2025 Top Ten (5-1)

 The Second part of the great books of the year. If you want to see all I read this year click here, and if you want to see the numbers 10-6 books, click here.

In at number 5

The Tale of Genji

I’ve written about this here.

This is a book that is already a wonderfully complex work compared to western works written at the same time but it becomes more complex as it goes on. The writer pushes the form and creates a book that is deep, complex and very interesting.

At number 4

Mr Bowling buys a Newspaper

I loved Mr Bowling buys a Newspaper, I found it funny, gripping and oddly sad.

 Mr Bowling was educated to be a gentleman but graduated into the Great Depression where there weren’t enough jobs so he has to make do with much less than he was expecting. He married young to a woman who refuses to engage with him sexually or romantically (an oddly common trait amongst the wives in this book, was it a hang up of Henderson’s?). He desperately wants to die, sees death as a merciful release from the mundanity if existence but won’t kill himself - instead, he’ll kill other people, be caught and be hanged. He has one problem, with the chaos of World War Two happening, no one seems to want to catch him.

I found the character of Mr Bowling to be an extremely pathetic figure. His motivations for murder are his dissatisfaction with life, but his dissatisfaction seems to come from his own shallowness. He grandiosely thinks himself a great artist who was born for a great love, but his compositions never really took off, and he married a sexless woman and he can’t imagine a life ‘worthy’ of him. It makes him both relatable (I also graduated into a world in depression and have artistic desires that have never translated to material wealth) but also more despicable. 

What’s more the book is incredibly funny. There are dozens of funny one-liners and moments. The farce of him moving a body in the manner of a three-legged-race made laugh, as did the fact that as sloppy as he was as a murderer, he simply couldn’t get caught. 

This book treads some similar ground as Patrick Hamilton’s novels, especially Hangover Square, with the same smoky, pub-laced atmosphere, but it manages to do so with a lighter touch, which veers on the flippant. I found it frequently surprising and entertaining. 

At number 3

The Bear’s Famous Invasion of Sicily

I was first recommended The Bears’s Famous Invasion of Sicily by Lemony Snicket, who has an appendix in the back of the edition I read. Being on a mini Italian children’s classic kick, having just read Pinocchio, I read this. I thought it particularly sweet to include a letter from author, Dino Buzzati to translator Frances Lobb recommending her translation.

There’s a wonderfully mythic tone to this book, found in the almost Bayeux Tapestry-like illustrations to beginning with a dramatis personae and location description. I loved the silhouette portraits next to the descriptions, along with the suggestions of spoilers. It all adds up to the feeling that this really is a famous tale I should know about already. Then there’s the inclusion of the werewolf, perhaps he does appear in the book somewhere, I haven’t found him. 

The book is told in a mixture of prose and doggerel, and it really is doggerel, rhyming things like ‘ramparts’ and ‘damp parts. This adds to the mythic/chronicle nature of the book, as if serious works and high flying epics have been created about the subject and are here mushed together. It’s also interesting how the most of the doggerel sections are within the part of the book that deals with the bears’ invasion, leaving just prose during their occupation and settling down, with a return to poesy with the song at the end.

The bears invade for a reason that many animals do encroach upon human  territories, they are hungry but they are also lead by the noble king Leander’s secret search for his more prosaically named son, Tony. The bears are expecting to be welcomed with open arms but are fought off, thus turning their encroachment into an invasion. On element I found really interesting about the illustrations was how it is only the bears that are shown to be bleeding in the battles. There’s even the detail of a bear red cross stretchering off an injured comrade during a battle. 

The illustrations are a key component of this book and I love them. I love the simple shapes of the bears, whether they are fighting, partying with ghosts, dancing in victory or indulging in gambling, drinking and suggested S&M. 

I also love the mythic nature of the story. How the bears fight their way into the city like the Israelites going into the promised land, their degeneration and corruption by luxury, the tragic death of King Leander and the march back to the mountains, reminding me of the children of Hamelin or the Elves at the end of Lord of the Rings. To have that myth, along with wry humour and a big dollop of bathos (like the end of the ferocious cat, Marmoset) and it’s a unique and wonderful thing.

I enjoyed the appendix by Lemony Snicket. I found the little textual and illustration nitpicks to be fun - pointing out that all the silhouettes face right, or that an illustration could be seen as two ghosts arm in arm or a ghost of a conjoined twin. He also pokes at some deeper troubling undertones in the book, how the human and bear communities seem segregated and Saltpetre’s summary execution by Dandelion. While in no way an essential part of the text, it was an interesting appendix. 

Number 2 is the highest ranked poetry book I’ve read.

A Portable Paradise

A Portable Paradise is probably the best poetry collection I’ve ever read. Easily the best one that isn’t an anthology of different authors.

Roger Robinson has a skill of finding a particular image or idea to make a poem from and then create that poem without under or overcooking it. Each one feels like an idea, plucked and presented well, without feeling like it’s complete, sealed and uninteresting, nor so open that is feels like it’s fraying at the edge. It feels whole without feeling done. It’s hard to describe. 

I think a key to each poem’s success is that they are built on something specific. I think the best poems have a clarity and specificity of meaning and intention - Wordsworth’s Daffodils looked happy and made him happy - that many poems seem to lack. It also helps that he is capable of writing many different forms and lengths of poem and sequence them so it never feels samey.

The book is split into five broadly thematic chunks. 

The first is about the Grenfell fire. A reviewer said it made him cry, I thought that was nonsense. Then I read the chunk, in public, on a sunny day by a duck-pond and I was very close to crying myself. I remember when it burned down, I lived not very far from it and the smell and taste on the air was something that will stay with me. The poems include one about the ‘lost’ posters being like a people’s portrait gallery, another about using sheets to climb out, another about a girl becoming her dead father and drinking cardamon coffee like him. The poems built into this full-seeming portrait of innocent lives lost to save a council a few quid. It was very moving.

The second section starts being about slavery and then about the lives of Black people in London (particularly Brixton- presumably because of the history of riots, Robinson’s from Hackney). I loved how there was a slavery limerick, I loved the one about black olives - it made me laugh. There were also some poems about racial profiling. The most impactful poem in this section was one about tension in Brixton before something kicks off. I lived in Harlesden, and there were days when you walked out the door and could just feel that energy crackling in the air and he captured it.

Section three contained poems by different citizens, bewailing and praising their London lives. To be honest, this was the weakest section for me but that’s probably more to my life experiences. I lived in the very gang-divided Harlesden, but the notion of ‘areas became ends’ didn’t ping for me because I had no part in gang life. I was very struck by the street names being named after slave owners (though the area I lived, the streets were named after naval battles).

Section four is about music and art. I can salute any poem that celebrates Sade, the Stubbs one was gruesome and John Coltrane reaching heaven on a mountain of cocaine made me laugh and wince. The darkest one was about his great grandmother.

The last section is about his premature son, and about health and sickness in general. I was a premature baby myself, and my Dad tells me about the prayers he made and how the experience of it turned him from a casual churchgoer to a believer. The disjointed poem about his prayers is heartbreaking, as is the picture of Grace, the nurse, who can thread a tiny vein like no one else. ‘Saints’ is an odd outlier, comparing prostitutes to them.

I picked the collection up from the Waterstones clearance for a pound (how I pick up most of the poetry I don’t already know) and I was blown away.

And at number 1

Beware the Cat

I’ve written more about this here.

I read this book at the beginning of the year and knew it would be a hard book for subsequent ones to topple. A peculiar melding of real people, satire on alchemy and science, and a collection of bedroom bawdy, all held together by the true secret about cats.

And that's all the best books this year, I hope next year is good.

2025 Top Ten (10-6)

 It’s been a great year for reading. I may not have read as many books as usual (or, if Goodreads is correct, as many pages) but I have still enjoyed some really good stuff.

All the books I read this year are to be found here

At number 10

The Amazing Dr Darwin

I initially talked about this book here

A fun counterfactual romp, a little like the X-Files cousin of the Samuel Johnson: Detector series. In these, Erasmus Darwin takes on medical frauds and curiosities, taking everything in a slow, thoughtful way and having as many big dinners as possible. 

In at number 9

The Swallowed Man

The Swallowed Man is a strange and melancholy book that tells Geppetto’s side of the Pinocchio story. Despite being an English writer, Edward Carey originally wrote the book in Italian.

It begins with Geppetto being swallowed by the beast. It’s like a horror story, having Geppetto grope his way around the inside of the fish, discovering the contours of his land and being surprised by the large wooden structure than becomes his new home. Trapped in this purgatory, he remembers his life, particularly his past loves, unravels his relationship to Pinocchio, creates art, slowly goes made and counts his existence by the number of candles he has left.

In this, Geppetto was not always poor. He was born in Collodi (see what you did there) where the main industry was the creation of famous and uniform plates. His family were in charge of the plates’ decoration and they stick to one pattern which the young boy must learn. But he can’t learn it. No matter how he tries, the pattern becomes distorted. Because of this, he is spurned by his family and the town’s only industry dies. It was interesting for Geppetto to have a backstory with a disappointing father, when Pinocchio serves as a disappointing son.

He creates artworks of the women he’s loved in his life. Some were banned youthful dalliances, others poor women dying from the embalming fluids she uses in her work. His last love was a hallucination brought about when he was slowly being poisoned by a badly fitted gas pipe. This last woman, and the one dying of cholera were both blue women to him, linked to the fairy with blue hair in Pinocchio.

It was the grief of losing this lost love that drew him to creating his little wooden boy. But the boy won’t be contained, he is “loathe to follow the rules of objects.” It’s strange how little time Geppetto and Pinocchio spend with each other, yet it sends Geppetto to stalk the world looking for his lost son. He also creates artworks, paintings and sculptures of him which get progressively darker and stranger. (The book contains photos of these works and they are strange, especially the white ones supposedly carved off mushed up ship’s biscuit). 

One of these artworks, one made in a drunken haze, comes to life as the dark boy. A figure of terror, madness and death that stalks him around the ship. He also imagines a story of a china boy called Otto, who he then makes. As well as all these, he becomes imaginatively invested in the photos left behind by the previous captain of the ship.

It’s a story about a man who can’t help himself but create but his imagination and creativity eat at him as much as it sustains him. Creation is not an unconditional good because he loses parts of himself to create, much as he loses parts of the ship to create carving, or parts of his food supply to sculpt ship’s biscuit sculptures.

There’s a cheeky Disney reference, where he says, “I wish I may, I wish I might” on the subject of ending it all. In the film, Geppetto says this when wishing on a star - the most saccharine element of the Disneyfication of the story.

The Swallowed Man, is an uncomfortable book, trapped in a world where the thing that brings salvation is the same thing that brings destruction. It’s a book that’ll linger. 

At Number 8

Great Expectations

Wow does Great Expectations start.

From the opening details of how Pip got his name to his imagining of his dead parents and siblings resembling their epitaphs in some way to the escaped convict coming out of the mist - it grips. Pip is placed so small in the marshes as “a bundle of shivers” and then this hulking brute comes, escaped from the hulk, with all his wetness, filth and deprivation described over a whole page. He’s terrifying, and the book being from the young child’s view, his obvious lie about a young man who removes gizzards is even scarier.

So Pip goes home to steal the file and food. His home life is so brilliantly set up, with his anger, bitter sister “raising him by hand” - the walloping of one. We are also introduced to the safety of Joe, who Pip sees as another child and promises the ‘larks’ they will have in the future, working at the forge together.

Even worse, it’s Christmas day and they have visitors who stare at him and make him feel guilty, especially the wonderfully named Uncle Pumblechook (who never quite develops into one of Dickens’s truly despicable characters, but comes close). Again, Joe makes this dinner bearable by the liberal pouring of gravy.

After all this is dealt with, and a little of Pip’s poor education at the Dame School, the book makes a sharp turn in tone and genre with the introduction of Satis House and Mrs Havisham. She’s an absolutely astonishing character, pitiful and frightening, a bit like a large but weedy spider. She’s accompanied by the cold, purity of Estella.

Then the book shifts again with Pip’s expectations and the move to London. The book is never quite as good as it was in the beginning after this, but there are lots of fun parts and characters.

I love the moral griminess of the lawyers office. With Jaggers being a formidable holder of everyone’s secrets, a lifeline to the most desperate but also a hard businessman, never a comforting figure. He’s so stained by his job he carries a perfumed handkerchief and constantly washes his hands. His assistant Wemmick, solves this problem by having two versions of himself, the tense-jawed, postbox, office self and the warm, quirky self who lives in a cottage-castle with his aged P.

Herbert Pocket is also enjoyable in his ineffective way. I found it interesting in how pointless being a gentleman really is, with their stupid Finch club. At one point Dickens says, “there was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves”, remind me of university. Everything about his London life is horrid, his love affair with Estella which only humiliates him, his feelings of worthlessness and shame.

It’s a very grim novel. The plot hinges on two old people using young people as puppets to play out their fantasies and get revenge on a man who never feels that revenge, it only hurts he young people themselves. Then there’s the fact the book is narrated by an older Pip who only looks back on his life with his embarrassment and shame, the whole thing aches with regret.  

It’s a great book. I loved Joe, was fascinated by Estella, pitied Miss Havisham and Magwitch - but it wasn’t a world I wanted to spend more time in like David Copperfield was. A fantastic book though.

Number 7’s book is…

The Pillow Book

I wrote more about this book here.

This is a fascinating book, similarly both private and public, relatable and alien. There’s always this element of performance in the book but also one of a diary - it’s a wonderful contradiction, full of life and energy.

In at number 6

The Turn of the Screw

I read this coming up to the end of October but I should have read it in December as The Turn of the Screw is an instalment in the brilliant tradition of Christmas ghost stories.

I love the set up, not just people gathering round a fire telling tales, but one with a tale so dark and intricate that they’ll have to send home for the manuscript - adding a few days postal service into the build up. What’s more the manuscript is a letter written to him, so it’s coming to the reader third-hand.. and what’s more ghostly than hearing the tale through a chain of people?

I am most aware of the set up to this story because of a parody of it called ‘The Turn of the Knob’ from the brilliant radio series, Tales of the Mausoleum Club. This is my first Henry James, and the rumours are true, the man loves a comma. I didn’t find his style distracting though, if anything, they lend to the breathless nature of the tale being told.

A governess answers the advert of a mysterious London gentleman. She is to look after his niece and nephew and is, under no account, to bother him about them. She goes down, expecting the worst (a real Agnes Grey scenario) but finds the housekeeper is lovely and the little girl quite angelic. The boy is being sent home from school under a cloud, he’s been expelled, but he is, if anything, even more perfect than his sister.

The governess starts to see figures, she asks about and determines them to be the ghosts of sinful servants who were spreading a baleful influence on the children. Are they trying to continue that influence beyond the grave? What’s more are the children in on it? Are they helping or slowly being possessed? … Or is the governess going mad and her obsession is he biggest threat to the children?

What’s brilliant is that all interpretations are on a knife-edge. James manages to keep all options open all the time and the story becomes a different kind of horror depending on the reader’s focus. At face value, it may be about evil pernicious ghosts who are after the children. Or it could be about an increasingly crazed governess whose desire to protect the children is the real harm. It could also be a tale of two creepy children who summon the ghosts or cause the madness. (Those children are too perfect, and why is the eight year old girl in a highchair with a bib?) 

Gripping, strange and unnerving by the sheer lack of certainties, it’s a very successful creepy story.

Find the rest of list 5-1, here.