All the books I read in 2012

Happy New Year! Last year I read 55 books (or more, I think I forgot to note some of them). My resolution for this year is to read at least 45, so I can say I've read 100 in two years. I hope I can read 55 again, but too much more than that and I start to eat into my writing time and that's not something I want to happen. 

Other resolutions include to quit one of my jobs in order to do more writing (already put that one in motion, I leave the book shop on the 20th of January), to finish writing a book, to send it off, to  do more exercise, more gardening, more walking, find more good music to listen to, maybe find time to update this a little more often too. 

Books I read in 2012 plus my own personal award ceremony for the best writers and books I personally read in 2012. 

(those in bold have broken into the 80s. Only the rarest of gems get such high scores. Scoring system based on my old University marking system where getting 90 or more was almost impossible).

1. Twilight Robbery – Francis Hardinge                                       65

2. Apples – Richard Milward                                                       45

3. Love Songs For the Shy and Cynical – Robert Shearman        78

4. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God – Etgar Keret              77

5. Girl on the Fridge – Etgar Keret                                              72

6. It’s Kind of a Funny Story – Ned Vizzini                                  42

7. No One Belongs Here More Than You – Miranda July              69

8. Tiny Deaths – Robert Shearman                                           80

9. Nimrod’s Flipout – Etgar Keret                                               73

10. Dogs 0 (Manga)                                                                   49

11. Naïve. Super – Erland Loe                                                    73

12. The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman                                          75

13. Legend of a Suicide – David Vann                                        70

14. Warm Bodies – Isaac Marion                                                71

15. St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves – K.Russell        69

16. The Safety of Objects – A.M Homes                                     76

17. All My Friends are Superheroes – Andrew Kaufman               75

18. Palo Alto – James Franco                                                    67

19. 1Q84 1&2 – Haruki Murakami                                                78

20. McSweeney’s 30 – Various                                                   73

21. Suddenly a Knock on the Door – Etgar Keret                                    60

22. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake – A. Bender              62

23. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan                              68

24. The Middle Stories – Heti                                                     52

25. Tell Me No Lies – Malorie Blackman                                      39

26. 1Q84 3 – Haruki Murakami                                                  87

27. On Writing – Stephen King                                                   65

28. The Waterproof Bible – Andrew Kaufman                            83

29. The White Cat – Holly Black                                                  66

30. Pastorlia – George Saunders                                                67

31. Red Glove – Holly Black                                                      64

32. Granta 119 – Various                                                            52

33. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Carver    85

34. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned – Wells Tower      89

35. HBWOSG – Dave Eggers                                                     76

36. Lights Out in Wonderland – DBC Pierre                                 71

37. King Arthur – Robin Lister                                                     36

38. Black Heart – Holly Black                                                     55

39. The Crimson Chalice – Victor Canning                                   68

40. The Circle of the Gods – Victor Canning                                58

41. Writing Fiction, Critical & Creative Approaches – Boulter        72

42. The Crystal Cave – Mary Stewart                                           68

43. McSweeney’s 40 – Various                                                   60

44. Civitas to Kingdom – Ken Dark                                             69

45. A Better Angel – Chris Adrian                                             82

46. Assassins Apprentice – Robin Hobb                                     67

47. The Wild Things – Dave Eggers                                            63

48. The Great Night – Chris Adrian                                              58

49. The Bird Room – Chris Killen                                                62

50. The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler                                    74

51. Granta 120 – Various                                                            70

52. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern                                     61

53. Dr Who Apollo 23 – Justin Richards                                      15

54. A Monster Calls – Patrick Ness                                             79

55. AD 500 – Simon Young                                                        45

Best and worst of the books I read in 2012

Best short story collection: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned – Wells Tower

Best novel: Andrew Kaufman’s Waterproof Bible.

Best children’s/ YA book: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness.

Best Non fiction: Civitas to Kingdom by Ken Dark.

My favourite all-round author in 2012: Andrew Kaufman.

Top authors: Andrew Kaufman, Wells Tower, Robert Shearman, Chris Adrian, Murakami, Carver, Chandler.  

Worst book: Dr Who Apollo 23 (I’m not sure if I should even count this one.) I also read half of Kraken by China Mieville and couldn’t finish it.

Short Stories by Etgar Keret and Robert Shearman

I got books for Christmas, mostly things that Adam Marek recommended during the reading he gave in Bridport in November. So far I’ve read Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman, Etgar Keret’s The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, I’m nearly finished The Girl on the Fridge by the same author, and I’ve read Apples by Richard Milward (this one wasn’t a Marek recommendation). What lead me to put Milward on my list was seeing this video of him doing a reading of his latest book. I liked that he transformed his head into a block of flats before doing the reading.

Both Shearman and Keret are amazing writers. I think Shearman is the better of the two; his stories are subtle and pack a lot more punch because I know there’s a lot going on in them.

Many of Keret’s stories are amazing. I think the stories in The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God are generally stronger than those in The Girl on the Fridge. I love Good Intentions, wherein a pro-assassin is hired to kill off the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, “the only good man I’d ever known”, a man who saved the assassin from orphanage beatings in his youth. He can’t do it, despite his 100% success rate in previous jobs. The ending is particularly strong, but I won’t go into it here. Keret’s endings tend to be very open. I think his stories demonstrate how it’s fine to leave everything hanging and unsaid, stories don’t always need a neat bow to round everything off.  

What I really, really like about Keret’s style is that his writing is so minimalist and bare, yet so vivid. The last story in The Bus Driver.. is Kneller’s Happy Campers. This was adapted into a film called Wristcutters, a Love Story. (See trailer below) The story is by far the longest in the book and is divided into twenty-six chapters, each about 300-600 words (his usual story length). The entire thing is forty pages. Any other writer would need five times that to tell this story – it’s enough to fill a feature length film. I think Keret is what I’d call a Conceptual Writer, by which I mean his stories are not really driven by character, plot or beautiful language, they are driven by an idea. The beauty of his prose is in its concise nature. Less is more, and there certainly is less in Keret’s work.

Keret manages to make stories out of anything and everything. Sometimes I’m not sure he succeeds. Perhaps I’ve just missed the point, but I’ve tried hard to delve deeper into some of the weaker ones, and still haven’t managed to figure it out. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy his stories, I like them for being little vignettes. I think what I’m trying to say is that I feel I could write a (weaker) Keret story without breaking into too much sweat, but Shearman is totally beyond me.

Shearman’s work is so multi-faceted. The collection I read were all love stories, yet not a single one could be described as clichéd or soppy. Most of them left me with a raw sadness (in a good way). They are simultaneously uplifting and crushing. In the story Be of Good Cheer, Gillian is allergic to other people’s happiness. “I’d take her to the cinema, making sure that the film was suitably depressing first. But it wasn’t enough to see films about depressing subjects, about heroin addicts or holocaust victims. Good films, no matter how dour, were still curiously uplifting, sent a ripple of unity around the audience that quite made Gillian gnash her teeth in distress.” I think some of Shearman’s stories are like that; though none of them could be described as dour, they’re all too light-hearted in their tone for that.

As for Milward’s Apples, it doesn’t really belong in this discussion because it’s from a different genre. Apples is well written, but I couldn’t connect to the characters, they were all too far from me and my life. I might talk about this in greater depth sometime soon because it did interest me in regards to teen fiction and reluctant readers. More on that later.

More on these authors:

Sample Keret’s work here: http://electricliterature.com/blog/2011/12/21/happy-holidays-from-electric-literature-and-etgar-keret/

and here with a story I read a while ago, before I knew who Keret was:http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/1479/second_chance/

Shearman is best known for writing the Doctor Who episode that re-introduced the Daleks. Here’s a clip from that episode: