Best (unread) books of 2012

By this time we've probably all seen quite a few of those 'Best of 2011' literary lists published in the press and on internet. At this stage most of them only make us feel guilty and/or lazy for not having read enough during the past twelve months. Or not having read discriminatingly enough. For somehow managing to miss what other - more informed -  readers regard as Must Reads.

Enough already.

I'm compiling another kind of list to start the new year. Not the Best Books I've read in 2011 (many of which I've already praised in this blog anyway), but the Best Books I plan to read in 2012. Of course you never know if you're going to love a book, even if your best friend or the most brilliant literary critics or a million other people adored it, so it's quite daring to make a list of best unread books. But then, what the heck. Even readers sometimes want to live dangerously.

The books on my list are either already in my possession (some af them have been lying around the house for months, taunting me with their seductive covers, begging me to make time for them) or have been on my literary shopping list for a while because of great reviews, word of mouth or personal preferences.
 
Roberto Bolano's 2666: This brick of a book (my copy has nearly 900 pages) is actually 5 books in one, published posthumously after the brilliant Chilean writer's death in 2003 at the age of fifty. The novel revolves around the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a place where horrifying crimes are committed, and has become an international sensation. The motto - 'An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom' (Charles Baudelaire) - sets the tone.  I've actually read more than 200 pages and arrived at the third 'book' (The Part About Fate) without encountering too much horror, but I'm anticipating it in the next part (The Part About the Crimes)...

José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis: The Portuguese author is probably best known among English-speaking readers for his more recent novel, Blindness, but I've been drawn to this one (published in Portuguese in 1984 and in English nearly a decade later) because the Ricardo Reis of the title is one of the many heteronyms of the celebrated poet Fernando Pessoa. And because I love the city of Lisbon - which I'll be visiting early in the year - and one of my erudite friends proposed that I take this novel along as a fascinating guide book.


Keith Richards' Life: Because variety is the spice of life, no pun intended, and because a few of my old rock 'n roll friends raved about this entertaining autobiography by a Rolling Stone who did everything in excess and lived to tell the tale. Although he tells it with the help of  'contributor' James Fox, his own voice apparently comes through clearly enough to please his many fans and maybe even earn him some new ones. 

Patti Smith's Just Kids: Not just another rocker's memoir, but then, Patti Smith is not just another rocker. Since I couldn't get a ticket for one of her concerts in France last year, I decided that this version of her early life and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which won a National Book Award in the USA in 2010, would be a perfectly acceptable consolation prize. 'The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s,' as it has been called in the New York Times.

Ewan McEwan's Solar: Because I have yet to encounter a piece of writing by this British author that I don't like. And when I heard that his latest novel, along with all the expected pleasures of McEwan's prose, unexpectedly offered a healthy dose of humour too, I was sold. Unlike The Guardian's critic who wrote: 'I was not expecting to like it. It is billed as his first foray into comedy, and we can only wonder about a man who waits until his seventh decade before he cracks his first joke.' Well, yes, I have to admit that's true, but the critic ended up loving it, calling it one of McEwan's 'best achievements'. And he has achieved quite a lot in his seventy jokeless years, hasn't he?

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies: No, I haven't read any glowing reviews of this novel, nor have I heard trusted friends raving about it, for the simple reason that it hasn't been published yet. But it's the sequel to Mantel's marvellous Wolf Hall - which would be on my list of Best Books read in 2011, had I drawn up such a list - and that, frankly, is reason enough for me to add it to this list. Wolf Hall is a so-called 'genre novel' that managed to seduce people like me who don't usually fall for historical novels, winning the 2009 Man Booker Prize along its triumphant way.  

Bring Up the Bodies, with its blood-curdling title, to be published later this year, will focus on Anne Boleyn's downfall, while the third novel in Mantel's Tudor trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, will continue Thomas Cromwell's story up to his execution in 1540. If history could have been taught in such a thrilling way in school, I would probably have been a more enthusiastic reader of historical novels by now. On the other hand, as one reviewer stated, to call this simply a historical novel would be like calling Moby Dick a novel about fishing.    

My list goes on, but I'll end here, because I have to leave space for all the books I don't yet know about that are bound to blow me away in 2012. One of the many pleasures of reading, after all, is the surprise factor. Not knowing the end of the story. Not even knowing which stories you'll want to know the end of.   

May 2012 be filled with fabulous reading and a few lovely surprises for all of us.

Blessed by books

Now that the year is nearing its halfway mark, I can confidently claim that 2009 is going to be a

grand cru. I'm talking books, not wines, in case you're confused.

Because readers, like wine tasters, know that the harvest differs from year to year, in quality and in quantity. Often I read for weeks, sometimes even months, without coming across a really great book. Oh, I find pleasure, of course, I always find pleasure in reading, but I yearn for something more. I want a book that grips me and shakes me, a book that thrills me and fills me with awe and admiration.

And then there are years, like this blessed one, when each month is illuminated by a brilliant book. The kind of book that stands out from the crowd, or jumps off the shelf, for the rest of the year. Maybe even for many years to come.

The thrill started in January, when I finally tackled Don DeLillo's Falling Man which I'd been threatening to read ever since its publication in 2007. It is the most magnificent writing about 'Nine Eleven' and the attacks on the Twin Towers that I've ever encountered, and it convinced me (as if I needed any convincing) that DeLillo is an awesome author. I wanted to fall down at his feet and worship him after some pages, for what he does with language and style and human relationships. I know this sounds over the top, but we all have our weaknesses, and DeLillo is one of mine.

Then, in February, I was blessed by another beautiful book: Anne Enright's The Gathering, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2007, a lyrical novel about a family gathering. The nine surviving siblings of the Hegarty clan get together in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam... Dark and delightful from the first to the last page.

So far so good, I said to myself, like a falling man (with apologies to DeLillo) who still has a long way to go before he hits the ground, but surely this good luck can't last. Well, it did last, into March, when I read Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, another outstanding novel published in 2007. (Talking of grand crus, what a grand year 2007 was for readers.) On Chesil Beach is a devastating study of a single young couple on a single night in the summer of 1962; 'a short, sharp shock of a story', as it was called in The Observer, proving once again that power has nothing to do with size or length.

And still my luck didn't run out. In April, while on vacation in South Africa, I read Toni Morrison's latest masterpiece, A Mercy, which I praised in my previous posting (Of mothers and race). And in May I read another novel I probably should have read three years ago. Kiran Desai's exquisitely titled The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, which makes it the 'oldest' of the five memorable novels I've encountered in the first five months of 2009. One of those marvellous stories about India that I just can't resist, as I confessed in another earlier posting (Hate and hurt in Mumbai, November 2008), it deals with an uprising in the Himalayas region in 1986, and demonstrates in a quite unforgettable way how big political dramas can affect the small personal lives of ordinary people.

So far so good, I say again, still falling. I can't wait to see what the rest of the literary year holds in store for me.