My Books of 2017.

My book list of 2017.  It was a quick year for reading, and I'm sorry to say I only read half the amount of what I read in 2016.  We'll have to do something about that.

The Pistol by James Jones.  This was a strange, quirky, at times irritating novel about a soldier who is a cross between an idiot and an obsessive.  Kirkus Reviews said:   “…one small area of the early days of war [WWII], the hardships without actual or imminent danger, the frustrations and yearnings of men...just ordinary men -- etched with sharp perception and understanding. Jones has proved that he doesn't need the false props of salacious depravity to give substance to his characterizations.”  I’m not so sure.

Mannequin by J. Robert Janes.  (A St.-Cyr and Kohler Mystery).  My books for fun reading lately have been mysteries, usually unusual.  This is part of Janes’ World War Two topography, a time that I’m deeply entrenched with.

Foreign Studies by Shusaku Endo.  Three stories linked taking us to post-World War Two Paris from the perspective of a young Japanese student.

To A Mountain In Tibet by Colin Thubron is a wonderful memoir about the author’s journey to Mount Kailas (southwest Tibet).  This is a mind-filler to be sure.

Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson.  Nonfiction.  I really liked this book, I became engulfed in the Trojan War as if I were an archeologist, reporter, librarian, myth-intimated man of the 21^st century.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book; there is much quirky ridiculousness but it’s handled. 

Kinds of Love by May Sarton.  She does not kid around with her relationships.  We’re in a small New Hampshire town, back in 1970.  I liked being taken back there, finding an Iris Murdoch sensibility in the cold U.S.

The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble.  I love Margaret Drabble, and this is another book that I can add to my flag-waving arch of triumph for her.  It’s not for everyone.

An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us by James Carroll.  This memoir was a bit thin.  Although Kirkus says “fresh retelling…about a son’s struggles with his father and his God,” it wasn’t a book to stay up late for. 

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.  Memoir.  At times fascinating, at times lugubrious in its sentimentality over the death of her father and her hyper-self-consciousness.  There are a lot of anecdotes concerning the behavior of hawks and the unintelligible need for people to hood them and teach them how to hunt vis-à-vis showmanship.  Macdonald did, however, turn my lights on for T.H. White. (You remember him; The Sword in the Stone, The Once and Future King, The Book of Merlyn, etc..)

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.  This novel began with a curious eccentricity that I thought would level out, but by the time I finished this book I was so angry at such a waste of my life.  This is a pointless book.

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.  This is a challenging book. It gives you a tense uncomfortable binding in your stomach and frown on your face over what people do in the face of and shrinking from passion.  Kirkus says it will remind you of Ian McEwan novels.  Maybe.

T.H. White - A biography, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, is a sad and sometimes brutal life.  Such a successful writer going at light speed without benefit of love. Born in India died in Greece. An interesting man. He was a strong influence on J.K. Rowling and Michael Moorcock and Ed McBain.

The Hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen takes us to postwar Germany, early 1950s, late 1940s, with the guilt and love/hate fibers of that defeated culture showing through every character.  More bleak than Le Carre but without Le Carre’s charm and brilliance.

Outwitting the Gestapo by Lucie Aubrac.  This is nonfiction; it is exciting at times as well as amusing; there is love, sex, danger pitting your skills against Nazis occupying Paris and the French countryside.

Ballplayer by Chipper Jones by one of my sports heroes.  I enjoyed Chipper’s self-deprecation and his all-too-often true blue stock being sometimes swept away by appetite.

Stonemouth by Iain Banks.  Contemporary, hilarious, gritty novel says Kirkus.  Yes, it is.  Problematic you-can-never-go-home-again story that, once put down, I couldn’t wait to return to it.

Brief Lives by Anita Brookner is another novel by someone whose work I cannot get enough of; cliché, I know, but her “…portrait of a woman adrift in a comfortless world, where the hourglass never stops running” says it for me.

The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis is a gothic romance published in 1796.  Lots of scandalous behavior among nuns, princes, ladies, monks, abbots, etc.; not lurid, don’t get me wrong.

Missing Person by Patrick Modiano is his sixth novel, and won him the Goncourt Prize.  It’s about a detective who lost his memory a decade earlier.  I thought it was convoluted and confusing.

 King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild.  One of the most extraordinary books I read in a long time, certainly one of the three most impressive of last year.  The sheer horror of white men’s cruelty to other races is and has always been monstrous, but in this book, the atrocities committed by and in the name of the King of Belgium for money and prestige, including American entrepreneurs (another way of saying “sadists”) was like a super-cancer invading an otherwise innocuous body, pulverizing everything in its wake.  You will never forget what you’ve read between the covers of this book.

The Catcher Was a Spy:  The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, by Nicholas Dawidoff, is a strange biography of a strange man.  You get baseball’s Moe Berg working with intelligence agencies during the War, and then afterward, his lonely aimless life.  Moe Berg is a fascinating psychological study, I don’t know what of, but fascinating nevertheless.

The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk was a disappointing post-Nobel Prize work by one of my living heroes.  Well written, captivating prose, but it is certainly a minor work.  And I hate myself for saying that.

The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty is a delightful book, my first read of Ron McLarty and I can’t wait for more.  I was reminded of the first time I read St. Burl’s Obituary by Daniel Akst, a great book I must say. (Not that the stories are the same, but the sensibilities are.)

A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre was not what I expected.  A rehash and retelling of the Spy Who Came In From the Cold under the microscope of 21^st Century British (could be anybody) stupidity.  Point taken, but not a very good novel.

1356 by Bernard Cornwell is a grand book.  It is bloody, amusing, brilliant history and should benefit the Medieval enthusiast certainly, but what a miniseries it would make.   This is a very good book.

The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin, early murder mystery work introducing his Fandorin hero.  I have a fondness for Czarist Russia, imported from my devotion to Dostoievsky and Tolsoy.  I’m hooked.

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  I loved this second book almost as much as I loved the first one of the trilogy (Shadow of the Wind).  I’m drawn to the darkness in Zafon’s novels as much as I am to the scholarship.  The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, I love it.  Los libros olvidados.   Naturally I’m chomping at the bit for the third one, The Prisoner of Heaven.

Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford.  First one I enjoyed very much, but Pigeon Pie is not as much a satire as her other work, though it tries to be.  Outset of the Second World War crushed Mitford’s family.  The twists and champagne-blurred characters lost me.

David Crockett: The Lion of the West by Michael Wallis is an interesting book about a remarkable man, but the narrative was informational so often, as if I were reading the index cards. 

An April Afternoon by Philip Wylie is beautifully written.  I understand why he was so controversial.  (This book premiered in 1938.)

 The Man Who Liked To Look at Himself by K.C. Constantine.  Constantine is a new compulsion for me, like I need another one.  Small Pennsylvania town, chief of police is the protagonist, strange and colorful characters, and murder.  I’m looking forward to lining his books up like a flotilla.

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanche Tribe by S.C. Gwynne.  This book is insightful, full of American history, and the wretched acts of incarceration, slavery, and genocide that the white settlers and U.S. government perpetrated upon the indigenous native populations of the American wilderness.  Early history of Texas is prominent, certainly nothing to be proud of in any sense.  A waste of lives and a destruction of resources, that’s us.