My 5 Favourite Reads of 2015

It's been a good year for reading, which isn't always the case, especially to judge by an uninvolving Man booker shortlist this year, though I have bought the Booker winner though that one will be a read for 2016.

I read 33 books this year, including one friend's, one author I started following on Twitter without making the connection to his book that had made it into my TBR pile, 3 works of non-fiction and one large 500 page tome I hope to finish before the year end which had I have completed it in time, might have squeezed into my list here - 
even if it did make the shortlist for bad sex in literature award this year. 2015 was also the year I popped my David Foster Wallace cherry with a collection of his short stories, but it was an unsatisfying experience so as yet I'm no further inclined to tackle "The Infinite Jest".
Anyway, here's my top 5.


5) 

I've had a mixed relationship with the work of Dave Eggers. Sometimes his literary conceits work for me and sometimes they fall miserably flat. This was almost perfect satire from beginning to end. People talked up "Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookshop" which pitted the ancient book against the new online technology. I found that particular tome vapid, the characters uninvolving. For me Eggers was far more convincing in both spheres. I've heard criticism that the main character is two-dimensional and a mere mouthpiece for the points Eggers wants to get across about the menace of surrendering our lives to public scrutiny by putting ourselves body and soul online. But I found her slow grooming into the "Circle's" value system and global takeover ambitions rather nicely plotted and modulated. The Circle (Google/FB) is shown as a corporate cult, all its employees have to subscibe to the living tenets by which to organise their lives. Clever and spot on.

From my Goodreads review - A fiendishly brilliant satire on the way we as a society are a headed. If 1984 drops you right into an oppressive totalitarian regime, Eggers in this book takes you on the incremental journey how we end up there, not through brute force, but through technology. The oppressor is not the government, but a corporation who outflank the government and make it pay obeisance to them and their data and their surveillance; now politicians can be held accountable to their actions through transparency.

4) 

Where to start with this one? Other than to say I revelled in its irreverence. Irreverence towards the notion of story, of language, of everything we comfort ourselves by the notion of a novel. It reminded me of the detonations of language as Ben Marcus' "The Age Of Wire And String". I'll let part of my Goodreads review paint a picture - "This, my bedroom, with the stirrups, and the paneled bleachers stuffed overboard with chunky puppets. The men left encamped inside the father where he burst through all his horse suits like a dickface overall." The key word here, the perhaps lone orienting milepost, is 'stirrups', not in its equine sense, but in a gynecological one. For while I would never proffer the following as the definitive answer to what is the book about, I think this is a book from the fish-eye view of a foetus in the womb, peering out at the carnage and power relationships each time her parents have sex. The book is filled with slits and slots and stoma and a whole myriad of openings for gases, liquids and of course vision to squeeze through. And yes there is the implication of pedophilia too. The whole book reads like an assault, on the senses and the sensibilities, which is why one can never really recommend it, since not every reader is going to be comfortable with it. 

But I'm going to be contrary and recommend it now! For readers with fairly strong stomachs probably. 

3) 

I don't care what people say about Michel Houellebecq the man, but he is a top notch writer and thinker. Curmudgeon at best, misanthrope in the French tradition at worst, he shines a light upon the dreariness of human existence, but he always contextualises it in utterly recognisable ways and his political analysis through the pages is acute and forces the reader to think. No mean feat. This was his best yet, because it was a little less searing in its despair, yet his analysis of religion and race remain trenchant as ever. From my Goodreads review - For all the politics and philosophy and questing for purpose, what it all comes down to is the love of a good woman, or with Houellebecq's jaundiced view, the companionship of a good woman.

2) 

The book that was a long time in the making as apparently after his Booker nominated "C", he embarked on this but dumped it all in the bin and started afresh. I'm just going to reproduce a chunk of my review as it gives the picture of what the book is about and thereby its approach and form - A book about writing the great Pandect, the book about everything, 'to name our era, to sum it up'. Only of course this is an impossible task. The moment you make a decision what to start with, you exclude everything else and already have gone down a very singular, subjective track. The protagonist 'U' (echoes of Kafka's 'K'?) just about gets a title by the book's end. 

As McCarthy warns us early on, if you're in this for a story, you're in the wrong book. This is a montage, the remarkable application of mise en scene to a work of prose. So parachutes elide with jellyfish and oil spills with a metastatising tumour. U struggles to determine what is a genuine association from that which is synchronous or purely arbitrary. 

And why is he charged with this great feat? There are no more Renaissance Men, able to be learned in all branches of knowledge, yet international corporations put all manner of specialists on their payroll to feed into containing and predicting the commercial zeitgeist; U is an anthropologist, throwing ancient rites such as the death of a tribesman to herald the new year practised by the Vanuatuans with the waste landfill of Fresh Kills Staten island. 

1) 
Michel Faber is probably the supreme stylist writing today. His writing seems so effortless, whether a mammoth tome like this, a collection of short stories or a short novel like "The Courage Consort", the words are sheer perfection. This his latest opus, contains so many elements I shouldn't like, a book about quiet religious faith, the strains of a marital couple separated by distance and dwelling among aliens on their home planet. But this story is like a beautiful tapestry knitted together seamlessly that just aches with the humanity of its two main protagonists even while setting up an alien world of real imaginative interest. From my Goodreads review 

As close to a perfect read as I've ever come across.

A story that dissects a husband and wife's love so expertly.

A book that tears back the veil of communication and how double-edged it is and how easy to misinterpret meaning. 

A science fiction world that wears its inventiveness very lightly, yet somehow manages to authentically conjure up a truly alien sensibility. 

A novel about religious faith which I would normally run a million miles from rather than read and enjoy.

Superlative.

The Internet - An Example of Adam Smith's Market In Action

I use Google Blogger. In fact I've used it right now as you are reading this very post on it. Me and millions of others. And then there's those who use WordPress , Tumblr and other platforms. 156 million publicly viewable blogs in 2011.

There's a court case in the UK, a man is suing for being libelled on a blog. One of the parties he is trying to sue is Google, for providing the blog tool in which he claimed to have been libelled. The argument runs that as soon as the potential libel had been reported, Google should have taken the offending blog down. Google's case is that it is not a publisher, therefore it has no causative association with the libel. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me these two arguments do not quite address the other head on, because they are battling over words and definitions; a publisher can be included in a libel claim. A company that is not deemed a publisher cannot. If Google is providing a universal software, is it actually a publisher or a facilitator?

Leaving these finer points of legal definition behind, the thought struck me that in washing their hands of any responsibility, yet providing a worldwide platform for anyone who wants to give their thoughts to the world, Google is approaching the status of the market as outlined by the Eighteenth Century economist Adam Smith.

Smith posited that buyers and sellers each trying to maximise their own gains through trade, creates a market that maximises benefit for all society. His famous quote is that such a market functions "as if by the operation of an invisible hand". That is the intricacies of the myriad of interactions are beyond the analytical conception of any one individual; quite simply, the picture is too big to see.

There are many criticisms of this concept, from the fact that it is clearly a metaphor and that is no literal guiding hand of the market, through to its complete amorality that takes no account of things like social costs, both physical and human. What it suggests to me is that economics is a bogus academic discipline and with guiding concepts such as the invisible (unknowable) hand, is it any surprise that economists and bankers in particular are about as effective as long-term weather forecasters?

But returning to the Google case, their defence seems to me to be akin to the Invisible Hand of the free market. Google seem to be saying they help service the online market by providing platforms, but are powerless to control what is transacted online between bloggers and blog readers. I'm not sure what I think of their argument, but instinctively I am suspicious of the Invisible Hand because it allows its adherents to throw their arms up their arms in helplessness and deny any culpability. Google is saying it isn't an individual and only individuals make potentially libellous statements. But then equally corporations cannot claim to have been libelled and had their feelings hurt when they are accused of various things, because only individuals can have their feelings hurt, not corporations. What corporations mean is they have their brand image damaged. They can't claim to be an individual or a corporation depending on which suits them.

Killing Time - Friday Flash

Clockwatching for elevenses. The second hand and I have been fellow travellers along the orbital face for some considerable time already this morning. For all its steady lick, the spindly red needle seems to be taking an age to haul the thicker armature of the minute hand around to the witching hour, tea minus five. A burden that keeps slipping off its back and it has to go all the way round to pick it back up again. Watched kettles never boil and all that.

So on the run-in, I am down to a snail’s pace. The swiftness of a tortoise. Atlases both, with the weight of their own world upon their broad shoulders. The Native American myth - Iroquois is it-? Yes here we are (‘verification needed’) - of the giant turtle that catches the mother-angel inadvertently somersaulting from heaven, who then proceeds to sow the whole world on the creature’s back. Hosannas all round now, for the weird and wonderful parabolas of the Information Superhighway, which saves me from going totally round the bend.

For here’s me stuck in my office, sowing nothing, coaxing naught into life, other than the beady eye of a blinking cursor. Management’s vulturous iris, scanning me for inactivity. Holding my fibre optic nerve, now my mouse tumbles that circling vultures on the thermal gyre are called a kettle. I’ve milked that excuse for leaving my workstation once already this morning. Double creamed by returning to wash my mug at the sink.

Next I unearth the truffle, that the collective noun is a ‘venue’ of vultures. If only I had one such to be at for an appointed time. Whisking me out of here, so that I might further dawdle in meandering my way to the destination. Oh for a bannered headline limned into the diary template. But I am not consequential enough to merit a coloured tag all to myself. Bereft of any meeting for my line manager to sign off on my behalf. For their name to give me body.

However, though unappointed, I do in fact have someplace where I can go alright. But nothing so lofty as to deem it a venue. A bolthole just about captures the nub of it. The only question, is it yet time? The answer is posted up high on the wall above the facsimile machine. It just hasn’t transmitted itself satisfactorily to me as yet. It appears to have prolapsed.

Who’s to say that the wall clock is accurate? My desktop icon insistently begs to differ by a full four minutes. No matter how often I reset the confounded thing, back it jumps to its own silicon mediated timekeeping. Could always page the speaking clock- does that even still exist in this digital age?- but all our calls are monitored, so how incriminating might that look? I would be court-martialled and make no mistake. Padded shoulders lopped off with a letter opener. Probably my boss’s faux-jewel, imitation curved dagger brought back from an ersatz Turkish bazaar, as part of an authentic ‘taste of the Orient’ excursion. Not that I sport padded shoulders of course. I’m not one for power dressing capaciously enough to light up the national grid. Unlike some I could mention around here.

Wouldn’t surprise me if the higher-ups employed someone just to sit and stare at the server, auditing what websites we visit. I bet all our virtual preferences, are laid bare in our actual personnel files. Still, I’ve nothing to hide on that score. News, current events, isn’t that what we represent here anyway? I’m just checking up on the real life movements of some of our stilted inmates. Sorry, exhibits. Shame it forms no part of the remit of the Waxwork Museum's bought ledger team.

Don’t suppose there’s much in the way of clockwatching from any of my team-mates. (From my crossword fiend days on the London Underground, ‘team’ and ‘mate’ are anagrams of one another, but there again so are ‘tame’ and ‘meat’). Too busy adorning their eager-beaver time sheets. Constructing their baroque dams to prevent the walls of commerce from falling in. If any of them are chancing to peek at the internet, it’s probably to scout for bargain holidays in order to use up their allowance. Only as a point of principle mind. An entitlement is an entitlement after all. Something you perceive you’re owed. Certainly it’s not because travel broadens their minds. Ergo cheap, quickly tarnished letter openers. They’ll likely spend their whole time abroad, scavenging for gobbets of gossip on our more significant movers and shakers, bolted down on their plinths beneath us in the galleries. Reading the English papers from abroad to sustain them. Clodhopping carbon footprints just to stand culturally still in place.

I could always just chance it. And what if I’m caught in the act, could I in all conscience defend my corner? For instance, attribute it on the lack of synchronicity within office chronometry (see, not such a tight ship as they like to imagine). Or maybe point the finger at parallax. That, from where I’m sitting, to my eyes it certainly appeared to be eleven. Hmm, the colonnade sharpness of Roman numerals rather than curvy Arabic ones probably rebuffs that ploy. Or even pin it on the irregular spin of the earth on its axis (verification needed). It is only a meantime we proceed from after all.

My gluteus-oh-so-maximus, decompresses the air bag of my bottom back into my seat. Meantime. A time of miserly intent. Time swiped back from the credit card of life. At usurious interest. Hold all my calls. Not that I ever receive any I might honestly welcome. Only wearying demands for someone else’s money, which just happens to pass through my hands. I am dirtied by the lucre and smeared by those soliciting me for it. We were only following purchase orders... Time for a serpentine cleansing. I run my eye over the path of least supervision through the office and mobilise my facial musculature to blazon ‘unabashed’. Then dash it all, if the padding of my chair doesn’t go and clarion a great sough, when released from the burden of cupping my volume. And my mouse goes for a burton too, its cable all snarled around one of the chair’s armatured wheels. The best laid plans of mice and... Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

The clock didn't chime, but my Boss' voice did...