There’s a good story – probably apocryphal, as all good stories are – about an Oxford professor who reached retirement. At his send-off party, he was asked how he planned to spend his retirement. He replied, ‘Read all the books I’ve reviewed.’ I’ve been engaged in the task of reviewing a fair few books recently, but unlike our professor I did read them all, which means I’ve had less time for other bibliophilic delights. However, I thought that now might be a good time to provide a sort of whistle-stop tour of some of the stand-out books from the crop I’ve read this year, complete with a brief review of each book and my reasons for recommending it. I’ll roughly treat this by subject –biographies, science, drama, and so on – just to give the thing at least a show of order.
Without doubt the outstanding work of biography I managed to get my peepers in this year was John Haffenden’s heroic two-volume biography of the poet-critic William Empson (1906-1984). Over 1,000 pages and two vast tomes, Haffenden charts Empson’s life and career, from his time as a student at Cambridge to his sudden expulsion from the university (when condoms were found in his possession), to his time in Japan, China, and then Sheffield (well, where else?), where he was Professor of English for eighteen years. Empson is a very colourful figure and many academics (and non-academics, of course) value him highly. He once stated that any literary criticism he wrote that bored him when he read it back ended up in the bin; it wasn’t right if it didn’t amuse him. (To make sure his work flowed freely and was more readable, he used to imbibe several pints of beer before writing; this helped get it ‘loose’, as he called it.)
Haffenden’s book(s) may be a tour de force in terms of biography, but The QI Book of the Dead is a marvellous work of biothanatography, focusing on famous and not-so-famous names of the past and bringing their dead or deadened stories to life. In this tome can be found the truth behind the ‘lady of the lamp’ who was Florence Nightingale, the ambition of the ‘other’ Victorian nurse Mary Seacole, the sex life of H. G. Wells, and a whole kaleidoscopic array of other luminaries and ... er, liminaries (a coinage I have reached for because I like the idea of being on the threshold, being liminal). I’d also strongly recommend The Second Book of General Ignorance, which kept me company during a cold, dark train journey and B&B night back in January. Talking of biography and thanatography and QI, I squoze in an autobiography as well, Stephen Fry’s autobiog part two, otherwise known as The Fry Chronicles. It’s a gripping read if you’re a pathetic devotee of 80s comedy and the 80s in general in fact (which I am), and Fry spins a yarn, or an anecdote, very well, as has oft been noted. I also read Fry’s Paperweight, a collection of his writings from the late 80s and early 90s, mostly bits and pieces he wrote for various newspapers. Also included are all the charmingly mad ‘Donald Trefusis’ monologues he wrote for Loose Ends back in the mid-1980s. Oh, and Latin!, the play he wrote at Cambridge, the story of whose composition can be found in the autobiography. I was a little thin on science this year, but I managed a corker or two. The best, for me, was Stephen Jay Gould’s collection of essays, Bully for Brontosaurus, which managed to be popular and accessible without being patronising or over-simplistic. Among the highlights are the considerable design faults behind the standard QWERTY keyboard we all use (and which my fingers are currently gliding across as I pen, or type, this, dear reader). These faults were deliberate, in order to force people to type more slowly; the typists were going too quickly with the previous, more ergonomic, keyboards, and as a result the typewriters were prone to continual jamming. There is also an illuminating little piece on the popularity of dinosaurs among children (written in the days before Jurassic Park, or at least before the film), and essays on the Voyager pictures sent back from Uranus. Gould was a great populariser of science, and this book demonstrates why repeatedly. In the field of language, I came across a charming little book in a bookshop (sorry, the bookshop, for there is only one) in St Davids, Wales: History of the English Language by Lincoln Barnett. Although published a while back (1962), the book doesn’t suffer from too much fustiness (though the pages, I’m pleased to say, are awash with the stuff), and there is a fund of fascinating facts. For instance, Sir Thomas Elyot, he whom his descendant T. S. Eliot was to name-check in his 1940 poem ‘East Coker’, coined the words ‘democracy’,‘encyclopedia’, and even ‘education’. It’s not quite so engagingly written as other books of its kind on the market – it has little of the eye for a witty story or humorous personality that Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue has, for instance – but it’s still got a fair few corking facts in there.
Talking of history, as I half-was there, and of Bryson, which I fully was, I found time to read At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bryson himself. A great read – 650 pages of quirky personalities, fascinating lives, and little gold nuggets of trivia, all woven onto the compelling narrative tapestry which Bryson has become so adept at embroidering (okay, so I know tapestries and embroideries are two different things, but you get the general needlework metaphor I’m going for here). People never married younger in the ‘olden days’, as is commonly believed – the stories of everyone being married by fifteen and dead by thirty are largely a misunderstanding, caused by Romeo and Juliet in the case of the former and by a misinterpretation of how mean averages work in the case of the latter. As with A Short History of Nearly Everything Bryson sings the praises of a few unsung or undersung heroes – John Snow, for instance, the man who worked out what caused cholera epidemics (which is putatively the origin of the tradition of saying ‘Good health’ when we raise a glass of booze, though Bryson doesn’t mention this).
What of my own metier, literary criticism? Well, I visited a few old friends again, and reread both The Force of Poetry and Essays in Appreciation, two Christopher Ricks works I would not be without. He is without doubt the greatest living critic. I also read his most recent book, True Friendship, which lacked some of his old magic, but still sparkled more brightly than everyone else. Parts of it read more like notes for an annotated edition of Geoffrey Hill’s poems, but then at least Ricks has the self-awareness and wit to point this out. I’m now reading his Allusion to the Poets, which glitters with the old magic. I also read The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar’s vast work in which, over 700 pages, they show how women writers of the nineteenth century worked with, within, and against male forms of writing which they inherited. It’s overlong and needed a good bit of editing in parts, but it stands as a monument of feminist literary criticism, immensely influential and endlessly readable, despite its occasional waffle.
I also read a fine book by John Sutherland, called Curiosities of Literature. This fun and hugely readable book is a great ‘dipping’ book, into which one can plunge for five minutes of interestingness whenever one has the time. Sutherland is the author of the three-books-in-one known as The Literary Detective, which is also a fantastic work – all about the little puzzles in fiction, particularly nineteenth-century novels, which we may have encountered but may not necessarily have stopped to think about. Curiosities is - curiously - organised by subject and contains some fine facts about the literary world – the authors of the longest and shortest ever plays, or writers who have had food named after them, and a host of other fine facts. A smorgasbord of delights, to be sure.
Another tome I read this year (which could double up as a weapon should the need arise) was Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets, a positively ridiculous 1,100 pages of dense biography covering as many poets who have written in English since Chaucer and Gower as Schmidt can fit in. He sifts out a fair few names from pre-1900 – Edward Lear only gets mentioned in a note to acknowledge that he’s been left out, if you see what I mean – yet nearly half the book is taken up by poets of the last 100 years or so. There are only so many Beat poets I can read about before I wish to beat somebody with a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s complete works, but if you can get through these dull and overlong chapters, it’s certainly worth reading. Schmidt has a habit, to which he falls prey continually, of quoting somebody’s opinion and then stating, ‘This is wrong.’ This in itself I find wrong, but again, it’s only a minor criticism.
Last Thursday the world lost the great and incomparable Christopher Hitchens. If you don’t know his work, go on Youtube after you’ve read this and search for one of the many videos of him uploaded there. (His appearance on Question Time defending his friend Salman Rushdie a few years ago has him arguably - another in-joke there, I fear - at his best and most clear-thinking and eloquent.) I read his fine polemical work, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything back on Hitch’s birthday (which he shared with Thomas Jefferson), 13 April this year. Again, a train journey was the excuse. I think I attracted a fair few funny looks from fellow passengers, but then given the choice between a book and a bomb, I know which I’d rather see someone carrying on a train. This book offers a cogently presented argument in which Hitchens deconstructs various religions and the arguments put forward by believers, arguing that reason and science are far nobler things to worship (although that is not the right word) than Bronze Age texts and deities for whom there is no evidence. His death last week robbed the world of one of the most powerful writers and speakers we have seen in recent years. As Pound said of T. S. Eliot, I have nothing to say except: read him.
Religion may not be a subject that’s packed with laughs (though there are many laughable aspects to it, undoubtedly), but two books I read this year treated lighter, more ‘fun’ subjects. The Naked Jape, by stand-up comic and ‘space hopper in a suit’ Jimmy Carr (and his friend Lucy Greeves), is a marvellous study of jokes, their meaning, their purpose, and their role in social interaction. Carr and Greeves pull off a masterstroke by including a joke literally on every page – in fact, at the bottom of every page. Intelligent, serious in its approach yet funny and entertaining to read, this book was one of the highlights of a cold winter for me. Oh, and the other great standout in the field of humorous works was Pop Goes the Weasel by Albert Jacks, which looked at the historical origins of all our favourite nursery rhymes, from Humpty Dumpty to Three Blind Mice and everything in between. I was disappointed in the lack of concrete evidence that materialised for just about everytheory Jacks put forward; the book is fascinating in terms of the light it sheds on various theories about the origins of nursery rhymes, but ultimately we’re left scratching our heads and feeling much as we did before, suspecting that we know nothing for sure about these funny little rhymes. Oh well. Still a nice enough read.
As for drama, well I well-nigh read my eyes out with that. Between January and May this year, I lectured at the University of Warwick (which, as every schoolchild knows, is not in Warwick at all, but Coventry), and on the train journeys between Loughborough and Godivaland I would read plays by any dramatist I could get my hands on. Aristophanes, Beckett, Bond, Brecht, Chekhov, Churchill, Ibsen, Lorca, Marlowe, Pirandello, Shaw, Terence, Wedekind... All were pretty much required reading for me. This is not least because that is what I was supposed to be teaching at Warwick (though inevitably poetry, art, science, religion, philosophy, graffiti, Come Dine with Me and other concerns all made an appearance at some time or another in seminars). Mostly I read Beckett from beginning to end, including all the short radio pieces and mini-masterpieces like ‘Breath’. I also enjoyed some of the plays I taught: I still have absolutely no idea what The Skriker by Churchill is about, but it all sounds impressive enough. Wedekind is a wonderful playwright, dark and different. Chekhov’s The Seagull is a little-known masterpiece. Hedda Gabler by Ibsen is stunningly good, his best after A Doll's House. If you can forgive Strindberg his misogynistic trespasses (and the matter is far from simple), then I’d recommend Miss Julie, which has some of the finest dialogue written for women in the whole naturalist movement. Brecht still leaves me cold. But then that’s what he wants, after all...
Novels were largely confined to the work arena. I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, and loved that. Many people, Anne’s sister Charlotte included, thought the novel not worth remembering, but I thought it a finely written book about a difficult subject (alcoholism, parenthood, domestic abuse, all are treated here with frankness and skill). I had to reread Wuthering Heights, a book I always have mixed feelings about, but the book does have a raw energy to it and the dialogue is practically unrivalled among nineteenth-century novels (Dickens’s eccentrics excepted, perhaps). I did find time to read a bit of non-work novelage. I also revisited David Gemmell’s Rigante quartet, something I started doing last year – I reread Stormrider, the finale to the tetralogy, and whatever criticisms people might throw at the late Gemmell, being a poor storyteller is certainly not one of them. If you’re looking for a fantasy author to read in the New Year, and you haven’t yet read Gemmell, seek out his books, beginning with Legend, his first and most popular novel.
Poetry largely eluded me this year, except for the occasional dip into old favourites like Larkin and Housman. I did, however, manage to do what I had never done before, and sit down and go through all of T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-62 in one sitting (well, two sittings really), when I had to travel on the train from Loughborough to Coventry on academic business. When I did so, I saw that Ricks was right when he said that when you read Eliot’s published poetry in order, you notice the way proper names disappear from the text. The poet who begins by offering us Prufrock, Sweeney, Phlebas, Madame Sosostris and all the rest leaves us with the Four Quartets, where people are seldom named. I also went through all of Auden’s Collected Poems. He was a damn sight more prolific than Eliot, and his complete works amounts to over 900 pages, and there’s a lot of weak stuff in there. He got rid of ‘September 1st, 1939’ but left The Age of Anxiety in? He pretty much lost it when he went to America, which isn’t saying anything new, just saying it again. There is the odd gem among the later work, though. ‘On the Circuit’ and ‘Doggerel by a Senior Citizen’ will always make me smile. I’d also recommend Simon Armitage’s most recent volume, Seeing Stars, a most considerable and considering volume (a joke for the star-gazers, or Latin scholars, there, I fear). This is a collection of tableaux written in a style which blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose.
And that’s about it! What joys await me in 2012, the annus olympus? I have two books to write (plus another two which are at the drawing-board stage at present), so I’ll be reading a fair bit of research for those. Plus I have articles planned on Aylmer Vance, Dickens, and Philip Larkin. All recommendations are welcome in the little box left for comments below – particularly when it comes to non-fiction writers in the fields of science or history. I have stacks of everything else still left on my shelves. So I will trundle off to read my Christmas choice for this year: it’s a Dickens book, of course. And it’s his earliest work, collected together in Sketches by Boz. So, a Merry Christmas one and all, and Godot bless us, everyone!
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