The Book Tower
debut novel coming soon

Reading other book blogs, I often notice that people have phenomenal TBR piles. Stacked high and ready to topple, books eager to be savoured in their dozens. Last night I was shocked to discover that I have no TBR pile of my own. I thought I did, but I’ve exhausted it. The books have run out without me noticing, creeping up on my unnoticed like the tortoise on the hare.

I’m currently reading Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. It’s excellent. It’s also a very slim novel and I’ve also almost finished it. Where to next? I have The Quiet American by Graham Greene, although I overdid Greene last summer. I still have unread collections of ghost stories, but the later months of the year are the best times for ghost stories. So I’m kind of at crisis point, where I will end up buying something from the bestseller lists because my imagination has let me down.

Of course there’s always the January sales, but every time I walk into a bookshop I’m greeted by the faces of Richard Hammond and Terry Wogan…

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So onto my pick of the older books I’ve enjoyed in the last year, where I’ve made a point of reading several authors I’ve always had in the back of my mind. The most prominent of these was probably Mervyn Peake, and I managed to complete the whole of the Gormenghast trilogy early in the year. I also made a point of catching up with Graham Greene. The other two authors I read several books by were both new to me – Cormac McCarthy and Neil Gaiman. Two writers who couldn’t be more different, but there’s diversity for you.

My non-new favourites of 2007, in no particular order:

• Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake (although to be brutally honest, I can give or take part three)
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
• The Outsider by Albert Camus
• In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

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The time has come again to trawl through the best books of the last twelve months. I’ve divided my choices into several categories. The first two cover new fiction.

Brand New

I’ve bought an alarming number of hardbacks this year. Reading books hot off the shelves is increasingly addictive. Right at the beginning of the year I enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. This is a novel I expected to receive more coverage. It’s very well written with some fine gothic undertones. Also recommended highly are two nominees for the 2007 Booker. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Darkmans by Nicola Barker. We all know about the first, although the second is another book sitting in unfair obscurity. Worth picking up if you have the strength and stamina for its 800 plus pages. Incidentally, I found the eventual Booker winner, The Gathering by Anne Enright, tedious and unoriginal. What were the judges thinking of?

The best book of the year to grace my presence was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s uncomfortable, harrowing, profound, frightening. It’s a masterpiece. Most importantly, it’s a book people will still be talking about in ten, twenty years time.

Lastly in this section, if you do have any Christmas money left over, I’d suggest Engleby by Sebastian Faulks. Quite different to anything else he’s written and very, very good.

Nearly New

My pile of newly released paperbacks of 2007 has reached toppling height, although there are only a few I would recommend highly. Again, some of them are criminally obscure. The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson is an unsettling yet gripping book about a man who may or may not have met The Devil. Fantastic.

Less obscure is The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney, a novel that’s received divided responses, at least going by the comments I received for my review. But I found it an absorbing and original read. However, my favourite paperback of the year by far was Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things. This is a collection of supernatural stories that is well written, wry, highly original and, most importantly, scary.

Sadly, it was the books that received too much attention that disappointed the most. Don de Lillo’s Falling Man, Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder and, I’m sorry to say, the final Harry Potter took up too much reading time that that would have been better spent on something more worthwhile. Here’s to 2008.

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From Booking Through Thursday.

Do you get on a roll when you read, so that one book leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on and so on?

I always claim to stumble from book to book, although when I look back at the trail behind me I can usually spot a pattern.

I’m currently reading the latest novel by Clive Barker, which is probably because I’ve been reading a lot of Neil Gaiman recently, although I wasn’t really thinking of anything when I bought the Barker book. I just subconsciously decided to widen my appreciation of the ghostly and supernatural to include a taste of horror. And what probably got me onto this path was Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, which has a supernatural element and was nominated for the 2007 Booker Prize. Because I’d read both this and Ian McEwan’s latest, the Booker theme continued when I bought The Gathering by Anne Enright – the eventual winner. But I must confess that I hated the book, so sometimes rolls don’t work out.

Usually planned reading directions don’t work out for me either. I finished Albert Camus and wanted to read Kafka, but the plan went nowhere. I put Kafka away again for another day. Even when I find an author I love I can’t read too many of their books in one go; their power gets diluted. This year it’s happened with Cormac McCarthy, Graham Greene and Sebastian Faulks. Sometimes my roll goes no further than picking up the next unread book on my shelf, other times it’s picking up a tip from another blog. More often than not it’s just luck and chance.

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From Booking Through Thursday.

How many of us write notes in our books. Are you a Footprint Leaver or a Preservationist?

I was once a Footprint Leaver in a big way, a lot to do with the fact that I studied for an English degree. I made so many pencil notes in margins and did so much underlining that I progressed to sticking post-it notes in pages. It was just quicker than making scribbles. My books would all have yellow pieces of paper sticking out of them, often more than one on a page. I grew out of the habit when I finished my degree, and going back to reread some of the classics I often puzzled over why exactly I’d left a yellow sticker in a particular page. I began to unpeel them all, one by one.

Starting to attempt writing book reviews, I was drawn back to my stickers and note taking but I’ve so far resisted. I’ve attempted and sometimes failed to commit the page numbers of important passages to memory. It can go disastrously wrong, and I recently forgot the part of an 800 page novel that I desperately wanted to refer to. I spent a wasted hour flicking through it to find the part I’d lost. But the reason I don’t like notes in books, especially those written in pen or when a highlighter has been given full flow, is when I find them in other people’s books. There’s nothing more disheartening than buying a second hand book, getting it home and opening it to discover the student vandalism that has gone on inside it. And nothing is worse than other people’s notes. And worse still is bad student notes, where the notes made are not noteworthy, the highlights highlight nothing and the passages marked yes! are definite nos.

So if you make notes in books and give them away, make sure they’re good ones. Or better still make them in pencil and rub them out when you have finished. Or just don’t make them at all.

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