2023: Favourite Reads - there were more than I realised

 

On looking through my reading journals for this year I was surprised to find that I’d read fifty-two books (that includes some audio books on BBC Sounds and Spotify.) I was equally surprised to see how much non-fiction I’d read. So here, in no particular order, are the books I loved the best in 2023.

Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries

I remember when I heard of the death of Alan Rickman. I was crossing the road outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, and I couldn’t stop myself crying out ‘oh no!’  Nowadays we are accustomed to seeing people talking into the ether, but in 2016 far fewer people had ear buds. No matter; Alan Rickman was more than worthy of my cry. One of our greatest actors, gone at the age of just 69. What a terrible waste.

The star of films as diverse as Die Hard and Harry Potter, Rickman was a complicated character. Coming from an Acton council estate, he clearly loved having success, lots of celebrity friends (he was an inveterate name-dropper and knew everyone from Ruby Wax – one of his closest friends – to Juliet Stevenson, Emma Thompson, Bruce Willis, Ian McKellan, and hundreds more) and money – he was a great spender and had a London flat, a house in Italy and an apartment in New York City.

Rickman was always out socialising (‘I probably own half of The Ivy by now’), but very critical of both his own and other people’s work. He loathed most directors, all reviewers and quite a few actors. He was impatient, volatile, morose and self-indulgent but also witty, charming, kind, interesting, and extremely generous with his time and his money. He met his partner Rima at the age of 15; they were still together when he died. These diaries begin in 1993 and end shortly before his death.  Rickman comes across as fundamentally a very good person. I loved this book.


One Body by Catherine Simpson

Author Catherine Simpson’s memoir of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment is about so much more than this one thing. Through the lens of her own life she looks at how women are conditioned from childhood to be ashamed of their bodies, to try constantly to shape and control them to please others (usually men.) She recalls years of dieting, push up bras, girdles, high heeled shoes, make up, leg shaving…  When her own body lets her down, she feels ashamed and guilty – she ‘mustn’t be a nuisance’, she ‘must Be Positive.’

Slowly, Simpson dismantles all of these strictures, while at the same time providing a brutally honest account of life with cancer – the side effects of treatment, the psychological impact of illness, and the acceptance she eventually reaches (she has now been in remission for some time.)

A brilliant, raw, perceptive and illuminating memoir.

Forever by Judy Blume 

I imagine that every American teenager has read this book, but I only discovered it this year, after reading and very much enjoying Are You There God? This Is Me, Margaret, in 2022.

When it was published – almost 50 years ago – Forever was highly controversial because it depicts a sexual relationship between teenagers. Now I think the more interesting thing about it is the way in which Katherine rather than Michael ultimately emerges as the stronger character.

Here is my review: 

https://sconesandchaiseslongues.blogspot.com/2023/07/20-books-of-summer-2023-forever-by-judy.html

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

This is a collection of Olivia Laing’s writings on artists and authors, ideas and experiences. She discusses people as diverse as Hilary Mantel, Derek Jarman, Freddie Mercury, Sarah Lucas, Ali Smith and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She looks at immigration detention centres, (consensual) mouth sewing, AIDS, Grenfell Tower, Queer Art, alcoholic female writers, portraiture, conceptual art, fan art, and much more.

Laing is a perceptive and well informed writer. She does occasionally indulge in a little more name-dropping than I feel necessary – we don’t really need to know that X is her cousin, or that she ‘knows Y very well’ – but minor quibbles aside, this is a fascinating and valuable book.

Holding by Graham Norton 

Holding is Graham Norton’s first crime novel – which he cheerfully admits he only got published by refusing to write the memoir his publishers wanted unless they published this too.

The plot (a skeleton is found when a farm is excavated for building work) isn’t very challenging, but the characterisation is excellent, and – unsurprisingly given Norton’s own background – the observations of life and conversation is small town Ireland are absolutely spot on.

The local sergeant in particular is a wonderful creation, as is the city detective sent down from Cork. Norton also handles a very sad episode in one character’s life with great sensitivity, and addresses the way in which people who can’t move on risk wasting their lives. This is in contrast to the sergeant himself, and to Brid, another of the characters who has suffered past wrongs, both of whom eventually turn their lives around in realistic and convincing ways.

Norton is one of my favourite TV hosts. With Holding he shows that he’s a man of even more talents.

Darling by India Knight

In 1945 Hamish Hamilton published Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love – a story largely based on Mitford’s own upbringing in an eccentric upper class family, and her love affair with a Free French officer, Gaston Palewski. The Pursuit of Love is fascinating, funny, and occasionally tragic. It was an instant hit, selling 200,000 copies in its first year.

Now, almost 80 years later, India Knight has written an updated version of this classic story. I must admit that I wondered if she – or indeed anyone – could pull this off. I needn’t have worried, Knight has done an excellent job. I loved Darling and raced through it in a couple of days. Here is my review:

https://sconesandchaiseslongues.blogspot.com/2023/11/review-darling-by-india-knight.html

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Maria, a trans woman, lives in New York with Steph, a lesbian. The couple splits up, Maria takes Steph’s car (without her consent) and sets off on a road trip to Nevada.

Here she comes across James, a young stoner living a dead-end life in a grim community. She unilaterally decides that James is a suppressed trans woman and tries to help him recognise this. Ultimately James rejects Maria’s help.

That’s the basic plot, but there is so much more to this book. Maria is neither loud, sorted nor confident; transitioning was essential for her but has not solved all of her other problems – and this is one of the points Binnie is making; trans or not, everyone still has issues.

Nevada taught me a great deal about trans life (in particular the way in which trans people who have not yet transitioned feel disassociation), life in New York City, and life for Maria’s generation whatever their gender. The New York abbreviations and slang, and indeed the trans-specific vocabulary, took me a little while to understand, but the book is easy to read and includes some very funny scenes too.

Verdict of Twelve by Raymond Postgate

I most often struggle with the British Library Crime Classics; I am seduced by the beautiful cover art only to be bored and disappointed by the actual stories, which seem so often to revolve around train timetables or some other precise and finicky detail, and to have little in the way of character development.

Verdict of Twelve is different. It focuses on the jury at the trial of a woman accused of the fatal poisoning of her nephew. Postgate examines the character and background of some of the jurors, and shows just how impossible it is for any of them to approach the evidence with true impartiality. He also looks at the accused’s household staff, especially the cook and gardener. Are they really ‘good Old Retainers’? Does this trope exist in real life?

Postgate constantly challenges our preconceptions.

Here is my review:

https://sconesandchaiseslongues.blogspot.com/2023/04/for-1940club-verdict-of-twelve-by.html



Apricots on the Nile by Colette Roussant

Roussant is the child of a French Catholic mother and an Egyptian Jewish father. Her mother was a socialite who was not much interested in parenting, so Colette spent much of her childhood at the wealthy and opulent home of her paternal grandparents in Cairo. Here she gleaned a great deal of information about food, both from her grandmother and their Syrian chef.

Apricots on the Nile captures a moment in time.

My review is here:

https://sconesandchaiseslongues.blogspot.com/2023/06/20-books-of-summer-apricots-on-nile.html

What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close 

I was sent a review copy of this book, which will be published by Saraband in February 2024.

Liz is an ambitious police officer in 1980s Leeds, but she’s held back by the rampant sexism in the force, and also by her working class background.

When she leaves her violent boyfriend and moves into a radical women’s collective, she is torn between her job as an upholder of law and order, and the collective’s determination to usurp the patriarchy. When Rowena, an upper class, opinionated, radical man-hater, arrives at the collective, the women are unaware that she’s a known agitator under MI5 surveillance. Rowena is determined to push the women into extremism, while carefully avoiding any exposure herself. MI5 want Liz to pass them information about Rowena.

Meanwhile the murders continue. The police are getting nowhere.

I recently watched the excellent drama series The Long Shadow, which is set in the same time period and focuses on Peter Sutcliffe’s victims, and on the inept and often disastrous police operation to catch him. Both What Doesn’t Kill Us and The Long Shadow took me back to those terrible times, to the overt sexism and racism, and the appalling attitudes to sex workers (‘they were asking for it’); all of these hampered the police investigation – preconceptions and prejudice led the police to ignore evidence and to follow blind alleys. (In the end Sutcliffe was caught by a routine police tyre check on his vehicle. Prior to this he had been interviewed and passed over nine times.)

What Doesn’t Kill Us also highlights the problems in the women’s movement in the 70s/80s (I was a student at the time. Spare Rib was in its heyday), and the issues that arise with radical politics in general when they start to disconnect with people’s real lives.

This book is a gem of a page-turner – the story is fast paced and gripping, and whilst Ajay Close also addresses important issues, she always does so subtly, within the confines of the plot, never veering into history lesson territory. Excellent.

 

Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor 

I only read this book because one of my daughters recommended it. I’m so glad she did, as it was one of the best works of fiction I read in 2023. Entertaining, informative, funny, sad, unlike anything I’d read before - and with great playlists -, Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl has stayed with me all year.

My review is here:

https://sconesandchaiseslongues.blogspot.com/2023/04/paul-takes-form-of-mortal-girl-by.html

East of Croydon by Sue Perkins

Sue Perkins is probably best known as one of the presenters of The Great British Bake Off (which she left in 2016), but she’s actually been a stand up comedian, performer and radio and TV presenter since her undergraduate days at Cambridge in the early 1990s.

In 2014 Perkins was asked to make a TV travel documentary in which she would follow the Mekong River from its source to the sea. She hates travel, discomfort, lack of hygiene, strange food, lack of privacy – so she decided to look them all in the face and accept the offer. East of Croydon is her account of the trip.

Perkins writes very well about the places she sees and the people she visits. This is no coffee table book – she holds nothing back about the reality of the river dwellers’ lives; they are not, she says,  ‘poor but happy’ and would all rather be Westerners. She is brutally honest about the effects that climate change and pollution are having on what is an already precarious existence.

She’s similarly honest about her own fears and failings, her inability to control her fury and despair at what she sees, and the commitment phobia that blights her personal life. She writes movingly about her own family back in Cornwall, especially the death of her beloved father.

Perkins has since made seven more travel documentaries, all of them well worth watching. I hope she’s also still writing; we need her razor sharp commentary even more as the world spirals out of control.


The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

1959. Widow Florence Green decides on a whim to open a bookshop in the run down eastern coastal town of Hardborough (presumably Happisburgh.)

She houses the shop in a very old and semi-derelict building, but one that the local lady of the manor, Violet Gamart, still says she has earmarked as an arts centre (she’s had decades to do something about this and hasn’t.)

When Violet is unable to dissuade Florence, she sets out to undermine her. The shop becomes reasonably (but not ridiculously – we are not in chick lit territory here) successful. Violet rachets up the subterfuge.

Like life perhaps, this book has no happy ending, nor even a tragic one. What eventually transpires is presented simply as an example of how life is. Penelope Fitzgerald is such a subtle writer that the reader almost doesn’t realise anything has happened at all. Gradually, however, light dawns.

As ever with Fitzgerald, the minor characters are very well drawn – the patronising bank manager, the resigned lawyer, the Colonel (Violet’s more sympathetic but ultimately weak husband), and especially Christine, the organised and straight talking child who comes to help in the shop.

And life on the East Anglian coast, with its mists and dampness, and the ever increasing erosion of its cliffs, is a physical presence throughout this story.

A vignette of a book, and one that is hard to forget.

I didn't feel that 2023 had been an especially good reading year for me - but looking back I can see there were some wonderful books among the many I found only so-so (or downright awful...I'm looking at you Daisy Jones and The Six.)

Have you read any of these? What did you think?