It took some willpower, (and weather cold enough to keep me curled up indoors with some honeybush tea for most of December, rather than riffling through beaten-up boxes in New York’s plentiful secondhand bookeries), but I managed to end 2017 as I had just four times in the previous year: reading more books than I bought, and continuing to eat my way into my almost infinite To Read pile, like an over-stuffed diner at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Thirteen books made their way to my once-more filled Billy Bookshelves, whilst fifteen were consigned to the past tense, and this month saw one of the highest ratio of recommended books I’ve shared for a long time. More than half of them I deemed good enough to make your winter warming list, from poetry beautiful in every sense to literature by a teenager; old English classics to modern American legends.
Firstly, (and fittingly, given the weather), this was a Penguin-heavy month. I discovered four further additions to my Penguin Classic Deluxe menagerie (Machiavelli, an African Achebe trilogy, the previously unknown Ernst Jünger, whose novel about World War I now sits incongruously next to a colourful Anne of Green Gables), whilst reading one old favourite and one complete newcomer to me, (although I only bought T.S.Hinton’s work from my new friend ‘D’ on the Southeast corner of Union Square due to its shiny 50th Anniversary Penguin Classics cover).
Considering it was written by a 16-year-old, ‘The Outsiders‘ was an astonishingly gripping, insightful story of the grey areas between right and wrong, good and bad, rich and poor, mature and im-, and I thoroughly enjoyed the short read, a feeling reproduced days later (although with less surprise) when I revisited one of my literary crushes and polished off Graham Greene’s ‘England Made Me,’ also in a Penguin edition.
Reading Greene again after several years was the literary equivalent of stalking an ex-girlfriend on Facebook, making sure that Greene is still beautiful but depressed, fascinating but pessimistic. I may have learned more about love, life, and how they slowly wear you down than from any other author.
Greene made up for the first ever (slightly) disappointing Borges collection I have encountered to date, (‘Brodie’s Report‘ being more prosaic than his usual magical tales), but that was washed away by the surreal, raw energy of another unknown, this time the wonderful weirdness of the prose poem ‘Grief Is The Thing With Feathers‘ in which crows come to some sort of life in the place of a loved one who has left it. Breathtakingly powerful.
My brother has several original pieces of art on his apartment wall from a graphic novel I had never read, but due to its title had been sitting on my wife’s bookshelf since I bought her a dedicated copy at ComicCon a few years ago. This winter seemed like as good a time as any to tackle the toe-breaking omnibus compilation of Terry Moore’s ‘Rachel Rising,’ and it was a dark and funny roller-coaster of a tale, part Gaimany magic and part Stoppardian riposte and repartee, with some pretty twisted moments.
Chuck Klosterman’s decade’s worth of collected articles (titled simply: ‘X‘) are cultural artifacts which remain a joy to browse, whilst Christopher Hitchens‘ interviews are a time capsule from another political era which seems like it was centuries ago. Both were thought-provoking and highly enjoyable, (balanced by the tale of Trumpian Brexiting which even my favourite living philosopher, A.C.Grayling, failed to make anything but depressing, if informative, in ‘Democracy And Its Crises‘).
This month, I learned how much magic goes into movie-making from legendary (and highly readable) film critic David Thompson; the danger that comes with overthrowing the Egyptian government from Bassem Youssef, (‘The Egyptian Jon Stewart‘); the wonders of a support system for the broken-hearted in yet another excellent Ted Talk book; the views on war (as if I didn’t know them already) of the ever excellent Kurt Vonnegut; and ploughed through one of the most beautiful (if awkward to read) books with a newly illustrated Walt Whitman, which proved that art and literature can go hand in hand. But sometimes shouldn’t.
And with these pages, and these words, I end the month, and the year, and invite you to follow me on another twelve month journey through the books which cross my path in 2018.
Happy reading!
Books Bought, December 2017
Storm Of Steel, (Ernst Jünger)
Cuba On The Verge: 12 writers on continuity and change in havana and across the country (ed.Leila Guerriero)
Song Of Myself (Walt Whitman, illustrations Allen Crawford)
Anne Of Green Gables (L.M.Montgomery)
Grief Is The Thing With Feathers (Max Porter)
How To Fix A Broken Heart (Dr.Guy Winch)
The Last Interview (Christopher Hitchens)
Snoopy: Not Your Average Dog (Charles M.Schulz)
Walden and Civil Disobedience (Henry David Thoreau)
The Prince (Machiavelli)
The Outsiders (T.S.Hinton)
Democracy And Its Crisis (A.C.Grayling)
The Africa Trilogy (Chinua Achebe)
Books Read, December 2017
X (Chuck Klosterman)
Rachel Rising (Terry Moore)
Grief Is The Thing With Feathers (Max Porter)
The Last Interview (Christopher Hitchens)
How To Fix A Broken Heart (Dr.Guy Winch)
How To Watch A Movie (David Thomson)
Armageddon In Retrospect (Kurt Vonnegut)
Democracy And Its Crisis (A.C.Grayling)
The Outsiders (T.S.Hinton)
Song Of Myself (Walt Whitman, illustrations Allen Crawford)
Brodie’s Report (Jorge Luis Borges)
Snoopy: Not Your Average Dog (Charles M.Schulz)
England Made Me (Graham Greene)
Think Like A Freak (Steven D.Levitt & Stephen J.Dubner)
Revolution For Dummies: laughing through the arab spring (Bassem Youssef)
