This is the fifth post in my occasional series of archive posts in which I look back ten years. (See others here.) I say occasional, but they are tending to be in alternate months. October 2016 was an exceptional month in terms of quantity read – 18 books read and a few more from September reviewed. But did they live up to expectation, and what else was I doing that month?
Apart from visiting my local indie bookshop Mostly Books for Bookshop day on the 8th, and buying a bagful of books, I was too busy reading it seems!
I was also busy at the start of the month. Issue 12 of Shiny New Books was published on the 6th, and I contributed 5 reviews listed below – in those days we were doing quarterly issues of Shiny – dropping around 100 reviews all at once, making it more of a magazine format. The Morley, Sedgwick and Laurain being highlights for me, and I revisited the first of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels for the paperback reprint.
- French Rhapsody by Antoine Laurain
- Slow Horses by Mick Herron
- Snow by Marcus Sedgwick
- The Empathy Problem by Gavin Extence
- The Age of Bowie by Paul Morley
But halfway through the month it was half term, and I was devouring novels aplenty. I also put an end to my Book Jar project – it just wasn’t working – it was all too easy to pick out a slip and think ‘not today’ and put it back! I joined in Simon and Karen’s biannual book club – the year to read that October was 1947 – and I read The Plague by Albert Camus. In Book Group, we were picking out books by topic, and for Music, discussed in early October, we picked Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, which was a joy to revisit. Then ahead of our meeting in early November on the topic of horror, I read Dark Matter by Michelle Paver.
There were two disappointments this month. One was a NF book of rock’n’roll trivia – the Marshall Book of Loud – which was poorly executed, the other was the over-hyped debut by Paula Hawkins – The Girl on the Train which I found so predictable.
Seasonal reading included the aforementioned Paver, a magnificently engineered pop-up book of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, and for Halloween, I wrote a post revisiting my Shiny posts about Robert Aickman and his weird fiction short stories. I also reviewed V H Leslie’s Bodies of Water with its dual contemporary and gothic victorian timeslinesfor Shiny (but sadly that post was lost).
Several excellent psychological dramas and crime novels also filled my blog with dark reading: My first encounter with Ruth Ware – The Woman in Cabin 10 was great, Liz Nugent’s second novel Lying in Wait has another of her killer first lines, and Tall Oaks by Chris Whitaker, read earlier began with ‘instant coulrophobia’ (you can look that up!). Ann Morgan’s Beside Myself was a psychological thriller featuring twins. French author Bernard Minier’s Don’t Turn Out the Light was another lost post – and I can’t remember anything about it.
I read some more literary fare too. At the time, I only gave Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk 7.5 out of 10, but that novel but I didn’t really appreciate her writing and erudition and it has grown on me since – I’d give it a 9 now, I think. This month also had my first encounter with Donal Ryan and his delightful novel All We Shall Know about teacher Melody, young traveller Martin, and two unplanned babies. I wasn’t so sure about Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra which is structurally based entirely on the real test that Chilean students take to get into High School; all multiple choice questions. A bit of a gimmick? I thought so. I also did a joint book and film review of Shopgirl by Steve Martin – both were charming, Martin writes so well.
One last highlight was My Life in Design by Terence Conran. Lavishly illustrated, and full of his trademark colours of Klein blue and orange, this took us all the way through his career – he was 84-years-young and still active when it was published.
What a good month of reading I had. What were you reading ten years ago?