Read & Rec'd, December 2004
The Cutting Room - Louise Welsh
Written by a fellow resident of Glasgow, The Cutting Room was a novel I missed when it came out two years ago, mainly I suspect because I was reading a huge stack of free SF books handed me by my then new editor at Gollancz. Louise Welsh's story is dark and brutal enough for any fan of noir, but at the same time it offers an elegance with words and level of detailed observation you more commonly find in poetry. The central character wanders at ease in the curiously otherwordly realms of auction houses, Glasgow's eighties gay scene, and the more sordid end of the pornography industry. You come out of the book feeling wiser and more awake, but at the same time slightly soiled and damaged. Which I suppose is what all great literature should do to you.
Train - Pete Dexter
A sharp, hard-boiled novel by the author of Paris Trout. Train takes place in an Ellroyesque fifties landscape of golf courses, crime scenes and well-to-do Los Angeles addresses. Its broad subject matter is race, and the damage racism leaves on whatever it touches, but really it's a series of character studies with just enough violent action to carry you along. I'm not in the least interested in golf, but for the time I was reading Train, I found myself understanding why other people might be. And where James Ellroy covers some of this same ground in his earlier novels, Dexter is wielding a stylistic rapier to Ellroy's mace. Imagine one of Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins novels, but written by James Sallis.
Stiffed - Susan Faludi
I started reading this one for research, but ended up hooked in a way you don't often get with non-fiction. Faludi's subject matter is American male alienation at the end of the twentieth century and not surprisingly there's a huge amount for her to get her teeth into. What is surprising is that on her tour of collapsing workplaces, domestic violence, religious resurgence, celluloid fantasy and celebrity culture, Faludi manages to move delicately through pathos, hard-headed social analysis and laugh-out-loud humour and then back again, exactly as if she were writing good fiction. Several years of painstaking research went into Stiffed, but it reads with a lightness of touch that's like finding an Aston Martin engine in a removals truck. Recommended reading for anyone who's a man, or has to associate with one.
Top Ten Vol 1 - Alan Moore et al
Having realised that Alan Moore is the finest comic-book writer in existence, and vaguely recalling a recommendation by my UK editor, I bought this for a long train journey back from London in October. It's perhaps not as gritty as Watchmen or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but there's still the same brilliant extrapolation of superhero convention into the real world and its various shades of messy grey. And while other Moore work has some fine humour in it, Top Ten is laugh-out-loud funny at a rate of about two cackles a page. Blindfolded psychic taxi drivers, mutant cats hunting mice with blowtorches and baseball bats, a drunk Godzilla, a cop called the Rumour who's never around... guaranteed to cheer you up, and then have you boring your friends with detailed re-tellings for weeks to come. Buy it!
The Blank Slate - Stephen Pinker
Stephen Pinker has a reputation as a nature-not-nurture hardliner in the evolutionary biology debate, but it doesn't take you long to discover that he doesn't deserve the rap. Like Richard Dawkins, Pinker is simply a hard-headed scientist with no time for political correctness, wish-it-were-so idiocy or wilful ignorance. In The Blank Slate he goes up against exactly those ranked idiocies, and sets the agenda for an examination of the human mind as a genetically hardwired system with capacities and limitations appropriate to that model. There are some alarming possibilities already well on their way to becoming proven facts in this book, but as Pinker points out the fact they are alarming necessitates evolving a structure to deal with them, not sticking your head under the covers, whistling loudly and pretending they don't exist. This is cutting-edge science for grown-ups, and that means there are no easy answers, just a bundle of fascinating and complex questions requiring consideration, thought and work.
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
I've been telling myself for years (since it came out in 1997 and I bought it for my wife, in fact) that I had to read this book, but somehow I never got round to it. Finally I took it to Peru with me and buried myself in it. Roy has a style all her own, when she can't find a word that suits what she wants, she just makes one up, and the story is told with scant regard for a conventional linear time frame or plot structure. With similarly off-hand abandon, she gives two of her characters a telepathic link as if it were the most natural aspect of human relations in the world. More than anything, the whole book reminded me of the jungle it's mostly set in - riotous, unrestrained, chaotic and darkly beautiful.
Persepolis 2 - Marjane Satrapi
Satrapi continues her autobiography in graphic novel form, picking up where the first Persepolis book left off, with the teenage Marjane hustled out of the nightmare of post-revolutionary Iran by her parents and into Europe, where things are not, of course, quite as lovely as she hoped they might be. It's perhaps not as captivating as the first instalment, mainly because here the central character is no longer a small, precocious and cutely drawn child with a skewed, child's eye view of the world. But still, it's required reading for anyone who wants an insight into the dangers of letting theocracy get a hold in a supposedly civilised society.
How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World - Francis Wheen
Possibly my favourite book of the year - a long overdue re-vindication of the values of Enlightenment thinking, and a devastating assault on lazy-assed bullshit everywhere, from religious fundamentalism to post-modernist pseudo-scientific babble and belief in the healing powers of crystals. Let's hope it's part of a bright new wave of hope for a rational 21st century.