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.
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.