her late husband, George, is also held in contempt by them although in his case it is because he ended up with Molly.

Throughtout the novel, the friendship between Clive and Vernon is put on test several times: Vernon decides to publish pictures of Garmory in drag on his newspaper taken by Molly and sold by George. Vernon morally objects to this and makes his opinion heard by Clive. Secondly, while trying to compose his 'symphony for the millenium' in the Lake District, Vernon witnessed the rape of a woman but is reluctant to go to the police. Clive's paper has been following the rapist's story for months and he is enfuriated by his friend's attitude.

Clive is sacked from his newspaper for publishing Garmory's photos and Garmory's not only does not suffer from it but it away is enhaced. Vernon's symphony is set to open in Amsterdam when both friends reunite there. They end up killing each other by poisoning their drinks.

The brilliant thing about this ending is that it is totally unexpected and, at the same time, all the elements are there throughout the novel to make it the perfect ending.

Other books I have read by the same author: The Cement Garden, Saturday, Atonement, Enduring Love.

Contemporary Reads: Jack Maggs

Jack Maggs (1997) is a novel by Australian author Peter Carey. Set in 1987 London when Australia was a British penal colony where even petty thieves were sent to. Jack Maggs is one of such characters who, after being betrayed and sent to Australia comes back to England. Pretending to be a footman, he moves into Percy Buckle's house in London. His neighbour, novelist and mesmeriser Tobias Oates will soon reveal Magg's secrets and starts writing about him. Jack Magg has come back to London looking for a gentleman called Henry Phipps whom he regards as his son.

This is a worthy homage to Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. An exciting historical novel and literary fantasy. Guilt, shame for crimes real or imagined and the two main themes of this masterly book.

Modern Classics: Good Morning, Midnight

Good Morning, Midnight (1939) by Jean Rhys was a book way ahead of its time. Its protagonist Sophia Jansen is an English woman in Paris. The facts that the heavy drinking protagonist is a woman and that the book largely narrates her sexual encounters and loneliness is what makes this book both very unusual for its time and so very relevant to ours.

This probably also accounts for its being overlooked until it was republished in the 1960s. Even today Rhys is better known for her prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea.

Modern Classics: Brave New World

Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley is, like most science-fiction about the society of its day. It presents us with a dytopian vision of civilization where drugs and promiscuity abound and where the public is entertained by feelies - the equivalent to 1930s Hollywood talkies.

The novel is set on 632 years after Henry Ford brought us the first car manufactured solely by mass-production, Model T. The World State is a stable civilization where all citizens are test tube babies who are conditioned since infancy to take a determined place within society. World Controllers are ultimately in charge of this society where citizens are handed out a drug called soma and communal activities (including sex with as many partners as possible) are encouraged and where solitary pursuits have been abolished. All in the name of stability and happiness.

There exist Reservations where the indians live out of any contact with civilization. This among other reference seem evindence that Huxley got at least part of his inspiration in modern-day America, even though the book is largely set in England. One day, non-conformist Bernard takes, Lenina, a girl he is obscenely growing rather fond off - this is a world were monogamy does not even exist as a concept - to a Reservation. There they come across Linda who got lost many years before in a visit with the now World Controller, Mustafa Mond, and her son John (finding herself far from civilization she could not abort the child as any civilized girl would have done). John has a vision of the world he has obtained from reading the Complete Works of Shakespeare (something unthinkable in the World State) and listening to his mother's stories about civilization.

John and Linda are brough back to civilization. Linda dies soon after and after a confrontation with Mustafa, John settles down in the south of England as a hermitage.

Even though this novel is much less shocking now than I imagined should have been when it was first published, it is still a fascinating novel of ideas.

Great Classics: Howards End

Howards End (1910) by E. M. Forster (1910) is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. As such, it has attracted a lot of attention from critics over the years and was made into a successful film in 1992. Some critics and general readers have felt uncomfortable by Forster's perceived elitism. Others have found the plot full of implausible coincidences. So let's start with the plot:

There are two families:

- The Schlegels: Margaret and her younger siblings Helen and Tibby.

- The Wilcoxes: Henry, Ruth and their children Charles and Paul.

The novel starts at the Wilcoxes' country house. Howards End, where Helen is a guest after the two families had met on holiday. Helen writes to her sister Margaret to announce her engagement to Paul. She writes then to explained the engagement has been called off as Paul is to set off for Africa. It is too late as Aunt Juley is already en route to Howards End to attempt to break off the couple to much embarassment.

Sometime later, the Wilcoxes will take an apartment opposite the Schlegels' residency in London. At the time, clerk Leonard Bast comes into the Schlegels' life when Helen accidentally purloins his umbrella at a concert.

Margaret becomes very close to the ill Ruth Wilcox and after the latter's death, she is bequeathed Howards End. However, Henry Wilcox does not carry out her late wife's wishes and does not even tell Margaret.

Years later, Margaret becomes engaged to Henry. Full of good intentions, Helen and Margaret try to help poor Leonard. However, some bad business advice given by Henry will see Leonard leaving his job at an insurance company for a worse paid one at a bank which he ends up losing.

Helen takes Leonard and his wife Jacky to the Wilcoxes' house in Oninton where it transpires that Henry and Jacky had an affair in Cyprus when Ruth was still alive. Margaret forgives this husband and decides to refuse helping Leonard by persuading Henry not to give him a job. Helen, thinking that Henry and not Margaret is behind this decision leaves England for Germany.

A few months later Helen comes back from Germany and Margaret discovers she is pregnant with Leonard's child. When both sisters are staying at Howards End, Leonard shows up, there is an altercation at his dies apparently of heart failure although Charles is condemmed to three years in prison for manslaughter.

Henry, Margaret, Helen and her baby end up living together in Howards End. Henry confesses to Margaret that Ruth had left her the house although this was never taken seriously by him because she had been too ill when she made her decision. He promises to leave the house to Margaret after her death and that Helen's baby must in turn inherit it.

So is the plot full of implausible coincedences? Yes, but I call that the artistic license. Is Forster an elitist? To use a very colloquial expression, so what if he is?

One of the truely important things about this book is the accurate and interesting portrayal Forster makes of the diverging forces at work in Edwardian England, represented by both families: The Wilcoxes are the Empire, capitalism, material progress and the Schlegels are Romantism, equalitarianism, social justice, culture. The abundant coincidences in the novel are the writer's intrument to bring us to the ending of the novel where both forces are finally reconciled.

Other books I have read about this author: A Room With A View.

Contemporary Reads: Austerlitz

Austerlitz is a strange novel. Its strangeness partly derives from its extremely long paragraphs, its pictures and its lack of chapters. But also, from the unnamed narrator about whom the reader will practically know nothing. This narrator will converse with Austerlitz over the years as the meet in different European locations such as Antwerpt, London or Paris.

We are told of Austerlitz's childhood in rural Wales where he was taken and fostered by a church minister and his wife before World War II. And we are also told about his youth and how he became interested in his origins only late in life. An only child of Jewish parents in 1930s Czechoslovakia, Austerlitz was sent to Britain by her mother, Agata, shortly before she was transported to Theresienstadt by the Germans. His father, Maximilian, was a Socialist politician who had settled in Paris. Most of this information Austerlitz obtains from his former neighbour and friend of the family, Vera.

This book is strange, moving and meticulously detailed.

Contemporary Reads: Beyond the Black

Beyond the Black is the most recent novel by British writer Hillary Mantel. Alison is a home counties medium tormented by the men of her youth (now in spirit). Colette becomes her live-in assistant after leaving her husband.

This book intruduces the reader in the world of mediums with an affectionate tone and a dose of black humour. The reader will discover the horrors of Alison's childhood: her mother was a prostitute who doesn't even kno who really fathered her child and her house was always full of disreputable men who abused her daughter. Alison castrated one of the men with a pair of scissors and took off someone's eye with a knitting needle. In adulthood, Alison tries to overcome her past by performing a good deed: sheltering homeless Mart in her garden shed.

After Mart commits suicide in the shed, Colette decides she can no longer live in the same house and work for Alison and, perhaps no quite surprinsingly, moves back with her husband after 7 years of separation.

The novel starts the summer Princess Diana dies and ends in the current climate of terrorism anxiety. I am not sure what Mantel was trying to achieve with the 7 year time span or the inclusion of events such as the death of the princess or September 11 but the novel is a good read.