John Banville on literary awards

[laverte]

Etienne! i'm happy to see you here. i think i read those Barbara Pym books together as well, at a time when they were to be found in many a secondhand store. It's great that her work is finding a(nother) new readership, although perhaps it had to wait until her world had properly vanished for it not to be confused with the superficially rather twee women whose lives it depicted.

i'll try to dig out my library borrowing list from 2020 to remind myself of what i have been reading, but it won't be as varied as yours!

laverte Lehman’s The Weather In The Streets is the one I’d start with.

Unexpectedly, my local library possesses three Lehmann books including this one, which i have enthusiastically reserved. That still doesn't compare with the roughly three thousand books it stocks on the subject of the Battle of Britain, but maybe there is hope! Thank you for the recommendation.

Back in the early 80s, when my future wife was piling through Virago books, I read and enjoyed a lot of C20 women “literary” writers that I might have otherwise overlooked.

And no examples. [sadface emoji]

Ironic about Saturday and people being related to Ian McEwan, as he was the step-dad of someone I went to school with and I therefore tried to read his books over and over and I never understood what all the fuss was about. They just bored me silly.

The woman in our reading group was related to McEwan's first wife – the tempestuous one who gatecrashes his readings to heckle him about the alimony he hasn't paid. i didn't mind his very early stories but since he became the conscience of liberal England i've found it hard to take him anything like as seriously as he takes himself. Saturday is uniquely absurd in its dreadfulness though.

Oh, and i pledge not to tease you any more about liking golf since your assessment of its value makes perfect sense to me.

That's another problem - trying not to think too much about the reading group's/publishing's idea of an empathetic character.

imp, it's impossible to describe what makes a rounded, believable character isn't it? i would definitely argue that every believable character is empathetic enough for me to want to know more about them and follow their narrative. But that's no help at all! For me, the secondary and minor characters are usually a litmus test – perhaps because most central characters are men, and even when they're drawn brilliantly, i'm always looking for how they get on with others and how their lives intersect with people who aren't from their background. That's the only way i know how to get to know them, really. The fact that Stoner, to go back to him, doesn't bother (or doesn't try to learn) to invest in relationships with anyone other than his buddies from his student days is part of the reason i felt like giving up on him.

[Sam]

there is a fundamental shift happening in writing, and not before time.

I'm about to go to bed, so sorry for not expanding further, but I don't want this to go unsaid:

It's not a shift in writing so much as a shift in publishing. And, to avoid giving the publishing industry more credit than it's worth, it's still happening far too slowly.

At year's end I'm going to try and do something similar to Etienne (in my case it'll involve searching for my posts on Current Reading this year). I was planning to anyway, because I've made a conscious effort this year to read less stuff by SWBs (straight white blokes), but I'll share the results here.

[Sam]

I also suspect algorithms have pushed all of us into reading by genre more than we once did.

Also this is a really fascinating point. I'd love to find out whether something detailed has been written about it. I might ask some people next week.

[Etienne]

Thanks laverte .

Barbara Pym came from the town I live in now, so she is still available in the (excellent) bookshop in town. It is odd that the mentality of Jane Austen's characters (who I think is the closest writer comparison in terms of dry humour to Pym) seems more understandable to me than the churchwomen of the 1950s, even though they are over a hundred years older.

[ale]

Retired earlier this year and combined with lockdown have had plenty of opportunity to catch up on literary stuff. Fiction being:

Doug Johnstone-A Dark Matter
Viet Thang Nguyen-The Sympathiser
Will Carver-Good Samaritans
Joann Chaney-As Long As We Both Shall Live
Lauren Groff-Fates & Furies
Zadie Smith-Grand Union
Joe Hill-Nos4A2
Alex Marwood-Poison Garden
Oyinkan Braithwaite-My Sister Serial Killer
Larry McMurty-Last Picture Show Texasville Duanes Depressed
Belinda Bauer-Finders Keepers
Mark Lawson-Allegations
Nicola Maye Goldberg-Nothing Can Hurt You
Devi S Laskar-Atlas Of Red & Blues
Louise Candlish-Sudden Departure Of Frasers
Jane Harper-Lost Man
Sue Miller-Monogamy
Alex North-Shadows
Jean Thompson-City Boy
Tana French-Searchers
Andrew O Hagan-Mayflies
David James Poissant-Lake Life
Zoje Stage-Wonderland
Billy O Callaghan-My Coney Island Baby
Lou Berney-November Road
Rumaan Alam-Leave World Behind
Ben Halls-The Quarry
Walker Percy-Lancelot
Raven Leilani-Luster
John Lanchester-Reality & Other Stories
Steve Canagh-Thirteen
Rebecca Wait-Our Fathers

A mixed bag but whether critical faculties numbed by this year most have been pleasure to read and doesnt seem fair to single out the few that irritated.

[laverte]

Is that a particularly obscure set, ale? i recognise no more than about half a dozen of those author names, and the only titles i know are the McMurty and My sister the serial killer, which was a lot of fun as an audiobook. i gobbled it up.

My reading in English took a different tack from usual this year. With the library closed for months and me unable to get to a bookshop, for long stretches i was restricted to the books already on my shelves and to what the library made available as audiobooks. Given what a bugger they all were to box up when we moved house, there was less than i expected in my book collection that i was keen to revisit, but even so i re-read more than usual. And the audio selection led me to consume more contemporary fiction than i have done in a while.

The most entrancing book i read all year was In the dreamhouse by Carmen Maria Machado. Structurally inventive and beautifully composed, it's also unbearably raw at times as the document of an abusive relationship. There's a reason why the acknowledgements come at the end of the book though, and i foolishly read them out of turn. Other books that flirt with autofiction included Valeria Luselli's Lost children archive and Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The discomfort of evening. These are both rather dense and frostily written, and demand the kind of concentration i find it ever more difficult to achieve. The former centres around the story of children crossing the US-Mexican border, but is very much more than that; the latter is a powerful tale of grief and loss on a farming family in the Netherlands, whose utter grimness slowly morphs into poetry, after many many pages of (literal, not metaphorical) shit. i've also just finished The emigrants by WG Sebald. i thought this had extraordinarily poignant moments of melancholy, as the author paints portraits of four men's descent into madness and despair, but there isn't much light to go with the shade and the relentlessness of seeing gloom and decay everywhere began to feel almost comical after a time (it reminded me of the painter from the Fast show who sees nothing but black).

Found in a secondhand bookshop days before the first lockdown, Helene Hanff's Apple of my eye is a curio: a sort of anti-guidebook to New York City in the 1970s which seeks above all to convince the reader that the city isn't as dangerous and dilapidated as it was apparently made out to be at the time. The book isn't very interesting except as a timepiece, but it prompted me to revisit my favourite portrait of the city – of any city? – EB White's Here is New York, whose sweltering intensity helped me to forget i was stuck within the same four walls and transported me to a time and place i've never known. i decided to set up camp in my imaginary NYC, re-reading old faves Manhattan transfer and Elizabeth Hardwick's impeccable New York stories, and listening to a deep-voiced dude trying (and i think succeeding) in doing justice to the character with tourettes in Jonathean Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. i finished my stay with a re-read of Jane Jacobs Death and life and a wander around the streets of Manhattan in the company of self-proclaimed Odd woman Vivian Gornick and her walking companions, including her unsurprisingly hard-boiled mother. Gornick has personality and opinions enough for the whole of the island, so it was a fun send-off, and i rattled through her Solitude of the self, in which she draws out new ideas from the writing of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, right afterwards.

Other travel-themed books included Johny Pitts' Afropean and Luke Turner's Out of the woods. The former has an interesting premise, as Pitts tries to fill out his notion of a distinct Black European identity that owes more to Africa and correspondingly less to the Americas. He meets some fascinating people on the way, including an unforgettable street entertainer with a hazy backstory, but i'm not sure i came away from the book any clearer on what it means to think of onself as Afropean. Out of the woods, by a writer for the Quietus, attempts to subvert and displace myths of the forest via a narrative of fall-and-redemption linked to Turner's personal life and bisexuality. The man who lives in the forest is one of the most beguiling characters i've come across in travel writing, but the story cleans up after itself a little too efficiently for my taste.

i must have wanted to get far away when choosing old novels to re-read. i think i started with Quartet, the last of Jean Rhys's interwar novels that i hadn't gone back to. i can see the wrinkles in the story more clearly now, and the determination not to allow anything positive to happen to her sort-of-heroine in case it might open her/Rhys up to the idea that the cards are not simply stacked against her. But i can't lie, her melancholy is gorgeous enough to wallow in. The orchid house by Phyllis Shand Allfrey was my attempt to balance out Rhys's rather fantastical vision of colonial lives. The story of three white sisters returning to their father's plantation as Dominica embarks on political change, it's narrated by the girls' brilliantly realised, compromised, fearful nanny. The plot gets a bit silly but the setting is so alive. Closer to home, i revisited i beati anni del castigo (Sweet days of discipline) by Fleur Jaeggy, a sparsely written tale of girls in a Swiss convent bursting with violence, pain and boredom. Exactly how i remember it! There's a similarly claustrophobic and unhealthy dynamic between Mary Gaitskill's Two girls, fat and thin, and within the crumbling family of Elena Ferrante's Days of abandonment, both of which i read for the first time, not in any way influenced by the fact that i was spending more time with Nou than ever before. i just finished listening to a historical novel set in rural 19th-century Ireland, The wonder by Emma Donoghue, which offers some nice twists against a truly grim backdrop. And i'd like to put in a plug for my friend Hanna Jameson's gripping apocalyptic bestseller The last, whose surprise finale puzzles me to this day!

[laverte]

As for non-fiction, much of what i read may be a bit niche, but i'll list some titles here beacuse when i discuss certain topics on here i'd like to show where i have picked up many of my ideas. i binged a lot of Angela McRobbie's cultural studies work while she had covid and i was worried we'd lose her: her most recent book The aftermath of feminism is a great summary of where we are now. Leslie Kern's Feminist city and especially Levine and Meiners' The feminist and the sex offender were on subjects i'm eager to read about, but both disappointed: the former promised to imagine what a city designed for women would look like but was sadly unambitious and too inspired by her travails as a young mum trying to negotiate all the obvious obstacles; the latter, an attempt to devise an anti-carceral feminist agenda, tries too hard to be provocative and ends up gliding over the big questions, so that i came out of it rather despondent at the prospects for such an agenda. Also disappointing was Kendi X Ibram's How to be an antiracist, which has the great idea of following the author's journey from internalised racism through a kind of stereotype-compliant black exceptionalism to the great goal of antiracism. His contention that non-racism and anti-racism are distinct positions is intriguing, but this book is aimed at younger folk than me and it sweeps along its trajectory with so much velocity that there's virtually no time to stop and think.

Even so, it's nowhere near as irritating as Rule Britannia, a post-Brexit book by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, both of whom i usually like and trust. Nothing annoys me more than using a couple of data sets to construct an immutable trend, and this book is full of such horrors. Anyway, i didn't really want to read about Brexit in 2020.

Finally, i consumed pleasant but unrevealing auto/biographies of Tove Jansson and the academic Stuart Hall, a much less cosy reflection on the lives of two social scientists in Ann Oakley's Father and daughter on the subject of personal and intellectual disagreements with her dad Richard Titmuss, and Svetlana Alexievich's fascinating collection of Last witnesses. i've already mentioned on here the philosopher Kate Manne's Down girl, which succeeds in its bid to define sexism and misogyny more exactly using persuasive examples like Trump and some incels. And i dipped in and out of narrative histories that were kicking around the house, the most readable of which was Ian Ousby's vivid but now 20-year-old and somewhat dated depiction of the Occupation of France from 1940-44. It's odd how much of the best written 20th century French history is in English. Maybe it's assumed that French people have their own memories of those years.

[ursus arctos]

It's odd how much of the best written 20th century French history is in English. Maybe it's assumed that French people have their own memories of those years.

From a USian perspective, we are settling a debt with Tocqueville

Closer to our own time, Paxton always said that people were willing to tell him things that they felt they couldn't share with their countrymen and that he was willing to write things that a native felt s/he could not. Much of that is grounded in the specific circumstances of the war, the resistance mythology that almost pre-dated the actual resistance and the grim reality of post-liberation reprisals, but there is also more than a kernel of general application.

[Jon]

It's odd how much of the best written 20th century French history is in English. Maybe it's assumed that French people have their own memories of those years.

It's the same with 20th century Spanish history.

[Etienne]

I think there are obvious reasons why domestic historians in any country may be weaker on more contemporary history. It's a lot more difficult to be dispassionate when what you are arguing strongly interacts with your current politics. Easier when it's someone else's country. When you think about French books on their 20th Century history, the one that springs first to my mind as a classic is Strange Defeat, but that is better as a work of rhetoric than as history (and Bloch was a great historian). If you mean best written in terms of quality of prose then my French was never good enough to compare.

Another reason why French history in English tends to be very good is that it's a very tempting field of study for British and American scholars. The glamour of studying in Paris - and the practicality of working there with a very centralised archive and library system. The relative familiarity of the language - (by contrast if you want to study Polish history in English you're not exactly stuck with Norman Davies, but he looms large). The lack of any political obstacles to studying there (compare to Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia pre 1989, or Spain pre 1976). So the larger cohort of Anglophone writers on French history increases the likelihood of them turning out excellent work. Paxton's reasoning (and he's a true giant of French history) probably is another factor, but I'd have thought less so outside of the 1933-1945 period.

[ursus arctos]

That's a very fine post
You are certainly right about the relative advantages of studying French history, but the issue of particularly problematic periods isn't limited to 33-45. Similar dynamics have been at work with the Dreyfus Affair (in all of its manifestations) and Algeria, Indochina and the colonial project in general (to just name two prominent examples).

[ale]

[QUOTE=laverte;n2393942]Is that a particularly obscure set, ale? i recognise no more than about half a dozen of those author names, and the only titles i know are the McMurty and My sister the serial killer, which was a lot of fun as an audiobook. i gobbled it up.

Far from it laverte. In fact always appreciate when see other posters lists as mine always seem more mainstream & commercial than most rather than obscure. In defence Tana French has now built up a catalogue that would recommend highly. As to a lesser extent has Belinda Bauer. Raven Leilana & Rumaan Alam books have been highly regarded as has Sean O Hagan. Know you mean well & hope my response doesnt seem combative. Have since added couple more:

Irvine Welsh-Dead Mens Trousers
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyay-Friday Black

Non-Fiction reads mostly history & biography:

Lonely Boy-Steve Jones
Only Plane In Sky-GarrettM Graff
On Chapel Sands-Laura Cumming
One Two Three Four-Craig Brown
And In The End-Ken McNab
Lowborn-Kerry Hudson
Special One-Diego Torres
Barcelona Legacy-Jonathan Wilson
Drive Thru Dreams-Adam Chandler
Searing Light Sun & Everything-Jon Savage
Let It Bleed-Ethan A Russell
Altamont-Joel Selvin
Last Night On Titanic-Veronica Hinke
Farther Corner-Harry Pearson
100 Hip Albums-Ian Moss
Bald Facts-David Armstrong
Goodfellas-Craig Bellamy
Grand Improviation-Derek Leebaert
Fall Of Red Wall-Steve rayson
Footballer Who Could Fly-Duncan Hamilton
1946 Making Of Modern World-Victor Serest
What You Think About Football Is Wrong-Kevin Moore
Sex Pistols Inside Story-Fred & Judy Vermorel
Glam Rock-Simon Philo
Darksome Bounds Of A Falling World-Gareth Russell
Metal Box-Phil Strongarm
Proud Tower-Barbara W Tuchman
Dont Hold My Head Down-Lucy-Anne Holmes

[Nefertiti2]

Larry McMurtry is fantastic. Would strongly recommend Lonesome Dove and also the astonishing essay Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen an amazing reflection on reading, writing and stories.

I was once stopped in a bar in Austin by someone who saw me with Lonesome Dove who said "I envy you reading that for the first time"

Have also coincidentally been reading Marc Bloch on the HIstorian's Craft. Definitely recommend and will move on to Strange Defeat next.

[ursus arctos]

McMurtry has at least two books of Texas essays that are outstanding

The range of his career is breathtaking

[Sam]

As promised above, here are the fiction books I've read during 2020 (where 'read' means 'finished'; I started the first one in 2019).

Rachel Ingalls – Mrs Caliban and Other Stories
Marlon James – Black Leopard Red Wolf
Maggie O'Farrell – Hamnet
Natalie Haynes – A Thousand Ships
Neil Gaiman – Stardust
Candice Carty-Williams – Queenie
Sunny Singh – Hotel Arcadia
Tayari Jones – Silver Sparrow
Naima Coster – Halsey Street
Henry James – The Turn of the Screw
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Daniel Tunnard – Escapes
Ingrid Persaud – Love After Love

I make that nine contemporary titles (published in the last few years), and only three Straight White Blokes (Gaiman, Conan Doyle, Tunnard). Ingalls and O'Farrell are the ones which will stay with me the longest, but James and Haynes were also really top notch.

[laverte]

Returning to the soapbox i was on upthread, i present this segment of a white man's review of a white man's novel in the Guardian today:

In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be: unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash of political ideologies; intellectually capable of encompassing such scope; artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama; and all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken from all points on the compass of the human character.

i have plenty of time for Mario Vargas Llosa, i found Feast of the goat absolutely captivating, and even his wordy later stuff is not without interest for the dedicated. But the idea that Great Novels need or ought to do what his do is bollocks. In fact, it leads to a lot of grandiose writing being passed off as important simply because it has been composed by white men in epic mode.

And i would add that the capacity to represent "all points on the compass of the human character" is one that's still almost exclusively considered the preserve of neutral-yet-omniscient white men. The limits of it have been flagged up repeatedly for half a century at least. Most of the characters in MVL's fiction are men. Isn't the compass a bit wonky when one half contains a lot more points than the other?

[Discordant Resonance]

As you say, Vargas Llosa's works certainly bear repeated reading, and in terms of sheer literary consistency, his only rival is García Marquez, but the man himself has long become a political reactionary, particularly when it comes to his opinions on Spanish current affairs. An article he published a few years ago now celebrated the Hispanidad for linking Latin America with the civilisations of Greece and Rome, the Golden Age of Spain, and the Renaissance, saying that while atrocities were committed, the colonial regimes were less brutal than the Aztecs or Mayans, so in light of such views, his attitudes towards female characterisation is perhaps unsurprising.

[Sam]

Made a mental note a couple of weeks ago to unearth this thread once my 2021 reading was done and do another diversity tally of the authors I read during the year. I briefly considered starting a new thread for it, but thought that continuing to do it here would annoy John Banville more in the unlikely event he ever stumbles across our little corner of the internet, so here it is.

During 2021 I finished 30 books: 22 fiction and eight non-fiction.

Oreo by Fran Ross
Six Stories by Matt Wesolowski
Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Natives by Akala
LOTE by Shola von Reinholdt
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Through the Leopard's Gaze by Njambi McGrath (I've counted this as fiction, though I think it might be quite heavily based on the author's life)
Jazz by Toni Morrison
Inferno by Catherine Cho
Thunderstruck and Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Sea People by Christina Thompson
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier
Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Sway by Pragya Agarwal
The King of Pirates by Daniel Defoe (counted as fiction)
The Quiet Fan by Ian Plenderleith
The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett
Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie
Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley
The New Age of Empire by Kehinde Andrews
Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris
Princess Bari by Sok-yong Hwang (translated by Sara Kim Russell)
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

Six white blokes (two of whom are in 'the canon') and nine white women, meaning a nice even split of 15 white and 15 non-white authors. Of the latter I count ten women, four men and one non-binary person (von Reinholdt). That a list of my favourite reads of the year would lean heavily on books authored by women of colour isn't a surprise, looking at those numbers – Oreo, Girl, Woman, Other, Through the Leopard's Gaze and Sway (which I think was my favourite non-fiction read of the year, although with close competition from Lands of Lost Borders) have all stayed with me, while The Mermaid of Black Conch and the magnificent In The Dream House are probably pretty much tied with Piranesi for the reads that will stay with me the longest. And I'll need to reread Nudibranch at some point, and try to read more of it during the day, because reading it at night got it tied up with my dreams in some really odd ways. It's a hell of a book.

My current reading is The Dawn of Everything by white bloke David Wengrow and Jewish bloke David Graeber (who as a Jew from New York probably counts as white too, for the purposes of my 2022 diversity list), but after that I've already got a good backlog / to-read list of stuff by non-white authors, and that's without even counting the new Marlon James book, which is due out in March. Here's to another year of annoying John Banville.

[ale]

I managed 51 fiction & 26 non-fiction. Which having totalled up for first time surprised me at such low level. Was running at over 2 books per week when retirement & pandemic first bit. But in truth is reflection of options now available-pubs open,games at SJP,socialising with family and friends

Irvine Welsh-Dead Mens Trousers
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah-Friday Black
Gabriel Krauze-Who They Was
Charlotte McGonaghy-Migrations
Lisa Taddeo-Three Woman
Michael Blumlein-Brains Of Rats
Pete Dexter-Train
Richard Ford-Sorry For Your Trouble
Jamie Mason-Hidden Things
Sarah Moss-Summerwater
Emily St John Mandel-Glass Hotel
Angie Annetts-Nudey Beach
James Scudamore-Wreaking
Leigh Bardugo-Ninth House
Inga Vespen-Long Afternoon
Nick Hornby-Just Like you
Eley Williams-Liars Dictionary
Abigail Dean-Girl A
John Hart-Unwilling
Mark Watts-Contacts
Donal Ryan-Strange Flowers
Matthew Thomas-We Are Not Ourselves
Camilla Sten-Lost Village
Jane Harper-Survivors
Jeffrey Ford-Shadow Year
David F Ross-Theres Only One Danny Garvey
Will Carver-Hinton Hollow Death trap
Catriona Ward-Last House On Needless St
C J Tudor-Other People
Thomas Mallon-Watergate
David Park-Travelling In A Strange Land
Lauren Oyler-Fake Accounts
Jack Townsend-Tales From Gas Station Vol 1
Saleema Nawaz-Songs For End Of World
Gwendoline Riley-Cold Water
Mary Lawson-Town Called Solace
Keith Ridgway-Shock
Stephen King-Billy Summers
Richard Chizmar-Chasinng Boogeyman
Jonathan Lee-Great Mistake
Patrick McGuinness-Throw Me To Wolves
Emma Cline-Girls
Clay McLeod Chapman-Whisper Down Lane
Catherine Ryan Howard-56 Days
Julian Barnes-Lemon Table
Chuck wendig:Book Of Accidents
Fiona Mozley-Hot Stew
Colston Whitehead-Harlem Shuffle
Vera Kurlan-Never saw Me Coming
Don deLillo-Silence
Anthony Quinn-London Calling
David Stuart Maclean-How I Learned To Hate In Ohio
Alex Chulman-Survivors


Phil Strongman-Metal Box Stories From John Lydons PiL
Barbara W Tuchman-Proud Tower:Portrait Of World Before War 1890-1914
Lucy Anne Holmes-Dont Hold My Dead Down:In Search Of Some brilliant Fucking
Will Hermics-Love Goes To Building On Fire:Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever
Clinton Heylin-Its One For The Money:Song Snatchers Who Carved Up A Century Of Pop & Sparked A Musical Revolution
Brett Anderson-Coal Black Mornings
J D Vance-Hillbilly Elegy
Tony Fletcher-A Light That Never Goes Out:Enduring Saga Of Smiths
Brett Anderson-Afternoons With Blinds Drawn
Deborah Mattinson-Beyond Red Wall:Why Labour Lost How Conservatives Won & What Will Happen Next
Madness-Before We Was We:Making Of Madness
Martin Pugh-Hurrah For Blackshirts
Daniel Storey-Gazza In Italy
John Preston-Very English Scandal
Daniel Todman-Britains War:Into Battle 1937-1941
Ronald Brownstein-Rock Me On Water:1974 Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies Music Television & Politics
Monica Black-A Demon Hunted Land:Witches Wonder Doctors & Ghosts Of Past in Post WW11 Germany
Michael Wolff-Landslide:Final Days Of Trump Presidency
Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes-Lucky:How Biden Barely Won Presidency
Robert Twigger-Walking Great North Line:From Stonehenge To Lindisfarne To Discover The Secrets Of our Ancient Past
Michael C Bender-Frankly We Did win This Election:Inside Story Of How Trump Lost
Richard J Evans-Hitler Conspiracies:Third Reich & Paranoid Imagination
Daniel Gray-Saturday 3 PM: Eternal Delights Of Modern Football
Alex Renton-Stiff Upper Lip:Secrets Crimes & Schooling Of A Ruling Class
Juliet Nicolson-Frostquake:Frozen Winter Of 1962 & How Britain Emerged A Different Country
Cosey Fan Tutti-Art Sex Music

[Sam]

John Banville, are you listening, John Banville? Belated annual reading diversity self-check!

In 2022 I finished 17 books (the start and end to the year were both slow, caused by reading a couple of Big Weighty Tomes that took a while to get through. Although the year-end one wasn't really that weighty; I was just sleeping badly and kept dropping off while reading it, so it took me two months to read).

The Dawn of Everything – David Graeber and David Wengrow
The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
Los peligros de fumar en la cama (translated into English as The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, in which translation it was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2021, but I read it in Spanish) – Mariana Enríquez
Beautiful World, Where Are You – Sally Rooney
The Five – Hallie Rubenhold
The Valley of Fear – Arthur Conan Doyle
Night Watch – Terry Pratchett
Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-García
Rotherweird – Andrew Caldecott
Around India in 80 Trains – Monisha Rajesh
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House – Cherie Jones
Shadow City – Taram Khan
One Long Night – Andrea Pitzer
If Cats Disappeared From the World – Genki Kawamura (translated by Eric Selland)
Strangers On a Train – Patricia Highsmith
Death and the Penguin – Andrey Karkov
We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

White men the distinct minority there, even if all but one of the men I read were white. The ones that have stayed with me the most are Mexican Gothic, One Long Night and The Dawn of Everything. Biggest disappointment was Beautful World, Where Are You, which does not make me want to rush out to grab the rest of Rooney's back catalogue.

EDIT: to be clear, 'the year end one' mentioned above was finished on 3 January 2023, so isn't included in this list. I didn't take two months to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I am literate.