It’s rare for me to read a book again. Once I’ve read it, I know what happened, and I want to read something else, something new. The last book I re-read was “Boy’s Life” by Robert R McCammon, a book I read as a teenager and loved, and then read again a couple of years ago and loved even more as I could now see it not just as a coming of age tale but also a coming off age tale told by a middle aged man looking back at the Stephen King like tales and mystery of a childhood murder. 

My worry about re-reading something is that it will not be as good the second time. If you know the ending, where is the suspense? Despite this, this year I decided to take a risk again with another favourite book as a teenager, ’The Dragonbone Chair’, now considered a fantasy classic. And this time, I could see why it was a classic and why sometimes a classic is a classic because it’s a bit… dusty. Tropes which felt fresh 30 years ago are now well worn and some of the characters and writing lacks depth. But most of it still stood up and I’m keen now to read the next two books as my memory of the original trilogy was that the first book was great, but the sequels were better and paid off in completely unexpected ways, none of which I can now remember.  

I read a few fantasy books this year and can recommend ‘The Tainted Cup’, if you like your fantasy with a good murder mystery, ‘A Night in the Lonesome October’, if you like your fantasy as a calendar to read a chapter a day in October, or ‘The Spear Cuts Through Water’, if you like your fantasy with experimental storytelling or stories within stories within sentences. You make a note to yourself to buy this book. [This is the funniest use of italics I have ever written if you are one of the few people reading this blog to have read The Spear Cuts Through Water].

For biographies, I discovered Brett Anderson had written a second book, though technically his first. I really enjoyed his account of Suede’s success a couple of years ago but hadn’t realised it was the sequel to his first book: his childhood and first attempts at forming a band. The first book (second read) was just as good and offered an interesting look at how he found a voice when songwriting including, for someone who was training as a town & country planner when starting out, how important it was for him to know the place a song was set, even if location was never mentioned in the lyrics.

Best biography though was easily Trevor Noah’s ‘Born A Crime’ about growing up in South Africa, both the funniest book I read but also the one with an unbelievable but true ending.

Other factual books I enjoyed include ‘The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip’ by Simon Hart (including the revelation that Rishi Sunak would tidy up the number 10 boardroom when people left);  ‘Hits, Flops and Other Illusions’  by film director Ed Zwick and ‘Coffee First, Then The World’ by Jenny Graham about her world record attempt to be the fastest women to cycle around the world. 

Book of the year was also last year’s almost book of the year – see here – and it was ‘Lonesome Dove’. Every sentence perfect. Every paragraph perfect. Every step across America with a herd of a thousand cattle perfect. But the surprise was that, despite starting this last year and realising how good it was going to be, there was also another contender for book of the year: Hyperion by Dan Simmons, a vivid and imaginative sci-fi with one hundred and 10 ideas on every page. The book contains several short stories told by the characters and two of the stories – the monk’s tale and the father’s tale were stunning. Almost as good as Lonesome Dove, but not quite. Occassionaly Hyperion had a duff sentence. Lonesome Dove didn’t have a wrong word in 1,000 pages.  I have never missed a book as much as I missed that one when I finished it. I might even re-read it, but not until I forget what happens in it…

Yearly target: Read 50 books

Books read: 50!