End of year chat
I’ve already posted my end-of-year book list elsewhere. But here I’ll mention a few other things. Of the small sample of music I�ve listened to this year one LP stood out: Sun Kil Moon’s covers LP Tiny Cities. The reviews were gratifyingly dim. The original songs by Modest Mouse are so different that this is really an original record. Curious how I seem to like covers LPs, Greatest Palace Music being my favourite record in the whole world ever.
Since I wrote my first book list, I’ve read Tom McCarthy�s Remainder. Had I read this curious novel before, it would have been included, as would Wallace Stevens� Collected Poems and Prose in the superb Library of America edition. It�s like reading Stevens anew. Page 8 has The Snow Man which is enough in itself. Also, I�d say Harold Pinter�s Nobel Lecture is one of the great works of the year; it’s like Guernica … in that the fascists’ still won.
On the negative side of the year, the worst books I read this year were Christa Wolf’s In the Flesh and Ian Holding�s Unfeeling. The first from a highly-regarded veteran was glib, boring and badly written (obvious even in translation). The second from a debut novelist showed how a powerful story and lyrical flair can’t compensate for embedded racism.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Funereal Festive Fifty
- Zadie Smith lecture
- Yawn Despite my unease about making Book of th…
- Library lists
- Books of the Year The serious newspapers are publ…
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One Response to “End of year chat”
ed
December 30th, 2005
Steve: Couldn’t agree with you more about the Wolf book. I thought that given all the praise (and the fact that I had to read the damn thing to end for the LBC) that I was the only one.