So, every new year on this blog I do a recap post for the year just past - and man, what a year 2017 has been. The world continues noisily going mad, I've finally finished university having submitted my Masters dissertation in September, and I'm lucky enough to have gone from studenthood straight into a part-time job with the Church Army, alongside which I continue to write - poetry here and there, but mostly grinding away in an effort to produce a workable draft of the first in my planned series of novels, The Improbable Interplanetary Revolutions of Naomi Moss; but you don't care about my life, dear internet stranger who for whatever unfathomable reasons may be reading this weird little blog of spewed idiosyncratic reflections on various wodges of paper and ink - you care, like me, about books, and so if you're reading this recap post I can only imagine it is to glean some insights into my final reflections on the material my brain has eaten and digested (and in places excreted) across the last twelve months. And wow! In 2017 we saw a new record set for this blog, with 69 books finished - a full 23 more than the previous best.
To what can we attribute this enormous disparity?
Well, to an extent it's because I've read quite a lot of really short books, which I'm still obligated to write individual posts for, but which I won't be mentioning most of here. To a larger degree, it's because I spent most of summer dedicatedly reading masses of material about Kurdistan for my dissertation - which is easily the most enjoyable research project I'd ever undertaken.
- Most interesting specific field in non-fiction: Kurdistan
Also, since November last year I've been trying to develop as a poet, and so have been reading lots of poetry: these books tend to be a lot shorter than typical others, but are far more often worthy of wide recommendation, so:
- Poets worth checking out: Alan Ginsberg and the beats generally, Vikram Seth, Kate Tempest, e. e. cummings, Mark Waldron
Eh, there's quite a lot of books I'm going to link into this, so rather than keep trying to preface each mention with a properly couching bit of prose I'm just gonna dump them all in no particular order. C'est la vie.
- Best comic strip (in anthology format): Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
- Most redundantly common-sensical non-fiction: The School of Life's On Being Nice
- Most reductively status-quo-apologist non-fiction: The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
- Non-fiction that uses immense philosophical complexity to assert conclusions that are basically common-sense morality: Peter Unger's Living High & Letting Die
- Books by Noam Chomsky to convert hand-wringing liberals to genuine progressives: Occupy and On Anarchism
- Most sentimentally enjoyable series I've revisited: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Classic kids' book (The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) which, though good, is nowhere near as good as an edgier funnier modern classic kids' book - Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
- Classic experimental play (Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett) which, though interesting, is frankly just a bit pretentious and boring compared with a play with similar experimentation applied in a far more theatrically rewarding setup - Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
- Really good Christian book on healthy perspective: John Ortberg's When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box
- Really good secular book on healthy perspective: David Foster Wallace's This Is Water
- Best textbook - Feminism: Issues and Arguments by Jennifer Saul
- Most depressing non-fiction - James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia
- Least depressing non-fiction - Helen Russell's The Year of Living Danishly
- Books all conservative Christians would benefit humankind greatly if they read and absorbed - James Jones's Jesus and the Earth and Justin Welby's Dethroning Mammon
- Probably the most difficult to describe: The Age of Earthquakes
- Thinking back, probably the highest enjoyment to word ratio - Where Cats Meditate
- Most likely to become a legit classic in the future: W. P. Young's The Shack
- Best biographical work - George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia
- Most satisfying non-fiction (also a bonus mention for being the only book on this blog so far which has been stolen by a party-crashing drug dealer and then returned to me safely) - Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics
- And I read lots of really really really good novels this year, and they're all good in different ways but in also kind of overlapping ways, and it would be hard to break them down into 'best emotional tuggings' or 'funniest' or 'most exciting' or 'most poignant' or whatever, so here's just my selected top seven: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Kate Tempest's the bricks the built the houses, and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
I'm still very much enjoying writing this blog and finding value in it as personal project, so buckle in for a buttload more books in 2018. There's been a pre-selected pile of items which I'd been planning to read alongside the start of my writing project, which I've now started working my way through, so there are some very interesting posts coming along hopefully. I'm still trying to tip the balance more toward reading books from female and minority background writers, as I'm painfully aware that most of the stuff I read (and most of the stuff most people read, given the nature of privilege in publishing industries and the tides of literary and academic history) is by white men, not at all to say that these aren't generally good books, but if one of the core points of reading widely is to broaden your empathic horizons then it is woefully shortsighted to read without taking such factors of context into account and seeking to correct for them in what one chooses to imbibe.
Anyway.
Whoever you are, dear reader, I wish you all the best, and thank you for visiting this blog whether you are a regular or first-time-stumble-across-googler: happy new year.
Peace & love
Isaac Stovell
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