2010 was a good year of books for me – a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, novels and short stories and memoirs, by writers old and young, acclaimed and establishing.

I am a little unhappy to have only read 22 books, even without comparing with the wastrelette Weinman, but I am ecstatic about the choices given that most writers I picked up this year were new to me and many of them have become favorites. Some books changed my life and several left a lasting impression. There are only four books that I regret reading.

One of my cliques strongly resolved this year to read more books than buy, excluding gifts and references. I succeeded until mid-December and I blame the clique for the binge that followed. May be next year then, eh? I know better than to discuss future plans.

James Ellroy: I started 2010 with Ellroy’s first novel Brown’s Requiem and followed it with his first memoir My Dark Places. I haven’t read anything else he wrote. I can tell his first novel was far from his best. The memoir made me his fan and I am drawn to the grit with which Ellroy faces darkness. I occasionally imitate his writing style. Very poorly. To disastrous effects. I have his thick LA Trilogy right beside me to kick off 2011. It will allow me to assess Ellroy the writer more than Ellroy the man.

Mark Twain: When I discovered audio books, I began my account with the new book of previously unpublished essays Who is Mark Twain? I listened to it twice. Later I listened to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twice each. In school we had some abridged non-detail. Then I couldn’t appreciate Huck and now I realize it is difficult for most Indian students. Not just for the lack of context about the Southern antebellum society, but also for all the colors of people that Annie Coleman brought alive and narrated about. After reading Mark Twain as an adult, I finally see his importance in American English literature. In this age of political correctitude I hope students have the privilege to continue reading unbowdlerized Mark Twain.

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange deserves its own post, my appy polly loggies. Your humble narrator has been postponing it until he viddies Stanley Kubrick’s cal. I wish to govoreet about why I liked it so much more than George Orwell’s 1984.

John Updike: When writing about Allen Coulter’s Remember Me I felt the desperate need to read John Updike’s Terrorist, for neither had I read any Sep 11 literature nor any book by him. Updike’s lyrical prose is a pleasure to read and it underlines my belief that poets can excel in writing prose. The book can be categorized into what people today call “essentially American”.

Philip Roth: After Everyman in December 2009 I read Exit Ghost in December 2010. I have been raving about his writing with anyone who listens. His portrayal of old age is unlike any other I’ve read, ugly and gritty, banal and bleak, pathetic and unsentimental. I hope that it becomes my tradition to read Philip Roth every December. Because in my mind I think of Updike whenever I think of Roth, I hope that it becomes my tradition to also read John Updike every year.

Henry David Thoreau: I don’t hold the writer Thoreau as highly as many others do. But I owe my weltanschauung to the man more than any other single person. Walden drew me more towards a minimalist, secluded lifestyle and intensified my need to read literature. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience improved my understanding of a society and a government and opened me to the possibility of a need for better and newer forms of governments. Thank you, LibriVox.

George MacDonald Fraser: Quartered Safe Out Here is the first book that I bought simply because I had been looking to buy for myself a gift and some blog (not on literature) that I follow recommended it. It is also the first soldier’s memoir that I read. Fraser is old-fashioned, candid, unapologetic and refreshingly indifferent to political correctness. The Cumbrian dialect is a treat. When categorized with Twain’s and Burgess’ books, I discovered that I thoroughly enjoy books written in diverse dialects of English.

James Joyce: A few years ago I happened upon some letters that James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle. Those are the most erotic prose I have ever read (limited experience reading erotica). If his informal letters carried such intensity, I could only speculate about his literature. I finally listened to Dubliners. Some stories deeply moved me and I listened to them again and again. His writing seemed subtle, meticulous, a little elusive, and very different from his correspondence. I got a taste of Joyce’s style and I wish to learn more with Ulysses, which I have been inexplicably postponing indefinitely.

Thomas Harris: Among all the popular thriller writers I’ve read, Thomas Harris is the most well-versed with the craft of novel writing. His characters, even the most perverse ones, are deep and mysterious while made of flesh and bone. His environments have more sensory details than most others. His dialogue rarely sticks out as artificial to my mind. Black Sunday didn’t disappoint either. I think the writer learnt how to create Hannibal Lecter while writing about Michael Lander here. In Black Sunday he went the regular way of sharing the backstory in the making of an ominously intriguing psychopath, whereas later he prudently chose to maintain greater secrecy about Hannibal Lecter in the Cannibal trilogy. That is what put off fans including yours truly when Hannibal Rising came out, and not for any other reason I can recall. I look forward to newer writings by Thomas Harris. He is far too good a writer to be stuck with Hannibal.

Agatha Christie: I have read more books by Agatha Christie than by any other writer. 20. I remember almost nothing from any of those books, so I am forced to ask myself why I read her books. Written in a plain journalistic style with no agenda other than the quest for truth, they are fun, quick and easy to read and mysteriously don’t haunt me with guilt. I started to notice more and more references to occasional wilder usages like private dick, pussy cats, gay parties and man-servants, and that adds to the fun. That still doesn’t answer my question. But I know I will keep reading her books.

Anjum Hasan: I am not a big reader of Indian writing for numerous reasons. But my clique keeps me informed about the new Indian voices (especially female), after filtering out the diasporic writers anguishing in identity crisis and the young blood that write funny or furious stuff. One of their recommendations, Anjum Hasan, acquainted me with the north-east better than the few chinkis I am close to. After reading Lunatic in My Head and Neti, Neti I now yearn to visit Shillong someday. I couldn’t follow the lunacy in the former novel all the way, but the latter was a thoroughly amusing portrait with sub-titles of modern urban India. I will keep my eyes on the Hasan sisters. And Zac.

Stieg Larsson: I finished the Millennium trilogy in 2010, having waited for a low-price edition. I wrote enough about it in the book review.

John Grisham: The more classics and literature I read the more pulp writers I reject. Grisham survives the massacre, but I regret reading his YA novel Theodore Boone. It bored me to death and I wasn’t even expecting another Client.

PG Wodehouse: When I read a paragraph from a Jeeves novel five years ago, I pointed it out as great writing and noted down that paragraph in a scrap book. Wodehouse changed Hugh Laurie’s life. This year he bored a few hours of mine. I am glad to have read something he wrote and to have escaped buying any of his books.

Irving Wallace: An old Telugu movie called antima tIrpu was memorable with an amoral protagonist misusing the power of media. I was told that it is based on Irving Wallace’ The Almighty. I bought the book a couple of years ago and finally read it a couple of months ago. With an old-fashioned hero and heroine, a mediocre villain, sloppy and inconsistent writing, and terrible dialogue that explained too much too often, Irving Wallace disappointed me once again. The Prize may have been the only good book of his that I read (I liked it all those years ago).

Kalpana Swaminathan: The Page 3 Murders is the book I most regret reading this year. Having read an interview years ago, I picked up her book from the Odyssey in Delhi Airport with very unrealistic expectations. Neither is Miss Swaminathan comparable to Agatha Christie nor Lalli to Miss Marple, and I could’ve lived without ever finding that out.

To the Editor:

There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived. The predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as the rewards that literature affords an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use.

Your paper’s cultural journalism – the more of it there is, the worse it gets. As soon as one enters into the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts”, and everything it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet? Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: “Does the writer have the right to blah-blah-blah?” It is hypersensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature over the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel.

Hemingway’s early stories are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so your journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than fiction. The integrity of the journalist’s informant is never questioned – only the integrity of the writer. The writer works alone for years on end, stakes his or her everything on the writing, pores over every sentence sixty-two times, and yet is without any sort of overriding literary consciousness, understanding, or goal. Everything the writer builds, meticulously, phrase by phrase and detail by detail is a ruse and a lie. The writer is without any literary motive. Any interest in depicting reality is nil. The writer’s guiding motives are always personal and generally low.

And this knowledge comes as a comfort, for it turns out not only are these writers not superior to the rest of us, as they pretend to be – they are worse than the rest of us. Those terrible geniuses!

The way in which serious fiction escapes paraphrase and description – hence requiring thought – is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that fiction, the lazy journalist’s fiction. The original nature of the imagination in those early Hemingway stories (an imagination that in a handful of pages transformed the short story and American prose) is comprehensible to your cultural journalist, whose own writing turns our honest English words into nonsense. If you told a journalist, “Look inward at the story only,” he wouldn’t have a thing to say. Imagination? There is no imagination. Literature? There is no literature. All the exquisite parts – even the not so exquisite parts – disappear, and there are only those people whose feelings are hurt because of what Hemingway did to them. Did Hemingway have the right …? Does any author have the right …? Sensationalist cultural journalism masquerading as a responsible newspaper’s devotion to “the arts”.

If I had something like Stalin’s power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussions of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak one another. I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. I’d do this for as many centuries as are required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.

– Amy Bellette/E. I. Lonoff

The above letter has been stripped out of context from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost without permission.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the few works that I read more than twice, watched more than twice, read the book first and then watched the movie and still didn’t get disappointed. Harper Lee’s novel is also my default gift, the way some gift the Bible when they can’t think of anything else.

The novel is dearer to me than all the other child-protagonist novels that I’ve read, including those by Mark Twain and JK Rowling. Even though Scout, Jem and Dill all together have hardly an adventure that can compete with those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter’s. Even though their thriller isn’t as thrilling as the others’. Even though their presence to the world is seemingly inconsequential. Perhaps for those very reasons.

What Scout narrates about that summer creates in me the most intense nostalgia of a childhood that I seldom dwell in. I find it effortless to imagine walking beside those three with our hands on each other’s shoulders, to pull Scout’s hair, to grab Jem’s collar, to kick Dill’s shins, to grow up along with them. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter are great fun, but I didn’t belong to their circle as a child.

When I think of the narration, I can hear Kim Stanley whispering in my ears. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices, right there beside Joan Fontaine’s Rebecca. The movie opens with the most creative title sequence I can remember. And Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch. Not getting tired of superlatives, am I?

When I read somewhere that Pauline Kael described Atticus as “virtuously dull”, I had to agree and to face the question of why he was still one of my favorite characters. “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything Atticus couldn’t explain.” That’s why. Atticus is seen through the eyes of Scout, his daughter. Most children below ten probably still feel that way about their dads. I hope they do. When I was ten my dad was the calmest, wisest, strongest, noblest and the most loving man there could possibly be in the whole world. He hasn’t changed much, though I have. Harper Lee through her vivid, humorous, and sensitive writing created a magnificent lens to see the world through.

Shush now. I actually wished to type a few lines from the novel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and this whole post is a tiny thin excuse for it. I may be breaking a law or two here. I consider the following scene the most powerful one I’ve ever read and watched.

———-

“Hey, Atticus?”

I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.

There was a smell of stale whisky and pig-pen about, and when I glanced around I discovered that these men were strangers. They were not the people I saw last night. Hot embarrassment shot through me; I had leaped triumphantly into a ring of people I had never seen before.

Atticus got up from his chair, but he was moving slowly, like an old man. He put the newspaper down very carefully, adjusting its creases with lingering fingers. They were trembling a little.

“Go home, Jem,” he said. “Take Scout and Dill home.”

We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.

“Go home, I said.”

Jem shook his head. As Atticus’s fists went to his hips, so did Jem’s, and as they faced each other I could see little resemblance between them: Jem’s soft brown hair and eyes, his oval face and snug-fitting ears were our mother’s, contrasting oddly with Atticus’s greying black hair and square-cut features, but they were somehow alike. Mutual defiance made them alike.

“Son, I said go home.”

Jem shook his head.

“I’ll send him home,” a burly man said, and grabbed Jem roughly by the collar. He yanked Jem nearly off his feet.

“Don’t you touch him!” I kicked the man swiftly. Bare-footed, I was surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his shin, but aimed too high.

“That’ll do, Scout.” Atticus put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t kick folks. No –” he said, as I was pleading justification.

“Ain’t nobody gonna do Jem that way,” I said.

“All right, Mr Finch, get ‘em outa here,” someone growled. “You got fifteen seconds to get ‘em outa here.”

In the midst of this strange assmebly, Atticus stood trying to make Jem mind him. “I ain’t going,” was his steady answer to Atticus’s threats, requests, and finally, “Please Jem, take them home.”

I was getting a bit tired of that, but felt Jem had his own reasons for doing as he did, in view of his prospects once Atticus did get home. I looked around the crowd. It was a summer’s night, but the men were dressed, most of them, in overalls and denim shirts buttoned up the collars. I thought they must be cold-natured, as their sleeves were unrolled and buttoned at the cuffs. Some wore hats pulled firmly down over their ears. They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and at the centre of the semi-circle I found one.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?”

Mr Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen falt.

Mr Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was white in contrast to his sun-scorched face, which led me to believe that he wore one most days. He shifted his feel, clad in heavy worn shoes.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr Cunningham?” I’m Jean Jouise Finch. You bought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Mr Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr Cunningham dispalyed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’ month, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes me and he shut it.

“Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes … that you all’d ride it out together …” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for living-room talk.

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

The last book of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is not unpredictable. From the outset it is clear that the book will be about the final trial, which we know that Salander and her “Knights of the Idiotic Table” will win, despite the several new difficulties and dangers that the supporting cast face and survive from time to time. We do not even learn anything new about superhero Lisbeth Salander. But I never felt the need to complain, except whenever I had to put the book down for reasons beyond my control.

The entire trilogy is very old-fashioned, with its well fleshed out but stereotypical characters and the plainness of its themes. The reason it captivated me is because of the pain-staking research and thorough factual approach that Larsson takes. I haven’t read any of his journalistic reports in the Expo magazine, but I suspect that he was an investigative journalist very much like Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist, in dogged pursuit of facts for the establishment of what he had reason to believe to be truth.

“Who will clean up Bhopal mess?” “Dow not liable for Bhopal?” “Could it have been averted?” “Two arrest warrants, last ignored by CBI?” “Is Digvijaya Singh targeting his own party?” “Did Arjun Singh arrange Anderson’s exit?” These are a few separate headlines and news stories about the Bhopal gas tragedy from the past few days. Recently I’ve noticed that many Indian news channels have graduated from conducting SMS polls (like “Are reporters morons?”) to posting questions as headlines (mostly rhetorical, I hope). I have been of the opinion that facts about unknowns cannot be established from opinions of a million sheep, but I confess that I am not up to date with the latest research in the applications of stochastic models on social journalism involving sheep. I may have missed the forward about the evolutionary manner of establishing facts, which probably proves that if a Twitter follower is moved enough to reply or a serious citizen to call a news desk then he or she must be knowing and telling the truth with an accurately calculable probability.

Unlike them the reporters and other investigators throughout the Millennium trilogy weren’t taught in the new methods of journalism. They start with their beliefs and gut feelings, with what they feel must be the truth, but they don’t thrum the world with persuasive reports about their perceptions of truth being true based on a long list of opinions, on historic observations, on psychological studies, nor on the ever-so-dependable instincts and intuitions. They ask questions and sieve through provable facts. In an explicit lesson Erika Berger tells a young promising journalist, “Think like a reporter. Investigate who’s spreading the story, why it’s being spread, and ask yourself whose interests it might serve.” In another lesson she rules that under her reign news reports have to deal with provable facts and that editorials (not by every person with an asshole) are the only place for opinions. Blomkvist shows them in his actions. Even though the trilogy is a work of fiction I hold it as a text-book example of old school investigation, and Millennium as a magazine of very high standards unswervingly clinging to the elements of journalism.

Another rarity is the vast number of women characters throughout the trilogy. In this last installment Larsson couldn’t have been more explicit with the numerous annotations about (sometimes mythical) women warriors like Dahomey Amazons, Libyan Amazons, Shammuramat, Semiramis, and Boudica. Were it not for those footnotes I probably would have not paid enough attention to the women in the book: Lisbeth Salander, Erika Berger, Advokat Annika Giannini, Inspector Monica Figuerola, Inspector Sonja Modig, Susanne Linder, Malin Eriksson, Ragnhild Gustavsson, and even the award-winning reporter at She of TV4. (Harriet Vanger and Mirriam Wu were strong too, but they are barely mentioned in this book.)

All these characters have a role to play, all of them are what Larsson likes to call “resourceful” in some way, all of them hold on their own and dominate male characters at sometime. Equally noteworthy is the fact that there are no women on the wrong side, no women who finally lose, no women who show cruelty towards other women (or men without justification). In one clear breach of the fourth wall Larsson through Blomkvist says, “When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.” He is very clear here that it is not about violence and injustice in general, but about that perpetrated by men against women. It is as if he is apologizing on men’s behalf, making sure that they all win. Yet in another dialogue he (again through Blomkvist) mentions that he does not believe in collective guilt, as if conscious about what appears to be so.

Despite many apparent shortcomings — stereotypes, unsubtleness, even clichédness if you will — Larsson with his matter-of-fact reporting style, by mixing fiction with non-fiction (real places, real scandals, real characters), and most importantly with his idealism makes the trilogy fascinating and memorable.

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I have never been the voracious reader that I present myself as. I began reading very late in life and I remain a slow reader. In the best months I may read four books, but in most months I manage one. I am not in the numbers game. I simply wish to read more than I do. There are so many great books that I have not read and will never be able to read. Those books which I have always wanted to read, which I sincerely promise myself to read some day, and which I postpone knowing well their exalted position in the history of literature and in my own wishlist, I collect and keep them aside as classics. Today I am brimming with new hope. I made one of my best discoveries of the new year — audiobooks.

I have never been very particular about preserving the sanctity of a book in its traditional form. It is reassuring that they continue to exist, whether as hardcovers or paperbacks or e-books or audiobooks or multimedia or future superformats. The forms and formats will come and go based on their ergonomic and economic viability. I hope for not much more than to find them agreeable.

I have largely survived on paperbacks and e-books while ignoring audiobooks until last year citing numerous excuses that I can instantly cook. Exactly a year ago I got my hands on a pre-release of the audio version of the recent Who is Mark Twain? It sat there in one of the folders of my PC ignoring me with greater snobbery than I am capable of. The atmosphere changed this year. I have already listened to Who is Mark Twain?, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and Walden. I am now listening to James Joyce’ Dubliners. There are many more in the pipeline.

Listening isn’t the same as reading. Nothing comes close to the pleasure of sitting on a toilet and leafing through a splendid story in the dead of the night. Perhaps due to my inexperience, when listening to audiobooks I can’t very well see the words dancing on a page nor observe the linguistic experiments. Still, I prefer that to not reading at all. And while commuting they are better than reading itself. Reading is strenuous when traveling by train, and is not enough to escape from the inanities waiting in adjacent berths. Listening to audiobooks, on the other hand, presents a pretty picture of voluntary deafness and youthful snobbishness.

I may unintentionally be violating copyrights, as I haven’t yet figured out how to verify copyright status of books, especially audiobooks, inside India. I mostly download the audiobooks from LibriVox. It is a beautiful sister site of the ambitious Internet Archive. If you are its user, consider dropping some change in their jar.

If you’ve never tried an audiobook, do.

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