2022: A Year’s Reading

Seven short-term moves in the first five months of the year, including three static caravans, weren’t ideal reading conditions. But finally we moved into our new home in May, and I was reunited with my books, many of which had been in boxes since 2016.

Amid all the upheaval, I found myself tackling trilogies, quartets, and even quintet, that I’d long put off. Doris Lessing’s five-book Children of Violence sequence covered similar ground to her single volume The Golden Notebook. I prefer the latter. Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet was initially hard going, but then I became hooked. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy was everything I hoped it would be, and added a vast imaginative world to the static caravan I was confined to at the time. Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy vividly evoked a world in flux. I zipped through Len Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, and also five of Chester Himes’s Grave Digger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson mysteries – a charity shop bounty.

As a teenager in Gaborone, Botswana, in the early 80s, my visits to the main bookshop were always fraught with the fear of bumping into Bessie Head. She was one of the great writers of the 20th Century, but also a troubled soul, battling alcohol and mental illness. Gillian Stead Eilersen’s biography, Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears, is a sympathetic portrait of a remarkable talent. Off the back of that, I read a couple of Head’s novels, and reread her engaging non-fiction social history of Serowe, the village that became her adopted home after her exile from South Africa. Serowe was also a refuge for Bessie’s friend, Patrick van Rensburg, another campaigner who fled apartheid. Guilty Land was his clarion call for international action. Alfred Hutchinson, a black activist, also fled South Africa, and his classic book, Road to Ghana, is an account of the perils he encountered during an epic journey up through colonial Africa en route to exile in Ghana. AS Mopeli-Paulus writes of an earlier era in The World and the Cattle, which chronicles his childhood as a chief’s son in quasi-independent Basutoland (later fully independent as Lesotho), and his service with the British Army’s ‘Grave Unit’ during WWII, which included having to collect the corpses after El Alamein.

My most fortuitous charity shop find this year was Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys. He was an author barely on my radar, but I soon discovered he was born just four miles from my new home. It’s a massive novel. By happy coincidence, while I was falling under its spell, Matthew Sweet hosted a radio discussion that affirmed that I’m far from the first person to be knocked off kilter by it: BBC Arts & Ideas: John Cowper Powys

As ever, Backlisted podcast had an impact on my reading choices. I especially enjoyed Winifred Holtby’s South Riding and the Joseph Heller-esque Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt.

Throughout my teens, I was intent on an acting career. I got into drama school, but had to wait a year to be old enough to take up the place. I worked in a zoo, which led to a stint as a park ranger in Africa, and then to travel writing. I haven’t acted for 30 years, but the compulsion is still bubbling under. One of the books I enjoyed most this year was Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries, which includes – via Maggie Smith – the definitive description of Miriam Margolyes: “[L]ike a Sherman tank in sequins.” While Russia was gearing up to invade Ukraine, I was reading The Method by Issac Butler. The first chapter, detailing Russian history, contains many striking parallels with current events. Then the book gets down to its main business, describing how the ‘Method’ transformed American acting. With so many classic films now instantly accessible, I was able enhance the reading experience by watching many of the ground-breaking performances described. It’s my book of the year.

The Full List

  1. Suder by Percival Everett
  2. The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad
  3. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn
  4. A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
  5. Greenmantle by John Buchan
  6. The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler
  7. Birth of a Dream Weaver by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
  8. Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
  9. My Life in Dire Straits by John Illsley
  10. The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah
  11. The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier
  12. Transit by Anna Seghers
  13. The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
  14. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
  15. The Four-Gated City by Doris Lessing
  16. Olivia Manning by Deidre David
  17.   Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
  18. Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
  19. South Riding by Winifred Holtby
  20. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
  21. They by Kay Dick
  22. Kontakion For You Departed by Alan Paton
  23. The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
  24. Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
  25. Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park
  26. The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov
  27. Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
  28. All About Me! by Mel Brooks
  29. The Alexandria Quartet 1: Justine by Lawrence Durrell
  30. Double Indemnity by James M Cain
  31. Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger
  32. The Day of the Locust by Nathaneal West
  33. Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi
  34. The Alexandria Quartet 2: Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell
  35. The Alexandria Quartet 3: Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell
  36. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  37. The First Man by Albert Camus
  38. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
  39. Gormenghast 1: Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
  40. If an Egyptian Cannot Speak Engish by Noor Naga
  41. The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight
  42. A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes (R)
  43. Gormenghast 2: Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
  44. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
  45. The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
  46. Gormenghast 3: Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake
  47. All Shot Up by Chester Himes
  48. Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes
  49. The Heat’s On by Chester Himes
  50. Companion Piece by Ali Smith
  51. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
  52. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
  53. Adam Bede by George Eliot
  54. Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane
  55. Border Districts by Gerald Murnane (R)
  56. Cimino by Charles Elton
  57. Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut
  58. Heaven’s Command by Jan Morris
  59. From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe
  60. Balkan Trilogy 1: The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning
  61. The Twilight World by Werner Herzog
  62. Berlin Game by Len Deighton
  63. Balkan Trilogy 2: The Spoilt City by Olivia Manning
  64. Mexico Set by Len Deighton
  65. Balkan Trilogy 3: Friends and Heroes by Olivia Manning
  66. London Match by Len Deighton
  67. Peterley Harvest: The Private Diary of David Peterley by Richard Pennington
  68. Remember, Remember by Winifred Holtby
  69. Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars by Nick Duerden
  70. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour
  71. Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears by Gillian Stead Eilersen
  72. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys
  73. Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
  74. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
  75. The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling
  76. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  77. Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
  78. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
  79. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
  80. Trust by Hernan Diaz
  81. When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head
  82. The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
  83. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
  84. Maru by Bessie Head
  85. Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
  86. The Trees by Percival Everett
  87. Congo: The Epic History of a People by David van Reybrouck
  88. Oh William by Elizabeth Strout
  89. Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
  90. The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton
  91. Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
  92. After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
  93. The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
  94. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
  95. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
  96. Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
  97. Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster
  98. The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
  99. The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk
  100. Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk
  101. Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
  102. The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
  103. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
  104. The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
  105. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
  106. Madly, Deeply: Diaries by Alan Rickman
  107. Autopsy: A Forensic Pathologist in Africa by Ryan Blumenthal
  108. Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
  109. Happening by Annie Ernaux
  110. Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux
  111. A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux
  112. The Last Colony: Britain’s Colonial Legacy by Philippe Sands
  113. Ragtime by EL Doctorow
  114. Liberation Day by George Saunders
  115. Billy Bathgate by EL Doctorow
  116. Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys
  117. Wild: The Life and Times of Peter Beard by Graham Boynton
  118. The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
  119. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (R)
  120. At War with Waugh by WF Deedes
  121. Foster by Claire Keegan
  122. A Season in Sinji by JL Carr
  123. Welcome to Hard Times by EL Doctorow
  124. The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury
  125. Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind by Bessie Head (R)
  126. Guilty Land by Patrick van Rensburg
  127. The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger
  128. Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
  129. Slow Horses by Mick Herron
  130. Dead Lions by Mick Herron
  131. Real Tigers by Mick Herron
  132. Road to Ghana by Alfred Hutchinson
  133. A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley
  134. The World and the Cattle by AS Mopeli-Paulus

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