Read about 30 books this year, which is below par. I aim for around fifty. I think it was a combination of finishing my PhD, which was mentally exhausting (a good reason), and because I allowed my free will to be commandeered by YouTube algorithms (a very bad reason).
I don’t have a film of 2019 this year, as in the past. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a decent Tarantino flick. Didn’t put me in raptures (like First Reformed did, last year), but it was pretty good.
For TV, the final season of Mr Robot was excellent. It sagged a little there in seasons two and three, I 
thought, but the last was a tour-de-force. Like everyone, I thought Chernobyl was brilliant. The first few episodes, which focus on the real-life heroics of the people trying to stop a nuclear cataclysm (or, at least, stop it becoming much, much worse) were extraordinary. A part of history I clearly did not know enough about. Gripping television. Barry’s second season was as well-acted, written, and as darkly comic as the first. Mr In-Between – much like Barry – is darkly comic, but in the purest Australian sense (laconic, ironic, and really dark). It’s hard to find quality Australian shows on any streaming service, and all-too-easy to fall into the trap of watching extremely good US shows all the time. So I’d recommend this above anything else on the list, if only as a way of diversifying your viewing habits.
In no particular order, my favourite books of the year:
- The Things they Carried (1990) – Tim O’Brien
“But this too is true: stories can save us.”
― Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
This collection of short stories was a revelation. Superbly written, the interlinked tales tell of Tim O’Brien and his platoon before, during, and after the Vietnam War. Thus the author is also the main character, and the stories are apparently a mix of fiction and non-fiction. It all felt pretty fucking real, reading it.
The fourth in the collection, “On the Rainy River” is about O’Brien’s attempts to flee the United States to Canada in order to dodge the draft. He stays in an isolated wilderness tourist resort right near the border during the off-season, trying to summon up the courage to cross the river to Canada. His relationship with the old man who owns the resort is gentle and touching, and his inner conflict moving. It is rare that a short story moves me close to tears, but this one certainly did.
The culmination of On a Rainy River – that the protagonist didn’t have the courage to flee, and that he only went to war because he was too afraid of the opinion of others – is a powerful inversion of the usual thinking on draft-dodging. He does go to war, obviously, and his stories of brotherhood, trauma, the absurdity of the conflict, and his profound loss are powerful.
Look, Tim O’Brien can write. This man can really fucking write. This is one of the best collections I’ve ever read.
- Tribe (2016) – Sebastian Junger (non-fiction)
Tribalism goes to the core of who we are as human beings, and what we need to feel human. Yet modern society, by design, is anti-tribal. As Sebastian Junger argues in his excellent book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging: “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
Tribe is a fascinating look at the alienation of the modern condition. He persuasively argues that tribe was the first and most fundamental form of human society. From these origins, human beings evolved to require three basic things in order to be content: “to feel competent at what they do… to feel authentic in their lives… [and] to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.”
That is, we have a basic need to be good at our jobs, and for those jobs to have meaning. We also instinctively dislike societies that are too unequal. Junger uses plentiful examples from the military and aid workrtd, showing why these groups in particular have a difficult time adjusting on return to the West. The book does not take a particular political side, which I found refreshing, but rather takes the side of our common humanity. Well worth a read.
- Queenpin (2007) – Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott uses noirish tropes and writing traditions – whip smart dialogue, 1940s American slang and settings, femmes fatale, gangsters, speakeasies, heists, double-crosses; all soaked through with hard liquor – but puts a twist on the old formula by having women as central characters. She’s a great pulp writer and Queenpin is one of her best.
In this, a young ingenue, (who is never named – another hardboiled tradition) is taken under the wing of Gloria Denton, a mob boss. The young woman wants to be somebody, and boy, Gloria Denton is the somebody everyone wants to be: sexy, hard-as-nails, smart, chic, and feared. Things go swimmingly until a 
homme-fatale enters the scene, and well, things go downhill from there. It’s noir, after all.
- Brighton Rock (1938) – Graham Greene
Graham Greene can be a dark motherfucker. Brighton Rock tells the grim story of Pinkie Brown, a teenage sociopath and wannabe Kingpin; and Ida Arnold, a kind-hearted, voluptuous, heavy drinking woman who accumulates a lot of boyfriends at a time when such a thing was scandalous.
Pinkie’s efforts to control his patch in Brighton, assure the loyalty of his gang, and cover up his crimes become increasingly fevered and paranoid. The police don’t care but Ida Arnold, a persistent amateur sleuth, does. She is unrelenting.
Like a lot of Greene’s work, there’s a lot about morality and the nature of sin here – and though part of this goes back to Greene’s lifelong struggle with his own Catholic faith – I find the spiritual questions still very interesting for the modern reader.
And holy shit the ending. Holy shit. Like I said: Greene can be a dark motherfucker.
- Machines Like Me (2019) – Ian McEwan
When I told a genre writing comrade that I’d just finished McEwan’s ‘Machines Like me’, she immediately denigrated it as being terrible. When I asked her if she’d read it, she replied: “oh no, just everyone’s been talking about it.” This snippet of conversation is emblematic of two things in the world of 2019 (and presumably 2020): one – we are allowed have very strong opinions about things we know almost nothing about. Whether it be a book, or science, or the motivations of our political opponents. Or anything, really. 
Two, genre writers love their ghetto. As much as we become offended at the suggestion that science fiction can’t also be literature (this fatuous highbrow nonsense certainly gets my goat), writers of horror, SF, and fantasy equally hate it when a literary type tries to intrude into ‘our’ genre.
Much of the criticism I’ve seen of McEwan’s novel has been along these lines: he doesn’t understand science fiction, none of his ideas are new; if only he’d read more SF he’d know this. All with a strong subtext of: get off our lawn! While it is true that McEwan hasn’t read enough SF (this is evident in his interviews about the novel), this, in itself, isn’t enough to condemn a man. Not quite, anyway.
The book? Well, the questions of ethics he explores around artificial intelligence and how we treat this new form of being are not new. Interesting, as far as it goes, but quite unoriginal. Where the book really shines is in its alternate history Britain of the early 1980s. The what if of a world where Alan Turing had not committed suicide and the Japanese hadn’t been nuked, is fascinating and extremely well thought out. The best part of the book, overall, is the writing. There’s a lot of dross out there and quite frankly, reading a story told by an accomplished writer at the height of his abilities is a pleasure.
- The Dry (2016) – Jane Harper
Much as my science fiction associates did not like Machines Like Me, a couple of my crime-writing friends expressed a dislike for The Dry. City cop returns to the town he grew up in as a kid – a town with a secret – to investigate a suspicious death. Hackneyed, they said. Sure. True.
However, like Machines Like Me, I admired the craft of The Dry. It is a well-written page-turner with a compelling cast of characters and a well-thought-out central mystery. The blistering, parched, unforgiving Australian climate is a character here, as with nearly all Australian noir and crime novels (I would classify The Dry as crime). The protagonist, Aaron Falk, talks about city-dwellers coming out to these far-flung places in the outback and not being able to endure, “the crushing vastness of the open land”.
The small town in question here, Kiewarra, is suffering under the worst drought in its history, and like the land, the townspeople and farmers are suffering as well. The depiction of the desperation of small-town life; the frayed psyches, the violence that hovers over everything, is compelling.
Anyway, like I said, a well-crafted page-turner; a very good Australian novel.
Special mentions
Slow Bullets (2015) – Alastair Reynolds. A fast, spare, science fiction novella with a pretty cool twist at 
its heart. The set up is well-worn – a prison ship, a long journey in hibernation, awakening to find the ship isn’t where and when it should be. But he does it all very well.
Build My Gallows High (1946) – Geoffrey Homes. Classic hardboiled novel that went on to become celebrated noir film Out of the Past (1947) starring Robert Mitchum. Red Bailey is a retired private eye running a petrol station in a small town. In a classic noir set-up, a dark figure from his past returns to force him to do one more job (though when I say classic noir set-up, I wonder if this was the first book to establish this trope). Perhaps. Either way, a cracking, suitably dark read.
Princess Bride (1973) – William Goldman. It’s everyone’s favourite movie. A classic. So why wasn’t this in my best books of the year? I suppose I find William Goldman a better screen writer than a novelist. It’s a good novel, though not great. He is, obviously, a brilliant storyteller.
