Read about 40 books this year, which isn’t bad considering the towering piles of enervating academic articles I had to read for the PhD. I watched a lot of movies and TV of course – probably too much. My loyalty to the written form is far too easily overridden 
by the desire to lie back on the couch, grab the remote, and click (but, I hear you thinking, you can flop on the couch and do that with a book. True. But books take actual brain function to operate. I remember reading a study which showed the average person used less brain function watching TV when compared to sitting and staring at a wall). The film of the year is First Reformed. Written and directed by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver), starring Ethan Hawke, a contemporary neo-noir featuring themes of faith, sacrifice, and our impending climate apocalypse. Brilliant.
For TV, I thought The Good Place (again), Better Call Saul (again), and The Americans (again), were all excellent. The Japanese anime series Death Note was wild and weird.
I suppose as a science fiction writer I should acknowledge that there are no science fiction books on this list. It’s good – imperative even – for a writer to read outside their genre, but I probably overdid that somewhat this year.
In no particular order:
- The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016), Jock Serong
I read The Rules of Backyard Cricket at the start of 2018, but can still remember having to stop, put down the book and think, fuck: that is good. Jock Serong uses superb prose to make searing observations about Australian sporting culture and masculinity.
The novel starts in a boot, with the protagonist (Darren Keefe), tied up, being driven to his death. Reflecting on mistakes made, all those paths taken, almost always wrong, that led to this point. From one of the most promising cricketers in the country, to the most disgraced. He discovers, to his detriment, that the world of cricket is a truly corrupt one. As one of the characters says to him:
Sport goes to the heart of everything. If you can reach inside it and fuck with its innards, you’re actually messing with society . . . Bigger than drugs. Bigger than hookers and porn, because people shy away, they can smell the desperation. But the same people will go on consuming sport long after they know it’s rotten to the core. They’re insatiable.
- Hiroshima (1946/1986), John Hersey
Originally published in the New Yorker (they devoted an entire issue to it), this (non-fiction) book tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is one of the those rare pieces of reportage that changed fundamentally the world’s understanding of an issue, in this case the horrifying consequences of a nuclear blast. It 
seems absurd now, but there was a time when the public was unaware of how apocalyptic the power of a nuclear weapon (including, apparently, a Manhattan Project scientist, who wept when he read the work). An excerpt:
He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.
- God is Not Great (2007), Christopher Hitchens
I miss Hitch. If ever his cool, erudite voice of reason was required in public debate, it is today. Yes, like many of his admirers I was bitterly disappointed with his stance on the Iraq War (one of the few clips I’ve ever seen of him losing his cool was in an attempt to defend the invasion), but in God is Not Great he was back at his very best. An 
encyclopaedic knowledge of the world’s religions – especially the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – he uses lucid and sardonic prose to demolish the arguments for religious belief. His defence of a rational, secular, and humanist world is more important than ever.
I also read his ‘Why Orwell Matters’ which was very good. I didn’t include it because much of the time it felt he was talking about how people misuse Orwell, and get him wrong, rather than why he still matters.
- Pale Fire (1962) – Vladimir Nabokov
I only read this because it features in Blade Runner 2046. It sits on a desk in K’s apartment, and forms part of the test he (as a Replicant Blade Runner) is required to take at police headquarters to ensure he hasn’t developed human emotions. The Pale Fire test requires K to recite lines from the poem that forms the centrepiece of the novel:
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
I assumed the work was going to be serious, complex; a bit like homework. Rather I found it hilarious and readable (while simultaneously being serious and complex). It tells the story of Dr Charles Kinbote, the deluded self-appointed ‘expert’ on the poetry of the recently deceased John Shade.
One of the finest ‘unreliable narrator’ novels I’ve read, and one of the very few works that does not require reading from beginning to end. Rather, it can be treated like a scholarly text, flipping between the poem itself (by Shade) and the commentary in the index (by Kinbote).
- The Human Stain (2000) – Philip Roth
I picked this off the shelf because Roth died this year; he was one of those ‘great writers’ I’d never actually read. Roth paints a picture of political correctness and academic mobbing that seems unerringly prescient. The story revolves around Coleman Silk, an ambitious and competent classics professor. Halfway through semester he notices two students have not turned up to any class and so asks the other students: “are these students real, or are they spooks?”
Meaning, of course, are they ph
antoms? Now, the problem is the two students are black, and spook apparently can be used as a pejorative for African-Americans. Much like today, context is not used to understand the word. So he is reported, denounced, subjected to an academic inquiry, and after sustained attacks on his character, finds his life spiralling out of control.
The Human Stain is beautifully written, with moments of genuine humour. It didn’t quite turn me into a hardcore Roth fan, but it did make me an admirer.
Sorrow of War and Dragonfish were both re-reads. I’ve finished both within the past couple of years, but went back to them this year for my PhD. Both survive re-reading. I’ve included my original reviews, below.
- The Sorrow of War (1990) – Bao Ninh
One of those rare books that made me see the world in a different way (as we get older, more cynical, more set in our ways, it becomes harder and harder for books to do this). The Sorrow of War, in my view, has structural and thematic parallels to Slaughterhouse Five. It opened up my eyes to the nature of Vietnamese suffering after the war with the Americans.
- Dragonfish (2015) – Vu Tran
American author Vu Tran, in his debut novel, masters the exceedingly difficult task of integrating a literary neo-noir with a backstory of refugee flight from Vietnam.
The protagonist is Robert, an Oakland cop who has not gotten over his wife leaving him, two years before. His ex is a Vietnamese woman, Suzy, a refugee who arrived in the US after the end of the War. The novel is set in Vegas, and Suzy’s experiences of Vietnam are recounted through a journal. Nonetheless, the flashbacks via the journal are visceral and shocking. I don’t usually swear out loud while reading a book, but I did with this one (in a good way).
My particular obsessions with noir and Vietnam could well make me overly partial to this novel; however, its prose, structure, and execution are excellent. One of the best noir novels of the past ten years.
Special mentions
Dancing Home (2018) by Paul Collis is a so-called ‘koori noir’, and being the first of 
such a sub-genre, is a ground-breaking novel. Paul (who teaches at the same university as me) is a Barkindji man. He writes in an unflinching way about the life of an indigenous ex-prisoner. It is brutal. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is one of those rare SF classics where the prose really holds up all these years later. Ray Bradbury could write a damn good sentence. The Robbers (1917) is a novella by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. I include it because it reads like a hardboiled proto-noir (10 years before Dashiell Hammett created the hardboiled sub-genre of crime fiction): oppressive, violent, corrupt, with a femme fatale and a heist gone wrong. If not for the happy ending and the thematic conclusion that the law is right (in true noir, the law itself just an instrument of the ruling class), this would have usurped Hammett’s claim to literary history.
