I started reviewing books here fairly early in 2016, and started cross-posting the reviews to Goodreads later on in the year (around Easter, I think, though I can't remember exactly). You can see the reviews by clicking on the "2016 books” tag. I make it 83 books, which is a surprising increase even on last year's 50, especially when six of them were by Dorothy Dunnett.

( List )

I don't seem to have logged Did Not Finishes this year, but I know there were a couple; Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, possibly Courtney Milan's The Duchess War, though that may have been last year (both of these were DNF basically for Too Much Sex, though in rather different ways) and Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint (much more whimsical than I was expecting it to be and not really what I was in the mood for at the time, but I might give it another try some other time).

And now it's New Year's Eve, possibly my least favourite daye of the year, and I'm trying to decide whether I should be polite and stay up and go with my parents to see the New Year in with lots of complete strangers in the second freezing Norfolk church in two days or just go to bed and read The Hanging Tree which I treated myself to on Kindle as no-one had bought me the hardback for Christmas and be sound asleep well before midnight. After all, 2016 was the first New Year I'd stayed up for in about 15 years and look how that turned out...

I always really enjoy hearing Susan Calman on Radio 4, so when a friend mentioned that she'd written a memoir about her experience of depression I promptly added it to my Amazon wishlist, and then forgot all about it so that it came as a complete surprise when it turned out to be what one of my brothers had bought me for Christmas. And, as Christmas is generally a pretty low time of year for me anyway, I thought I might as well read it straight away.

Calman writes pretty much the way she speaks; I could hear a lot of the book in her voice. Like her radio shows, it's very funny, if perhaps more wry-smile-of-recognition funny than rolling-on-the-floor-in-hysterics funny, and it was nice, as someone who is pretty much the same age as her and has spent a similarly long time struggling with mental health issues, to read another person's story that had so many points of similarity with my own. The bit about how no-one in the 80s talked about mental health resonated particularly; I had no words to describe what was going on in my head for a long, long time, because I didn't even know there were words for it, and I'm sure that's part of why I still struggle to articulate what I'm feeling. Also, the bit about Clause 28, and just what that said to LGBT teenagers in the 80s about where we belonged in society. It's an excellent read for anyone who's suffering from mental health issues and wants to feel a bit less alone.

As well as being a memoir, this is also in some ways a self-help book, as Calman talks through the various strategies she's developed over the years for managing her depression. This part of the book felt quite basic to me, probably because I've spent as long living with my depression as she has with hers, although there was still some interesting stuff in there, particularly the identification of the different ways depression can manifest and different strategies for coping with each; this may well be something I do, but it's not something I've ever tried to taxonomise in that way, and maybe it would be helpful to do so. It was also really helpful and positive to read about someone else who was trying to live with depression through simple, straightforward actions, and not medication or therapy (I have found NHS therapy unhelpful at best, can't afford private and don't believe in it anyway, and while I occasionally wonder whether giving up the medication was really sensible I genuinely do feel that I'm better off without it*). However, I suspect the advice would be more use to someone who is suffering from depression for the first time, or perhaps to someone whose friend/significant other/child/parent is suffering and who wants to understand a bit more about what they're going through and how to help (and, indeed, how not to help).

*there's a lot to be said for not needing 10 hours of sleep a night and being able to lose myself in a good book again. Especially the book thing. I missed reading so much, and am not prepared to risk losing it again.

I bought a Kindle copy of Sarah Cauldwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered a couple of years ago after legionseagle recommended it, and decided to start reading it last week after it came up in the books thread on fail_fandomanon. I wish I hadn't waited so long to read it, because it was an utter delight, although on the other hand it was absolutely the perfect thing to read at the end of a long Michaelmas Term in a long and difficult year.

Thus Was Adonis Murdered is a cosy (I might almost say frothy) murder mystery, focusing on a group of young barristers, one of whom is accused of murdering a man she met on holiday in Venice. Most of the action actually takes place in London, as her colleagues read her letters and conduct investigations remotely, advised and guided by the narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar, an utterly Oxford donnish Oxford don whose gender is never revealed. It's wonderfully witty and arch and simultaneously an engaging mystery and an absolute hoot. It reminded me a bit of Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels, except without the casual misogyny which really put me off The Case of the Gilded Fly. I will definitely be buying and reading Cauldwell's other novels, and already feel sad that she only wrote four.

I didn't read Patrick Leigh Fermor in 1990, when I had discovered travel writing via Bruce Chatwin and The Songlines* and someone (I think it was my A-Level English teacher) had recommended him, because when I looked for his books in the local bookshop I saw that the third volume of the trilogy had yet to be published, and thought I'd wait until I could read all three (at that point, Between the Woods and the Water was recent enough that this didn't seem like too remote a possibility). I finally bought a copy of A Time of Gifts in 2011, when the news of Leigh Fermor's death suggested that, in fact, this was not going to happen, and I might as well just read the two instalments he had managed to publish. However, despite the writer's block which prevented the final book appearing during his lifetime, an early manuscript (actually predating the writing of A Time of Gifts) still existed; in the last years of his life, he began revising this, and after his death the travel writer Colin Thubron and Leigh Fermor's biographer Artemis Cooper prepared the manuscript for publication.

The Broken Road isn't a complete, polished work like the earlier two; the main narrative breaks off in the Bulgarian port of Burgas, still a long way from the walk's final destination, and is followed only by some scrappy diary entries from PLF's stay in Constantinople and a section of longer entries describing his subsequent visit to Mount Athos. The descriptions of the landscapes, towns and people of Bulgaria and Romania are as stunningly beautiful as those of the earlier books, and if The Broken Road does sometimes feel like the less mature work that it is in origin that's not a reflection on the writing; rather, it's the more personal content, with the long historical and geographical digressions of the earlier books mainly absent and replaced by reflections on the process of writing an account of a journey undertaken thirty years previously and the childhood events that had brought him to the point of setting out on the walk. There's more of a sense of occasional homesickness for London here, and also a much clearer impression of the way this charming and good-looking young man was taken up and fêted, not just by the aristocracy across Europe but specifically by the women he met; a Greek-Bulgarian student in Plodiv, the landlady of a hotel in Rustchuck, the whole staff of the brothel he mistakes for a hotel in Bucharest... There's also more melancholy in the reflections of the fates of the people Leigh Fermor met on his journey during the intervening years, especially those in Bucharest (where he is careful only to mention by name the people who are dead or who had escaped to the West by the time of writing, to avoid anything that might put his friends in danger at the hands of the Communist authorities); I don't know whether this is because of self-editing in the first two publisheed books, or because Romania was the place where Leigh Fermor ended up living for several years between the end of his walk and the start of World War 2, and the losses have hit him more because of that.

I found the diary entries from Mount Athos the weakest part of the book. I can see why the editors included them, as they do offer a more satisfactory conclusion than breaking off mid-sentence in Burgas, but PLF at nineteen is a very different person from PLF in his fifties looking back; he already had the facility for description that is the defining feature of the work of his later self, but he's (understandably) much less mature and his descriptions of the people he meets lack the subtlety and insight of the later work. His dislike for the food offered in many of the monasteries (vegetables and olive oil, horror of horrors!) comes across as somewhat brattish, and his discomfort at encountering a monk who insists on holding his hand is an interesting contrast to his more open-minded reflections, earlier in the book and later in his life, on homosexual relations among the people who gave the English language the word "bugger".

It is a glorious book, though, and I'm glad that we did get a third volume in the end, even if not quite a complete one.


*It may be 25 years, but I still got full marks on the set of bonus questions on Chatwin on this week's University Challenge, which was more than the students did.

Apparently autumn is when I read Gwyneth Jones's Bold As Love series; I can't remember when I read the first one, but I vividly remember finishing the second in a holiday cottage with a stunning view over Hastings harbour very early one morning exactly ten years ago this week (I know it was then, because we'd gone there to celebrate ten years together). I read the third last year and finished it the evening of the Paris attacks, and somehow, even though I thought I wanted something cosy and calming to drive away the fears the current state of the world have provoked, when I was flipping through the books on my Kindle last week trying to decide what to read it just felt like time to read the fourth.

I really like the series; a retelling of Arthurian legend (with, I think, a particularly strong nod to the Arthur of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset) disguised as, or transfigured into, a near-future sf fable about what might happen as the world of the twentieth century disintegrates. For a series first published between 2001 and 2006 it still feels like a remarkably plausible vision of the future (unlike her 1991 White Queen, which I also read last year and which is set in a 2038 where people still use fax machines and there's no internet), and I like her rockstar-turned-politician characters, both the central trio and the supporting cast. And actually, even though the series is about civilisation falling apart as the world collapses into a new dark age, I don't find the books dark and depressing; the world in Band of Gypsys has moved a long way from the not-very-different-to-now world of the first book (in some ways it felt as though it was set much further from "now"), generally not in any good ways, and there are deaths and destruction and unhappiness, but there's also sunlight and the English countryside and love and friendships and small acts of kindness, and the overall effect is somehow uplifting and hopeful despite the horrors of the setting.

The books are out of print at the moment, but cheap Kindle editions are available, and although I have paperbacks of the first three I bought Kindle copies of the later ones, and would advise anyone tempted to do the same thing to seek out secondhand paper copies instead - I have never read such a dreadfully formatted Kindle book, not even free editions of classics (well, there was the copy of Linda Grant's When I Lived In Modern Times which kept insisting that it was entirely in italics, but apart from that).

I'm still reading Dorothy Dunnett when I want comfort reading; not that her books are entirely comforting in themselves, given her penchant for throwing her heroes into one dire situation after another and piling misfortune on misfortune, but they're books I can lose myself in, and that's what I wanted this week. In the third book of the House of Niccolo series, Nicholas ends up in Cyprus, where both claimants to the disputed throne want him and his army to fight for them. There are battles and twists and romance; some plot threads from the earlier books are resolved, while others emerge.

I do feel as though I'm starting to get a bit of a handle on Nicholas's character, which I struggled with in the first couple of books. Even though long sections of the narrative are written from his point of view, unlike Lymond, where we only get a handful of scenes from Francis's point of view throughout the series, and those tend to be solitary action rather than introspection, I've found him harder to understand; perhaps because the amount of point-of-view time he gets is deceptive, and there's a lot of crucial stuff we don't see. With Lymond, the overarching mystery always seemed to be what had happened in the past to make him the way he was, but with Nicholas, I think it's more about what kind of a person he really is.

I'd been putting off reading the third of the Cazalet Chronicles, because I wasn't quite sure I wanted to read about people living through the grimness of World War Two when the world seemed to be falling apart around me. Actually, though, the grimness seems less obvious in this one than it did in Marking Time; it begins in 1942, three years into the war, and where the last book showed how life changed in the early years of the war, in this one it feels more like a steady state which people have got used to. The main point of view characters are still Louise, Polly and Clary, growing up during the war and almost unable to remember what life was like before it; much as I like them, I would have liked to see a bit more of the rest of the family, who mostly only seemed to make very brief appearances as the novel took them through the last three years of the war (and some of the sections that didn't focus on the three girls actually focused more on one-off characters, including two who appeared to have wandered in at random from a Mary Renault novel; they were probably having a slightly jollier time of it in Howard's book, though not by much). Generally, though, I'm continuing to enjoy the series a great deal and looking forward to reading the next book soon.

Cordelia's Honour is an omnibus volume of the first two novels, in terms of internal chronology and within the main timeline, of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. I actually read the first, Shards of Honour, about eight and a half years ago, and felt a bit meh about it; looking back at the post I wrote about it then, apart from the strong sense that the me of eight and a half years ago really was a pompous ass, it's clear that back then I was reading sf for ideas and new ways of seeing the world, whereas now I read books for enjoyment and escape and the chance to see through someone else's eyes and try to understand what it might be like to be them. I think this is probably a reflection of just how much I've changed over that time; finally, and somewhat belatedly, I've developed a modicum of emotional intelligence and can now enjoy a book which isn't about grand ideas, it's just about people, and about love and loyalty and the intersection between different cultures.

That said, even though I enjoyed Shards of Honour much more for reading it as a character-driven novel rather than one primarily driven by plot, the fact remains that the plot is fairly thin and relies quite a lot on fortuitous coincidence for a happy resolution; it's mainly just an excuse for Cordelia and Aral to meet, have time to get to know each other and fall in love (surprisingly quickly, for people who met as enemies, though on Aral's side this seems to be largely due to his cultural background and lack of experience, while I think Cordelia's initial attraction develops into something more during the months between their first and second meetings, knowing that Aral has already offered her marriage and the children no man she's met on her home world has), be parted and meet again. The second book, Barrayar, is much plottier, combining political intrigue with comedy of manners and showing the development of Cordelia and Aral's relationship, their relationships with others around them, and Cordelia's interactions with Barrayaran society (a process of adjustment on both sides).

I'm glad I decided to give Bujold another try; I often do find that if I don't get on with a book or an author the first time, I will at another time, and this time I was obviously ready to appreciate her.

I bought my copy of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Asssassin just after we moved to Oxford, in early 2001, but then I never got round to reading it; there were always other books, and for a long time I read so little, and so slowly, that I was daunted by the prospect of embarking on a book of more than 600 pages. Happily, these days I'm reading more and faster, and long books are no longer offputting, and as I'm going to see Atwood speaking at the Sheldonian in November I thought I ought to try to catch up on her back catalogue.

The Blind Assassin is an intriguing, multi-layered novel. The main narrative is reminiscent of a family saga, set in smalltown Canada in the 1920s and 30s, as Iris Chase Griffen, now in her 80s, remembers her childhood and early adulthood and her relationship with her sister Laura. We learn two things about Laura at the start of the novel: that she killed herself just after the end of World War II, and that she is the author of a celebrated posthumous novel, The Blind Assassin, and this novel, the story of a love affair between two nameless characters, is woven alongside Iris's narrative, a novel within the novel. There's also a third narrative, as the man in Laura's novel is a writer of pulp SF and spins out a story, or several stories which sometimes intersect, across their many meetings, and a running commentary of newspaper stories. Atwood is a skilful enough storyteller to let the multiple narratives twine around each other, occasionally intersecting, creating a space between them which coalesces into the shapes of the secrets which have been hidden for half a century and which only Iris is left to remember.

It's not a happy book; it's full of loss and heartbreak and empty, unfulfilled lives, but it is beautifully written and vivid and made me stop and think about what being alive really means, and it reminded me (if I needed reminding) just why it is that Atwood is one of my favourite writers. She doesn't deal in comfort, but she always captures the truth.

Ursula Le Guin's A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else is one of the books that got me through my teens, and although I hadn't read it for years before finding a copy in the second-hand bookshop in Stratford last week I've often thought about it. Unlike most of Le Guin's work, it's not SF; instead, it's a fairly simple story about two geeky contemporary teenagers. It's also less than 100 pages long, which I hadn't remembered, but even so it's probably the truest depiction I've ever come across of what it's like to be a thoughtful teenage loner, trying to learn how to do the human act and work out what the point of all the years stretching ahead of you are. It's also one of the very few books I encountered in my teens that touched on the subject of depression (the other one is Fire and Hemlock); it doesn't refer to it by name, but when I first read the narrator's description of the mental fog that descends on him I knew that he was feeling the same way I was, and I didn't feel quite so alone any more.

Thirty years later, I still found it beautiful and moving and insightful; it was good to be reminded of some of the things it taught me about living but which I'd half forgotten over the years.

(Interestingly, I think the UK edition must have been anglicised in a way I don't think happens so much now; there are references to "maths" and "primary school" and a few other things that now strike me as incongruous in an American book.)