My Year in Books, 2017

I enjoyed recording the books I read last year, so here’s the 2017 edition.

I was reading two books at the end of 2016, but got distracted by a third, so the first entry for 2017 is…

Inside the former Commonwealth Institute (now the Design Museum). Photo by Chris Guy.

1. The Story of the Design Museum, by Tom Wilson. When I was growing up in Christchurch, there was a small building near the airport — the Brevet Club at Wigram, now sadly gone — with a double-curved roof. In school I learnt that the double curve is a hyperbolic paraboloid, and it’s cool because the curves are made with straight beams. Consequently my main reason for visiting the Design Museum recently wasn’t the collection — although I’m fond of that too — but the opportunity to get a closer look at the roof of the old Commonwealth Institute, now the museum’s new home. The complex geometry of the roof is quite hard to understand from inside or alongside the building. It’s basically a smaller hyperbolic paraboloid within a larger one, but I only worked that out because I bought the book, which includes photos and schematics of the building as it was originally, and as it is now. It’s a quick and easy read, covering the history of the Design Museum, the history of the Commonwealth Institute, and the conversion of the building.
2. Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, by Johan Harstad (Kindle). Maybe you’ve heard of slow food; this is slow fiction. Nothing much happens, and when it does, it happens off stage, so you get a second-hand account as the characters tell each other about it. Norwegian gardener Matthias finds himself lying in the road in the rain on the Faroe Islands, unable to explain why he’s there or how he came by the money in his jacket pocket. That might sound mysterious, or even dramatic, but this is a book of the mundane, in which an ordinary man tries not to stand out. It took me over a month to read, because there’s no urgency to find out what happens next.
3. Lily and the Octopus, by Steven Rowley (Kindle). One man and his dog, but a gay man and a dachshund rather than a shepherd and his border collie. Ted Flask has had Lily since she was a puppy, but now there’s an octopus on her head, trying to take her away. A sweet but weepy story of love, grief, fighting back and accepting the inevitable.
4. The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication, by Alberto Cairo. I bought this after reading an interview with Cairo where he talks about the island of knowledge and the shoreline of wonder. The more you know, the more you realise there is to know — as your island of knowledge expands, your shoreline of wonder gets longer. Great metaphor, but a dull book. He spends a lot of time talking about the importance of presenting data truthfully (coming from a science background, I take that as a given) and a fair amount of time on basic stats (mean, median, mode, standard deviation — again, been there, passed the exam). There are plenty of illustrations, but sometimes they’re hard to understand without the full context. If you want to science up your charts, you may find it useful, but if you’re trying to visualise data to make it easier for non-scientists to understand, it’s not that helpful.
5. Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly (Kindle). Enjoyable, easy-to-read account of the time when a ‘computer’ was a woman who did calculations, and the newly formed NASA needed them so badly it not only hired white women, but also black women — in the Jim Crow, segregated South. An inspiring story of courage in small things — resisting the segregation of bathrooms and cafeteria tables, campaigning to attend meetings — alongside the big changes brought by the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race.
6. Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx. Another slow read. Brokeback Mountain is the standout piece and comes at the end of the book, after 10 other tales of hard, desperate, violent lives in the American West. There’s very little light in Proulx’s dark book, which quickly dispels any romantic notions about the beauty of the West compensating for the limited opportunities; at best the stories manage to be blackly humorous.
7. Five Rivers Met in a Wooded Plain, by Barney Norris. Five lives intersect, briefly, when a car collides with a scooter in Salisbury. It reads more like five short stories, overlaid with a game of ‘spot the connections’, and while they do come together in the end, the metaphor seems a bit strained. Rivers that meet don’t part again, whereas disparate lives touch up against each other briefly and then separate. Interesting, but not 100% satisfying.
8. Deep South, by Paul Theroux. Another lengthy read. Theroux complains about air travel, which seems barely relevant to an account of his road trips to the southern states, and talks a lot about himself, ditto. Sandwiched between the ‘more about me’ sections are his vivid but depressing descriptions of life in the South — great swathes of urban and rural poverty that underfunded local organisations can do little to alleviate, despite their best efforts. Theroux makes frequent comparisons to poverty in the Third World and repeatedly highlights the irony of American individuals and organisations funding aid programmes in Africa, but not in their own country.
9. The Crossing Places, The Janus Stone and The House at Sea’s End, by Elly Griffiths. Technically three books, but with the same characters and on-going story elements. They’re set on the north Norfolk coast and I picked up the first in the series while on holiday there. The main character is forensic archeologist Dr Ruth Galloway, who crosses paths with Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson when the body of a child is found buried in the saltmarsh. All three books are atmospheric page turners, and if you can suspend enough disbelief, the engaging and unconventional characters make for good holiday reading.
10. The Leaping Hare, by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson. An odd book, originally published in 1972, that collects all the strange things people have believed about hares. Although there’s some (possibly outdated) natural history, it largely covers folklore and mythology.
11. A Dying Fall, The Outcast Dead, The Ghost Fields, The Woman in Blue and The Chalk Pit, by Elly Griffiths (Kindle). Finished the Ruth Galloway series — apart from book 4, which had negative reviews — while ill. Easy reading, as much soap opera as mystery, with Norfolk settings and scenery.
12. Strange Fits of Passion, by Anita Shreve. All the domestic violence cliches, albeit with a neat ‘story around the story’ wrapper that adds some modern context. In the main story, Maureen English is delicate and beautiful, her husband is dark and handsome (and alcoholic and violent), she escapes to a tiny fishing village on the Maine coast, where the good people take her in and she falls in love with a tall but gentle fisherman with problems of his own… but it all ends badly, of course. Well written, but the characters and plot are so, so tired.
13. Penguin Bloom: The Odd Little Bird Who Saved a Family, by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive. Text and photos telling the story of the Bloom family after wife and mother Sam is paralysed by a near-fatal fall during a holiday in Thailand. Depressed and angry, she is finding it hard to accept the changes in her life when an injured magpie chick — Penguin — joins the family. Through helping Penguin, she finds hope and the strength to continue. Brutally honest, unsentimental and beautifully illustrated. Buy the hardback to get the photos in colour.
14. Any Human Heart, by William Boyd. Another of Boyd’s romps through the 20th Century (see also: Sweet Caress, no. 25 in last year’s list). The central character, Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, was born in South America in 1906. His life through to 1991 is told through his erratic diaries, with occasional annotations. Taking in an English boarding school, Oxford, Paris, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, New York, London and a small village in France, it touches up against historical events and figures — Picasso, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Jackson Pollack — as the main character fails to find either a lasting relationship or a long-term career. Depressing.
15. The Deep Dark Descending, by Allen Eskins (Kindle). Follow-up to The Heavens May Fall (no.37) in which Detective Max Rupert finally unravels the mystery of his wife’s death. Alternating between a confrontation on a frozen lake on the Canadian border and the events leading up to that point, it maintains the suspense right through to the end. Dark.
16. Breath, by Tim Winton (Kindle). Hard not to use a surfing metaphor to describe this wild ride through Bruce Pike’s teenage years in a small town of coastal Australia. Totally believable and highly recommended.
17. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, by Joanna Cannon. In the endlessly hot summer of 1976, in the cliché cul-de-sac where everyone (thinks they) know everyone else’s business, Mrs Creasy has gone missing. Ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly go looking for Jesus, who will keep everyone safe and bring Mrs Creasy home. Stifling.
18. A Banquet of Consequences, by Elizabeth George. Book 16 in the apparently endless Inspector Lynley series has a clever plot, but takes a long time to get anywhere, thanks to leisurely and not entirely relevant diversions into the lives of all the characters. A gratuitous account of violent rape — which serves only to remind readers that Lynley is empathic as well as tall, blond and handsome — should have been cut by the editor.
19. The Red House, by Mark Haddon. Families, eh? After the death of their mother, doctor Richard decides it would be a good idea to invite his sister, teacher Angela, and her family for a week’s holiday with his new wife and stepdaughter in a cottage on the Welsh border. It’s a bad idea, of course, and the seven characters fall out, create new alliances, find themselves (perhaps) and then head back to their separate lives.
20. Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything, by Aly Raisman (Kindle). Every successful US gymnast has a book, but this one’s a good read. Raisman’s candid account reveals the hard work and heartbreak on the way to London 2012 and Rio 2016. It doesn’t seem worth it.