2022 – Arthur Hofn

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

It’s been a tradition of mine for a long time that at the end of the year I collect together every book I’ve read over the previous twelve months, just to see what they look like. This year I took a photograph!. Every year I think I’ve not read as much as I normally do, but when I see the pile I’ve created I realise it’s generally about the same. This year of course I had two lots of Beck’s Game to read, redraft several times and then edit so I’m quite pleased with what I’d accomplished. I’ve even written some new bits and pieces which may or may not see the light of day at some point. I have plans for next year. Ideas swimming around my head. What happens to them, of course, awaits to be seen.

I do love the clean slate of a new year. This time last year I already owned or had planned to read about half of the books I did get through. The rest I picked up along the way.

In total I read about thirty six books. That’s not a great deal compared to some people, but I’m very pleased with that number. In previous years I’ve done this as two blogs with four books a piece, however I’m noting how fast my Suggested Reads is growing and so to add another eight books in quick succession will being to make the list look unwieldy, I need to do something about that next year. But for this year I’ll write about four books (and it was really hard deciding which four), they ended up being ones that I didn’t already have a mental theme to write about for future blogs.

As for the future we’re fast coming up to a new, empty page, that will fill over the next 365 days. I wonder what books will be in next year’s pile.

The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon. This is one of those books that I’d occasionally come across as a reference to something, generally cited as an inspiration (I’m a Doctor Who fan and it comes up every now and then, but also in other places). I was in the brilliant Chapters in Dublin, and there was a pile of copies on a table. I’d never thought about reading it before but I decided on a whim to give it a go.

This is the story of an American solider from the Korean War who had saved his troop and is highly rewarded in his home country. This is just the beginning because unknown to him, planted deep in his conscience, are commands from an enemy agent who can take control of him whenever they please. As this was written in the 1950s it tapped into the paranoia of the age and as a result was soon turned into a film.

To start off with I struggled a bit. I couldn’t place the order of when events were supposed to be taking place in relation to each other, on top of which it seems like Richard Condon had been playing with his thesaurus. As a couple of examples, in the very first paragraph is the word “osculatorium” and on page 23 of my copy it has a sentence that begins, ‘To the extent that wartime zymurgists imperil the norm….’. However once I got my mind in sync with the writing style I soon started enjoying it immensely.

“The apartment was on the sixteenth floor. It was old-fashioned, which meant that the rooms were large and light-filled, the ceilings high enough to permit a constant circulation of air, and the walls thick enough for a man and his loving wife to have a stimulating argument at the top of their lungs without invading the nervous systems of surrounding neighbors. Raymond had rented the apartment furnished and nothing in the place beyond the books, the records, and the phonograph was his.”

― Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

The Hare With The Amber Eyes – Edmund De Wall. About eight years ago I bought my copy of this book in a second hand bookshop. They were running a “Buy two, get a third free” deal. I had two books I really wanted and only noticed the offer at the till and didn’t have time to properly look for a third so just grabbed this. I had no idea what it was about but it was a book so that was fine by me, I’d find out when I read it. It’s sat in my To Be Read box ever since. This summer I decided the time had come.

I’d thought it was fiction, it is not. In the book the author Edmund De Wall writes of his own family’s history through some really interesting times via the device of a collection of Japanese netsuke (small ornaments). The collection has been passed down the generations and when they ended up with him he decided to trace their journey from when they were first bought by his ancestors to the present.

It didn’t sound great, I thought, as I read the opening pages and learnt of the concept. The book is fairly thick and I realised it’d take me a while to get through, however, like with the Manchurian Candidate, I soon got into the swing of it and it became very interesting. Not only is it his family history, but how they fitted into the bigger canvas of real world events. I’d say it was how the ordinary people fared, but these people are far from ordinary, yet they still represent a corner of history that we don’t often see. My favourite section is the one in Vienna from the turn of the last century to the start of the Second World War. In the book you see, almost from a contemporary viewpoint, Vienna being built and a Upper Class family dealing with the fast changing world and its fast changing opinions. In the end I was pleased I’d bought this, despite the fact I had no idea what I’d got at the time. Well worth a read, especially if you like history.

“This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.”

― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers. During a wonderful spring (my favourite season) I took this book away with me on a trip which feels like it was a very long time ago. This was the first time I’d properly gone away to be by myself in a foreign country since my trip to Albania, it was much needed and I think back on it as a chance to clear the cobwebs away; as such anything I read would have had positive memories attached to it.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was perfect. It’s written in such a way that you feel properly part of the action. There is a party about two thirds of the way in and it felt like I was on the streets watching events. It’s not the number of words McCullers uses but the ones she chose. I was very jealous and in awe, and she was only twenty three when it was published.

Set in a small town in Georgia, the state not the country, in the 1930s, the novel follows the characters and events that surround John Singer. Singer is deaf and can’t speak. Although he can sign he tends not to, however he has a very amiable personality that draws the locals to him. They begin to open up to him in ways they can’t with anyone else and he soon becomes an important part of their lives. Singer accepts this, but secretly he has worries of his own and he needs to find a way of dealing with them.

It’s a beautifully thought out book which slowly engulfs you as more and more the various personalities develop. I read this in a very warm and far away city that was just waking up to a new Spring and new possibilities. I felt free, completely detached from everything, and with this as my companion I was very happy.

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”

― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Anxious People – Fredrik Backman. I’ve somehow managed to end the year on a quite a strong Nordic note, as it was I read this Swedish novel in February. Anxious People seems to be one of those books that grabbed a lot of people’s attention at the same time; it’s very good.

The concept is that a flat is for sale and during a showing an armed robber enters and holds everyone hostage. The book explores the various different characters who were there that day and what lead up to this event.

First publish in Sweden, in Swedish, in 2019 it was then released in English in summer 2021. People liked it so much it’s become a Netflix series, which I’ve not seen. It’s a really interesting concept and whilst there are a lot of “whacky” elements, over all the more you read the deeper and more intricate it becomes. I’m sure with just one reading I’ve missed a lot of the subtly. I’m actually finding this a difficult one to write about as there is so much I don’t want to give away, it’s worth you reading/ discovering it all from the novel itself.

As the most modern of the books I’ve read this year, I think, it definitely goes to show good literature is alive and well in our day as much as it’s ever been.

“This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

Buy The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
Buy The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
Buy The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Buy Anxious People by Fredrik Backman