Do you rush out and buy a new book as soon it’s published? Do you read a review, drop everything and have to read that book right this second? Or, do books hang around in stacks for ages until they reach the top of your pile or you discover the right mood? Do you follow your interests and obsessions, or are you led by PR?
Rather than ask our tutors to list their favourite books published in 2015, instead we asked them about the books they actually read. Our Head of School, Ashley Stokes talks about his list here.
A War with the Mountains
This year I’ve been trying to buy fewer books and make a dent in the four piles in my office, all of which I’d wanted to read desperately when I bought them. As ever, a lot of the novels I’ve enjoyed this year come from Eastern Europe and/or derive from the 1920s and 1930s.
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth: I discovered the other Roth a few years ago when I read both his collected reports from Weimar Berlin What I Saw and his gorgeous novella The Emperor’s Tomb. The Radetzky March made it to the top of my Office Pile Two this autumn and had me entranced. Ostensibly, the novel follows the military and bureaucratic careers of the Trotta family, though really it’s an elegy for the Hapsburg Empire, here drifting into history with much pomp, scandal and moral panic. Starting off on the battlefield of Solferino and climaxing on the Galatian Front in the First World War, this is a novel about living through end-times, in a culture about to culminate and cave in. The prose is immaculate. It glitters with frost and glints like sabres. I’ve never read a novel in which the word ‘autumn’ is repeated so often.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. It’s nice to return to a book that made an impression on your younger self to see if it still stirs you up. A Farewell to Arms reached the top of Office Pile One in February. I first read it when I was seventeen. It was one of the first books I’d found for myself, alongside Under Western Eyes and Darkness at Noon. I do remember liking it very much then. I remember that it rained a lot while I was reading it. The only thing that I really remembered of the text was a scene in which Frederic Henry drinks Vermouth in his hospital bed. This time round, I was again swept up in the world of the Italian Front and a war as unwinnable as a war with the mountains themselves. Heavy cocktail drinking in sombre spa town hotels also appealed, as did falling in love with a nurse. However, I did find Catherine a balsa wood character this time, something of an object, a mere plot device. Even so, A Farewell to Arms is best read as a war novel, and is probably one of the greatest anti-war novels of the 20th century.
Europe Central by William T Vollmann. I turned eastwards again in the autumn when this chunk reached the summit of Office Pile Two. It’s quite an investment in time and a dense novel. At its best its mesmerising but it has some longueurs and lapses into the sort of obscure, fancy prose that winds some readers up the wrong way. Broadly a novel about the Nazi-Soviet War and the lives of various people who in one way or another rebelled against those dictatorships, Europe Central is really a fictionalised biography of Shostakovich flying in loose formation with some short and long-short stories that take the form of biographical vignettes. There are some feats of prose here (a sequence in which the siege of Leningrad is written in the style of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony comes to mind) and overall it’s hard not to be awed by the scope of Vollman’s erudition, humanity and vision.
Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov. Even though I’d intended to buy fewer books on impulse, I found this hard in second-hand shops. During the summer I chanced upon this novel I’d always intended to read in a charity shop in Oxford (along with Ismail Kadare’s Broken April, which I also recommend if you’ve ever been caught up in a Balkan feud). It’s the story of Viktor, a writer of miserable short stories (I related to him) who adopts a penguin when the Kiev zoo can’t afford to feed its animals (I’d have adopted that penguin). What ensures is a bleakly comic affair, involving penguin depression, obituaries and gangsters set against a backdrop of an unstable country in uncertain times.
Don’t Try This at Home by Angela Readman. Not everything I read this year was about war or societal collapse (though I have to admit that I’m often drawn to these subjects). One of the only books actually published this year I read was Angela Readman’s scintillating first collection of short stories. This is a mordant, witty and vibrant series of stories, surreal in places, folkloric in others, sometimes gritty, always human and on the side of the outcast. ‘Birds Without Wings’ was my absolute favourite, one of those pieces that makes you feel a little different afterwards. Staying with short stories, I’d also like to give special mention to Jessie Greengrass’ An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, the title story being one of the most memorable I read tin 2015.
Ashley Stokes is Head of the Unthank School and teaches the Advanced Fiction Workshop in Norwich and the Online Fiction Workshop.
