2023 Books of the Year
Every year I like to remember and celebrate the books that I’ve enjoyed most. This year, according to the statistics and the increasingly controversial Goodreads, I read 50 books, more than usual for me. I tended to read more widely and loosely this year, more fiction than previously and enjoying it more, though I still struggle a bit with reading books online, unless I’m travelling. Here are my top five books of the year. You can see what else I read and coonnect with me on Goodreads HERE.
1. J. G. Ballard – Empire of the Sun
This highly autobiographical novel came out in 1984 and is based largely on Ballard’s own childhood experiences in Shanghai during World War II. Better known as a dystopian science-fiction writer, no doubt the horrific experiences of a sudden, dramatic utter transformation in status influenced his sf writing.
As he put it: “The memories of Shanghai that I had tried to repress had been knocking at the floorboards under my feet, and had slipped quietly into my fiction.” Those memories included casual violence, and an upheaval in status as his family became Japanese prisoners.
What stuck me most strongly was the lifelong lesson that Ballard took from this experience, on the impermanence of our daily reality. Everything can be uprooted and destroyed.
“One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set,” he once told a journalist. “The comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it … could be dismantled overnight.”
It’s an uncomfortable lesson that resonated with me as violence. and warfare continues to destroy lives.
2. Iain Sinclair – Downriver
This is a strange and wonderful book; one reviewer called it the Greatest Welsh Novel, though it is firmly London, England, and the Thames that are at the centre here.
As the same reviewer wrote:
Downriver is relentlessly peripatetic, taking place almost entirely on foot, on public transport or in public spaces. The novel’s geography gravitates around the area of Hackney, Homerton, Spitalfields and Bow, moving towards the river through Wapping and Shadwell across to Rotherhithe, then following the river East past the Isle of Dogs, Silvertown and Tilbury, out into the estuary and the Isle of Sheppey.
and
As well as psychogeography, Downriver adapts the methods of modernist poetry and conceptual art to the novel. It might be thought of as an ‘open field’ novel. Sinclair’s early poetry works from the 1970s, such as Lud Heat, are composed in the open field style promoted by Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson.
If it sounds complex and difficult that’s because, at times, it is. Sinclair is, at his heart, a poet and the language is baroque, intense, poetic and powerful. I can also strongly recommend some of Sinclair’s other work, particularly London Orbital and Lights Out for the Territory
3. David Marr – ‘Killing for Country’
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This was a harrowing read for me, particularly in the dark shadow of a failed referendum vote in Australia to recognise indigenous Australians in the constitution. As I wrote at the time on GoodReads:
‘If this detailed account of the brutality of white settlement wasn’t grim enough, reading it in the shadow of the recent defeat of a referendum that might have gone a tiny, tentative step towards redress was dark indeed.
This is an account of how vested interests, greed, brutality, ignorance, weasel words and lies were easily able to defeat the small voices of humanity and protest as white settlement spread through Australia in the 19th century, leaving indigenous Australians dispossessed or dead.
It is unrelenting stuff: ‘dispersals’ of Australian natives code for unprovoked attacks and massacres that went on and on wherever there was land to be exploited and indigenous Australians in the way.
The views of the conservative Liberal Senator who campaigned strongly during the referendum against giving a parliamentary voice to indigenous Australians arguing that there are “no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation” look more outlandish and perverse with every page of this book.
As Marr wrote, just prior to the referendum, ‘Polls show hostility is strongest where most blood was shed. Despising those we have wronged is another way we humans have of dealing with our shame’. Queensland, where most of the murderous events described here took place, was the Australian state most strongly against giving indigenous Australians a voice.
This is not a pleasant or easy read. It might have been more effective if the family connections, and the relationship of the author to the anti-hero of this story, were made earlier but it is important nevertheless.
For David Marr, the new knowledge that one of his forebears served in the brutal Native Police demanded reckoning and truth-telling. It is a pity that, on the larger scale, Australia is still not ready for coming to the truth; books like this, hard as they are, can only help progress our understanding.’
4. Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell – ‘Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra 1955-1964’
I blogged about this beautiful book earlier in the year HERE, but since then I’ve been thinking more about the ideas here, and how it has got me thinking again about Charmian Clift, George Johnston and Leonard Cohen, and the bohemian writers and artists who were trying to escape the world in a Greek island that was half paradise and half prison.
5. Sarah Holland-Batt – ‘The Jaguar’
Holland-Batt is an Australian poet and this collection is a powerful new addition to her work, with a focus on her father’s illness and death, with universal significance. As poetry should.
Other books I enjoyed …
Barry Lopez – Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Richard Ford – Be Mine
Anna Funder – Wifedom
Ben Shattuck – Six Walks; in the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
Katharine Smyth: All the Lives We Ever Lived; Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
John Banville – The Singularities
thinking about poetry 