Many people say I always have my nose in a book. This year, I kept a list of all the books I read and am sharing it here. I got this idea from Barak Obama who releases a Top 10 list of his favourite books every year. This post reviews a selection of the ones I read, providing some background and what I did or did not like.
Titus Groan (Mervyn Peake)
This is the first of a series of novels, and the entire plot takes place within the confines of a huge castle, called Gormenghast. The main character, Steerpike, is a servant in the kitchens. However, he is also the villain. The book follows his schemes as he uses lies, chaos, and even murder to acquire progressively more powerful positions. I like a good antagonist and am always on the lookout for books that tell stories from their perspectives. Steerpike kept me reading to the end.
This is one of the “original modern fantasy stories”. It was published in 1946 while Tolkien was still writing The Lord of the Rings. The novel stands out for its imaginary medieval setting without any supernatural elements. As the story is completely set within the castle, there is no travelling between locations, a plus if you are not normally interested in that and instead want to focus on characters.
However, except for Steerpike, most characters are cartoony weirdos. Their dialogue often includes quirks of speech. For example, one has a lot of weird laughs inserted every few words. The author obviously did this on purpose. However, I found a few characters to just make annoying reading when mixed with the book’s already over-flowery language. (5/10)
Stand on Zanzibar (John Brunner)
I heard about this book from an interesting BBC article. It is an old science fiction novel that takes place in a world where overpopulation is a serious problem and Brunner imagines what the consequences of this would be. For example, governments have strict eugenics laws and limit the number of children couples may have. Life in the book involves some close similarities with life today, but Brunner was also off on a few things. The worldbuilding is rich and does not come across as dated or implausible like a lot of other 1960s science fiction.
The novel makes fresh reading and has a compelling story. It is composed of two storylines that eventually merge. One main character works as a spy for the US government to steal biotechnology secrets from a rival country. The other is an executive at a mega-corporation set to take over an African country. Interestingly, the characters are both roommates due to the world being overpopulated.
Scattered throughout the book are what I term “commercial breaks”. These are short chapters, sometimes only a page or two, that depart from the two storylines of the novel. They provide the reader with more details of the sci-fi world with snippets of overheard conversation, advertising slogans, songs and even newspaper clippings. There are also quotations from fictional books. This was a cool concept and I feel it worked well. (9/10)
My Wicked Wicked Ways (Errol Flynn)
Errol Flynn was an actor in 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. He was famous for playing Robin Hood and his ‘swashbuckler’ movies and westerns. This autobiography should appeal to those interested in Old Hollywood. Flynn interacts with people like Bette Davis and John Barrymore throughout his acting career.
I was originally interested in the book because I heard Errol Flynn was a terrible person in real life. I was under the impression that he talked about his life with unapologetic relish and plenty of wit – and I am interested in finding a fictional novel told with a similar perspective. Upon reading, his life came across as rather sad. Flynn was never close with his parents, was a poor student and a drifter as a young man. Additionally, he only seemed to enjoy his first few movies. Afterwards, Flynn was type-cast and forced to do films he was not interested in. When he wrote this, he was washed up, dying from alcoholism and on his third marriage.
Nevertheless, Errol Flynn was certainly wild. He was a serial womanizer, had microphones installed in his guest bathroom so he could hear visitor’s conversations, a false mirror above a guest bed, and was charged with statutory rape twice (but was acquitted). That was just as an actor. When a young man, he lived a life in New Guinea that resembles something out of his own pirate movies.
Something that really stuck out to me was Flynn’s description of “casting couches”. This is when aspiring young actresses are solicited for sexual favours. Maybe its just because of Harvey Weinstein, but I assumed that this was mostly done by film producers and directors. However, Flynn describes how this was done by leading men and at other levels of a film’s production too. I was surprised to learn writers would promise actresses they would write scripts with them in mind for sex. (7/10)
Howard Stern Comes Again
This is a collection of excerpts from some of Howard Stern’s favourite radio interviews. My favourite was Stern’s Conan O’Brien interview. It features a story about a prank Conan played on Bill Cosby when he was a university student. I found it so funny it brought tears to my eyes. Reading something funny usually only gets a chuckle out of me. The interviews cover a wide range of famous people and feature various funny, thought-provoking, and scandalous conversations.
Read it at your own pace. You can put it down and find other interviews later. (8/10)
House of Leaves (Mark Z Danielewski)
Something of a novelty, this horror story is known for its copious use of footnotes and bizarre formatting. It even includes braille and some backwards text the reader must decipher with a mirror. The novel is presented as real notes written in a book about a home video. It features three stories layered on top of each other.
Essentially, there is a family that moves into a new house, experiences strange events and documents this with video footage. This home video is described in the style of a film analysis, with each scene broken down. The author of this is an old man and the home video is described by him. However, at the beginning of House of Leaves, this old man is dead and not actually featured in the novel. Instead, his book is found by another character, a young man. He added his own notes and journal entries over top of the old man’s film analysis. The journal entries detail his own hedonistic life and descent into madness after reading the old man’s book. The final novel exists in this form, with the young man’s story being told in the footnotes he supposedly added.
This book has something of a cult following on the internet. The home video scenes are the best and they convey both suspense and touching moments between the family members. The old man’s film analysis can make tedious reading as it is written in a dense and very academic style. It is supposed to be like this, but it is not always clear what it is actually providing to the novel. For example, there is a quick chapter where the old man explains how light works, but I did not feel it was necessary. The young man’s entries mostly serve as entertaining or haunting departures from the home video. They also feature several explicit sex scenes. Although, since he is portrayed as a pathological liar, I think at least a few of these are only fantasies.
Fans of this book enjoy generating theories about several elements of the book. Resolving them could be “mind-blowing” or just a wild goose chase. Overall, I am glad I read it. But, I think the novel is overrated and mostly gets its appeal from its unusual formatting and narrative structure. If it were written in a more conventional way, I doubt it would get as much attention. (5/10)
Genghis Khan (Frank McLynn)
This biography covers the founding of the Mongol Empire by Genghis Khan, describing his life and the reign of his immediate heirs. It is the best resource I found on how Genghis corralled various Mongolian tribes and conquered China, Persia, and Russia. The book provides an excellent description of Genghis Khan’s personality and what life was like at the imperial court. The author is a military historian, and this comes across in the accounts of various battles. However, at times the book can be heavy with listing battles and dates. I recommend it for people who are interested in the Middle Ages but want to learn more about what was happening outside western Europe. (8/10)
Necronomicon (HP Lovecraft)
I consider HP Lovecraft another “original modern fantasy” writer. That said, his horror stories certainly provided a different direction for the genre than Tolkien and others did. For Lovecraft, humans are at the mercy of amoral god-like beings they do not understand, and lost civilizations are often founded by non-human races or travellers from space. These are compelling ideas that lend themselves well to horror fantasy and many writers are influenced by him. This is a remarkable feat as Lovecraft never achieved commercial success in his lifetime. He never wrote a full novel, only ever publishing short stories in various magazines.
While the ideas and themes behind his stories are unique, his style for delivery does not always do them justice. Lovecraft himself admitted he struggled to write dialogue and how his stories feature very little. When characters are quoted, Lovecraft usually wrote their accents into the words, changing grammar and spelling to show this. The result is often hard to read. In addition, Lovecraft’s prose presents another barrier to his stories. He uses very long descriptions to convey feelings. For example, long convoluted paragraphs are used when simple sentences would suffice. Lovecraft often uses obscure words. In combination, these traits make him seem like a creative writing student using a thesaurus to reach a word count.
This book is a collection of multiple HP Lovecraft short stories and novellas. My favourites were the Dreamland Saga of stories, including The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath which Lovecraft never published. I also enjoyed The Whisperer in Darkness which features an early example of the ‘brain in a jar’ trope but has a predictable ending. I found At the Mountains of Madness, which details an expedition to Antarctica and is celebrated by many Lovecraft fans, to be boring; and The Call of Cthulhu to be too overly descriptive. Half-way through, I realized that the stories are arranged roughly in the order Lovecraft published them. This might be why I generally enjoyed the second half of the book more. Both Lovecraft’s writing improved over time and I was more familiar with his style. (6/10)
Tales of the Narts: Ossetians (J. Colarusso)
This book is a collection of myths by the Ossetian people, an ethnic group that lives in the Caucasus mountains between the Black and Caspian seas. This is a very diverse region where many different languages are spoken. It serves as gateway between Europe and Asia, and was fought over by Persians, Mongols, Turks, and Russians for its strategic value.
The author, John Colarusso, is a professor I had in university for two mythology courses and an expert on the Caucasus languages. I kept in touch with him and he recommended the book to me. It is a collection of Ossetian stories arranged in a quasi-chronological way, so they make a narrative when read through. The Narts are a clan of multiple generations of heroes and the myths cover the exploits of individual Narts. At different times they reminded me of heroes in Norse mythology: the Narts feast, go on adventures, fight giants, and rescue each other. While gods are present, and in some cases the parents of Narts, they do not feature prominently.
I like to draw comparisons between different cultures myths. A few of the episodes seemed superficially like Greek myths about the Trojan War. Future posts will address this and other examples. Overall, a great dive into a remarkable but not widely known mythology. (8/10)
Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
In this work of fiction, a small group of colleagues put their heads together to develop a document called “The Plan” as a joke. This “Plan” is their own account of what happened to the medieval Knights Templar, after the group was disbanded and purged. Various historical elements, legends, and conspiracy theories are weaved together to claim the Templars not only survived but went into hiding, resurfaced as various secret societies, and left clues so they could share a ‘big secret’ with each other. “The Plan” involves Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Nazis, alchemists, and the usual personages that real-world conspiracy theorists fever dream about. There is just one problem. While making their joke, which occurs over most of the novel, the characters stumble upon something real and now some of those secret societies are out to get them!
The book references various real-life texts from medieval alchemy and other literature. This is what originally intrigued me about the book as I am interested in the use of real documents to create something completely fictional. However, because of this, the sections detailing “The Plan” may seem dense to people not familiar with the references. Consequently, this book could be a difficult read and easy access to Google may be needed throughout. I enjoyed the story, although I have mixed feelings about the ending. (8/10)
Black Leopard Red Wolf (Marlon James)
My favourite book this year. This is a fantasy adventure novel set in an imaginary world based on a tribal Africa. I heard of this book from a BBC article on overlooked recent novels. I was intrigued as I am fiddling with some short fantasy stories that take place in non-western Europe settings. An extra bonus is the novel’s eye-catching cover that looks great on my bookshelf.
The plot centres on a rescue mission. However, the main character determines that the real reason for the adventure is shrouded in mystery. The novel is not for the faint of heart: there is a lot of gruesome deaths, violence, and unsympathetic characters. Probably for this reason, it was described as an African Game of Thrones, somewhat jokingly, by its author. Unlike George RR Martin though, Marlon makes magic and monsters much more prevalent in his fantasy world, including shapeshifters. Marlon makes a cool innovation here. Instead of people being able to change into animals, he has some animals able to change into people. Indeed, one major character is a leopard. He complains about life as a human, being especially unimpressed with cooked meat and wearing clothes.
The dialogue is absolutely filled with figures of speech and one-liners that reflect this world. I loved it. The story is told in first-person so even the descriptive prose is in the style of the main character’s dialogue. Reading it takes getting used to at first, but it works really well if you get the hang of it. (10/10)
Other books read in 2020:
Baudilino (Umberto Eco)
City of Brass (SA Chakraborty)
Mitra-Varuna: An Essay (Georges Dumézil)
Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts)
The Stand (Stephen King)
Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell)
Greek Myths (Stephen P Kershaw)