Although we shouldn't really be reading anymore, for those of us who still are 2010 has been something of a transitional year. New books by Philip Roth and Don DeLillo were entertaining rather than soul changing (although DeLillo's book was funfully fun.) Jonathan Franzen surprised less than a few people by writing probably the most highly regarded novel of the year - scabrously funny in parts, a call to a farewell to arms, it's scope and eloquent grandeur was not surpassed in 2010...
...except perhaps by the collected stories of Lydia Davis.
Some of the best books of 2010 were not fiction titles. Bill Clegg's 'Portrait of an addict as a young man,' was a startling memoir - a wholly unsensational account of addiction and the tragedy that accompanies and encompasses it. Susan Compo's marvellous biography of Warren Oates - one of the finest actors ever to act finely - was an undoubted highlight of the year as was Stewart Lee's, 'How I escaped my certain fate,' a book about how to be a stand-up comedian whilst sitting down...
The Dalkey Archive published some of the most interesting fiction of the year. In, 'Dolly City,' by Orly Castel-Bloom, a son named, "Son," is saved from a premature end of life by the eponymous Doctor Dolly...the resulting satire is as ingeniously grotesque as it is hilarious. John Toomey's, 'Sleepwalker,' invaded and occupied similar territory - the Patrick Bateman styled protagonist lurching from one barely concealed catastrophe to another...
Patrick Ness, Sam Lypsite, Daniel Clowes, Kenzaburo Oe, Willy Vlautin, Philippa Perry, Gilbert Hernandez...Roger Sterling...all wrote books of varying degrees of excellence in a year of contrasting quality.
However, somewhat surprisingly, two of the incontestably finest books of the year were music titles. Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's story of Dance Music and its DJ's, 'The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries,'was as encyclopedic as it was readable - a real labour of turntabling love - containing honest and intimately revealing portraits of the culture, its progenitors, and its accompanying hedonism.
Alex Ross was roundly applauded for his magnificent 2007 treatise on modern music - 'The Rest is Noise.' 2010 sees its successor in the form of, 'Listen to this,' published by Fourth Estate. This is the music book many of us had been waiting for - scholarly without being rarefied, entertaining without being superficial, a masterly account of music and musicality in its many and myriad forms. From Bach to Bjork and then Bach again...er...
So, 2011, only 28 days to go...
This post is dedicated to all book-sellers past and present - for all their hard work, their dedication and their loyalty and for making the world, if only for an instant of an instant, a better place.
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