Don DeLillo: Americana
DeLillo's 1971 follows a disillusioned TV exec's travels across middle America and it's all there: the insistence on looking under the surface of quotidian realty, the breath-taking metaphor, the not-quite-surrealism, the casual sex - and casual violence - and that extraordinary dialogue. Boy, was he ever destined for greatness...
Iain Banks: Transition
Marketed with the "M" in the US, Banks' return to the fantastical in his "literary" guise is a real disappointment. Full of the usual righteous anger and brave explorations of violence and belief, but a real mess of a plot, nothing truly original in the alt universes theme and in the end a terrible shaggy dog story. Feels like it needed *a lot* more work.
Steve Knopper: Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
Interesting and informative, but ultimately little more than an extended article. Read my lengthier review here: http://tiny.cc/YLNKg
Don DeLillo: Great Jones Street
Truly vintage DeLillo (his second?). A burned-out rock star holes up in ravaged downtown New York; the cast of characters who subsequently drift in and out of his life take in drub barons, ultra-violent cultists, entertainment moguls and a brilliant but fucked-up ex-girlfriend. It's a pretty bleak indictment of early 70s pop culture, but at times as funny as hell.
Don DeLillo: The Names
Fairly early DeLillo, but already showing the DeLillo hallmarks: the extraordinary, free-wheeling, poetic prose, the brilliant dialogue, the obsession with language's relationship with reality, all embedded into some kind of thriller: Lawrence Durrell with added murderous cult action.
Lewis Hyde: Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture
One of the most confounding yet stimulating books I've read for a very long time: Lewis Hyde's overview of trickster mythology and its implication for the practice of art is part academic study, part philosophical investigation and, I suspect, part *trick* itself.
Don DeLillo: Cosmopolis: A Novel
Late - or rather, recent - DeLillo, and masterful. A single day in the life of a software/business multibillionaire in New York. Strangely Ballardian in the spareness of the story, but of course in DeLillo's extraordinary prose-going-on-poetry. Dazzling.
John Steele Gordon: A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable
A fast, fascinating read, following the exploits of US entrepreneur Cyrus Field as he led efforts to lay the first Atlantic telegraph cable in the middle of the 19th Century: an essential moment in the birth of the modern world.
Steven Levitt : Freakonomics
Hardly "The Black Swan" it's true, but for all its detractors - from "hard" economists to the simply skeptical - Levitt and Dubner's book is a three-night romp, charmingly written, thought-provoking and actually fun, even where some of their non economics-based observations are at best dubious (witness Levitt's weird optimism in the Peak Oil post).
Hugh Barker & Yuval Taylor: Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music
I can't say this history of the pointless search for "authenticity" in pop music (and culture), was especially an eye opener, but then it was preaching to the converted with me. But it IS brilliantly researched and clearly argued; in my case, it provided a lot of evidence for some deeply held hunches.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Not sure I can add to the hubbub over NNT, but I will say that like all the best books this really leaves one looking at the world in a completely fresh way, and certainly skeptical about the unthinking use of statistics and spurious historical narrative.
Neal Stephenson: Anathem
Sprawling, self-consciously clever, arguably a shaggy-dog story. Of course, these could all be said of everything Stephenson's written since Cryptonomicon. And yet... I raced through this gargantuan alt.reality tale as quickly and voraciously as the Baroque Cycle. Ultimately, Stephenson writes entertainments: ferociously clever ones, to be sure, but entertainments. And it seems you love 'em or loathe 'em; I'm in the former camp.
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Finally got round to this after some of the fuss had died down. As it turns out, the fuss was warranted. This is a masterful book: exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and unflinching in the face of its central tenet: that from Bolivia to Gaza, contemporary corporatist capitalism thrives on disaster.
Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope
Essential reading, though deeply problematic. Obama is so even-handed, so eager not to offend that often his true standpoint is opaque. It has to be said, he writes beautifully.
Naom Chomsky: Failed States
Chomsky's 2007 critique of American exceptionalism, its subversion of genuine democracy and insistence on legitimacy over legality. Depressing, but essential for a rounded understanding of post-WWII power and geopolitics.
Philip K. Dick: Ubik (Gollancz S.F.)
Reissued as part of Gollancz's handsomely groovy SF classic series; free-wheeling, cerebellum-bending visionary SF from 1969, still ahead of the pack.
Bill Buford: Heat
Bill Buford, a distinguished member of New York's litterati took two years out of his "normal" life to become a kitchen slave at Babbo in NY before going to study under a pasta maker and a butcher in Italy. His record of these two years is fascinating, literary and sometimes very, very funny. And deeply moving; its final conclusions about cuisine in the modern world are just a little depressing.
Iain M. Banks: Matter
Yes it's space opera. Yes, it's another Culture novel. No, it probably doesn't push any boundaries. But, fuck, it's fun... and dark. Banks remains the most virtuosic hard SF storyteller of his generation.
H.P. Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
I'm 41 and only just got round to Lovecraft, which is shameful. I loved this handsomely packaged set of some of the 20th Century Gothic master's finest stories, with an illuminating introduction and copious annotations by noted Lovefcraft scholar ST Joshi. The tales have a remarkable sense of dread - and on some nights certainly gave me some very uneasy dreams. Which is a good thing, I think.
Ryu Murakami: Piercing
Another riveting and pretty disturbing psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami starts with a young father talking himself out of stabbing his baby with an ice pick and unfolds from there as he figures out how to face his demons. Dark stuff, but often funny, too, and full of a bleak insight into the tortured mind of a psychopath.
Jack Womack: Going, Going, Gone
Missed this one when I raced through Womack a few years back. Yet another bleakly dystopian alt.reality SF novel set in NYC, its first person narrative - Chandler meets Kerouack on acid - and its wry humour are what mark it out. Its compression and brevity, too; Womack inherited PK Dick's ability to summon up an entire world with minimal description and - crucially - no exposition.
Steve Erickson: Zeroville
Erickson has been a writer of genuinely visionary genius in the past, but his latest novel, tracing the life of an autistic cinema buff living in Hollywood from the 60s through to the 80s left me cold at best and sometimes deeply angry. Erickson's knowledge of cinema is impressive, but the plot and characters here seemed to be designed specifically to demonstrate this, which is frankly unacceptable. A great disappointment.
E. J. Hobsbawm: Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution
The master historian's highly detailed - and, of course, leftist - account of the rise and fall of Britain's mercantile empire, first published as part of Pelican's Economic History of Britain in 1968.
Peter Ackroyd: Albion: Origins of the English Imagination
Ackroyd's typically free-wheeling and erudite love letter to Englishness left me clearer on why I'm quite so negative about us!
John Gray: Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
The latest edition to the ESSENTIAL Gray oeuvre, an exploration of the follies of Utopianism. The passage on Thatcherism and its heir in Blairism is breathtaking political commentary.
Kate Ascher: The Works: Anatomy of a City
Like going back to school! Ascher's book uses the example of New York to explain how a city's infrastructure - from drainage to comms, transport to food supply - actually works. I recommend actually reading it in New York if you can!
William Vollmann: Europe Central
At over 1000 pages a bit Himalayan for a slow reader like me... but worth every moment. A fantastic fictionalised account of lives caught up in the 20th Century struggles between Germany and the USSR.
WILLIAM L. SHIRER: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH
Finally got round to me dad's 70s BCA hardback edition of this (sadly not pictured). Felt I had to after Vollman's Europe Central revealed vast lacunae in my knowledge of WWII generally and the Nazis specifically. A formidable read, but absolutely gripping, if more a work of journalism than of technical history.
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