For the past five years now I’ve been keeping a formal tally of the books I’ve read throughout the preceding twelve months, allocating each of them a mark out of ten and a paragraph or so of notes and observations. These scorecards act as informal aides memoires and are strictly for my eyes only, though taken as a whole and year on year, they provide a fascinating insight into the onward progress of my own reading. Failed projects, wilted enthusiasms, sudden insane passions, they are all charted here in these sequential Word documents. The very randomness of these reading journeys has served to frustrate and annoy me in previous years, leaving me with the sense that I could have done better, that I should have been more organised, that I didn’t stretch myself enough. I have resolved to do better in future, but in spite of all best intentions have rarely done so.
This year’s reading tally marks itself out as different in two distinct ways. Firstly, I have somehow managed to read getting on for twice as many books as what has come to be the norm for me. This might be partly on account of a lower average page count per book – I don’t know, I haven’t counted – but it is also the result of my having set aside more time specifically for reading. So whilst I am still well behind on what I would ideally have achieved, some progress has been made.
The other way in which my 2018 reading year feels different is that – and perhaps this is also a by-product of having read more books – I feel invigorated by the lack of a core focus rather than disappointed by it. I feel I have learned stuff this year, as much as anything by reconnecting with those aspects of literature that resonate most with me. I feel that I have been changed by my reading just as my reading has changed.
Something happened to me roughly halfway through the year, and that something was Eley Williams’s collection Attrib. It is difficult to articulate how hugely excited I was by these stories, which – rather like Camilla Grudova’s The Doll Alphabet last year – seemed to smash so many assumptions about what makes a ‘good short story’. Williams’s stories fall a long way from the Raymond Carver ‘slice of life’ archetype that has become the template for so many first collections and big competition winners. Rather, whilst never eschewing emotion – many of the stories in Attrib made me gasp aloud with their poignancy – they are mainly about language, about the many uses to which language might be put. They are about formal inventiveness, and they are never afraid to wear their intellect on their sleeve.
Reading these stories set a fire in me to up my game. More, to keep seeking out work that would challenge and inspire me in similar measure. Thus began a period where I read in quick succession a series of works that have marked this year for me in indelible ways: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which I can honestly say is one of the most perfect novels I’ve ever read, First Love by Gwendoline Riley, Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici, Munich Airport by Greg Baxter, Missing by Alison Moore, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Milkman by Anna Burns and Berg by Ann Quin, the pearl of them all, which has attained a kind of ideal status in my mind as the point where the hallucinatory power of language and the nervous drive of story become perfectly fused.
These works, and what I feel to be my collaboration with their authors in reading them, continue to resonate, working a profound change of mood and heightening of ambition within me and in my writing. In recent weeks I have also begun working my way through the T. S. Eliot Prize longlist, an experience that is proving similarly energising and instructive. In the raw power of words – the sounds they make – as well as the formal inventiveness on the page that sometimes only poetry can provide, I am stunned by the richness and erudition and energy of these collections, which have reconnected me instantly with the excitement and writing-hunger that overwhelmed me when first I read Eliot, Plath, Lowell, Szirtes, Fainlight. What I felt most on reading these new collections, some of them by new poets, was I’ve been away too long.
The vast part of my energy this year has been spent in constructing my next novel, The Good Neighbours. This is a book I first began to write about four years ago, when we were living in Devon. It has been through monumental changes since then, but the important work of the last six months has been sped on its way – goaded forward – by the driving inspiration provided by the works I’ve mentioned above, by the changes and development in my own writing practice that have occurred through this reading year. I finished a complete third draft of The Good Neighbours just a couple of days ago. I’m thrilled to have the book mostly done by the close of the year. What thrills me most is that it is my most personal and – to me – most risk-taking book yet. What I can say for certain is that it represents, exactly, where I am as a writer right now, a piece of ground I want to build on. In this at least, the book is a success. Whether it is a success in more outward-facing, worldly ways will be for others to decide.
Next year, my third novel The Dollmaker will finally be released into the world. What makes me most excited about this is that I am happy with the book, which sounds a simple and obvious thing to say but it really isn’t. The Dollmaker took a long time to come together but it came right in the end. The book being published in April is the truest and best version of itself that I could possibly make it, which is all any writer can aim for, really. I hope that those of you who choose to read it will love it as much as I do. I’ll announce details of events and interviews about The Dollmaker as they become available.
I am also thrilled to announce that in September Titan will be publishing a new and definitive edition of The Silver Wind. Titan have presented me with a wonderful opportunity not only to edit and revise the existing text, but to add new material. The new edition will include two previously uncollected Silver Wind stories as well as a brand new novella, which I always intended to be part of the original book but that never worked entirely to my satisfaction. I spent part of this summer redrafting that novella, and then re-editing the entire text as a continuum. I’m very happy with the results and hugely excited about having The Silver Wind out in the world in a form that feels complete and true to my intentions. I’ll be posting cover art here as soon as it’s ready, as well as a fuller description of the book itself.
2018 saw me publish criticism for the first time in The Quietus, a matter of particular satisfaction to me as I love that magazine. Its left-field and idiosyncratic approach to the arts feels particularly important in a world of increasing blandishment and I was especially pleased to make my debut there with an essay on the literature of 9/11 that necessitated a considerable amount of research and hard graft generally. Writing this essay, as well as another long one I wrote for Strange Horizons on the new TV adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock was an enriching experience that made me reassess my approach to criticism – not only the subjects I want to write about but the way I want to write about them. I would like to make my criticism more personal, for one, more contiguous with my fiction writing. I would also like it to be more focused on subjects that actively interest me, as opposed to fighting battles that cannot be won and that are in any case false conflicts. My first revelation along these lines came last year, when I resolved never again to use the falsely opposing terms genre SF and literary SF. This year it was the appalling standard of some of the debate around Anna Burns’s Milkman, of which a particularly offensive and need I add ignorant piece in the Times marked the nadir.
The fact is – and this should be obvious – that there is no conflict between books that focus on immersive narrative (‘a jolly good story’) and those that focus upon the ways and means by which such stories are created. One does not negate the other, any more than a reader who prefers one approach to putting words on a page should count themselves superior to those who prefer another. And yet I continue to see entire segments of the online debate around books polarising itself around precisely these non-existent issues. It’s tiresome and I’ve had enough of it. I won’t promise not to read any more of these articles (for the flesh is weak) but I am going to make a particular effort not to write any. I would like to focus instead on criticism that actively engages with work I identify with as a writer and consider to be important. The kind of critical writing we find at sites such as Splice and This Space are beacons in this regard, as are the informed and in-depth discussions on offer at the Backlisted and Republic of Consciousness Prize podcasts.
The ugliness and chaos of our current politics only serve to emphasize the necessity of writing and reading as far outside the box as we can bear to push ourselves. Writing is first and foremost the transmission of ideas and we should not doubt its importance. The work that readers and writers do together has always and will continue to form the building blocks of practical and philosophical change.