The best of 2011: books
Time Out's Books editor Chris Moss picks out his favourite books and authors of the year
Fifty-two weeks means around 45 fantastic Books of the Week here at Time Out – some weeks none merit the title and in others the key book turns out to be terrible – but it’s only when you scan back through the titles that you realise it’s been a really great year for books. We’ve had new books by Anna Funder, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Edna O’Brien, David Foster Wallace, John Berger, Joyce Carol Oates, Linda Grant and two by Julian Barnes. Graphic works, crime and IT analyses all continue to boom, London has inspired a couple of great novels and at least a dozen highly readable non-fiction titles, and Nicholson Baker wrote a hilariously naughty porno. So a pretty vintage year, despite the difficulties faced by bookshops, the aggressive advertising by Amazon and the other e-reader manufacturers, the recession, the jellification of the mass brain, the fucking-over of town centres and all the other socio-economic trends that scream: don’t read, just eat, tweet and watch telly. Here’s a quick-fix, one-stop round-up, so you know what to pick up off the ‘3 for 2’ tables and go looking for, on or offline, now or in the new year.
The best books of 2011
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Novel of the year
Graham Swift’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ (Picador) is that rare thing: a novel that articulates the thought processes and language of the working classes without condescension or caricature. The slowly unfolding tragedy of Jack Luxton, his wife Ellie and his brother Tom, a soldier fighting in the Iraq War, is mesmerising and deeply melancholy, opening out into a ‘condition of England’ parable that remains unsettling long after you’ve finished the book.
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Writer of the year
With January’s short-story collection, ‘Pulse’, and August’s Booker-winning novella ‘The Sense of an Ending – both published by Cape – Julian Barnes consolidated his position as one of Britain’s finest storytellers and most articulate decoders of contemporary life. While some of the tales in ‘Pulse’ were comedies of manners and class (in particular the liberal upper-middle class to which the author belongs), it also shared the heavier themes of the novella: age, time, death, friendship and personal loss.
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Comedy book of the year
Most of these were earnest, unfunny or/and crap, but Steve Coogan’s rendezvous in print with his alter-ego (if you’ve seen him moaning on the telly about the tabloids you’ll know we’re not quite talking about a ‘persona’ here) in ‘I, Partridge: We Need to Talk about Alan’ (Harper Collins) was skilfully executed, as well as laugh-out funny, razor-sharp and engagingly absurdist.
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Fictional debut of the year
Twenty-five year old Belgrade-born Téa Obreht became the youngest person ever to win the Orange Prize with ‘The Tiger’s Wife’, a novel woven from the stories told by a grandfather to a young woman doctor. With an obvious debt to Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez – as well as to Obreht’s creative writing tutors at Cornell University – the story conflates rural myth and urban reality, the personal and the historical, and obliquely records a new generation’s memory of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
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Loo read of the year
‘Lives of the Novelists’ by John Sutherland (Profile) is a collection of 294 wise, witty biographical essays on writers from John Bunyan to Benjamin Disraeli to Paul Auster. Why read the ‘Viz’ annual or some unfunnily ironic ‘novelty’ book when you can learn something and take a view on supposed great writers – Evelyn Waugh, J G Ballard, Aldous Huxley, you know the ones we mean – that’s healthily, sanely irreverent.
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Publisher of the year
Non-fiction publisher Verso Books – founded in 1970 by the staff of the New Left Review – continues to evolve a genre all of its own that we could call populist politics, with a dash of Marxism lite. This year there was a lot to be learned from Owen Jones’s ‘Chavs’, about the class prejudices prevalent in middle-class white culture’; Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay’s ‘White Riot’, chronicling the role of race in punk rock; and Ross Perlin’s ‘Intern Nation’, about the use and abuse of unpaid workers in all industries. And if these seem rather earnest, last month we previewed a scrapbook-style compilation of Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine Savage Messiah that was very retro but refreshingly low-tech.
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Travel book of the year
In a weak year for travel, the thirteenth edition of the ‘Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World’ (Harper Collins) was the most inspiring sketchpad for anyone harbouring global wanderlust aspirations. A tad controversial because of the publishers’ erroneous press release claiming ‘15% of Greenland's permanent ice cover’, it’s nonetheless an amazing source of information and an impressive work of both cartography and graphic design.
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Music book of the year
The argument in ‘Retromania’ by Simon Reynolds (Faber & Faber) extends beyond popular music but at its core was a meditation on an online world in which everyone owns – but doesn’t value – the whole of the global back catalogue of all genres across a century of record making. It was gloomily enlightening, the sort of book that makes you dim the lights and weep along to your favourite tracks with a renewed sense of loss.
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London book of the year
There have been many excellent books about Time Out’s mother city this year, but ‘Londoners’ by Craig Taylor (Granta) gets the five and a quarter stars because it looks at London through ordinary people’s experience. Taylor’s collection of craftily edited first-person narratives takes readers to every sociable corner and social strata, malevolent mood and glorious moment, grand avenue and grim armpit of the capital; it will be a valuable primary source for the city’s future historians.
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Reissue of the year
Helen Hodgman’s debut ‘Blue Skies’, which first appeared in 1976, was republished this year by Melbourne-based Text Publishing (along with Hodgman’s Somerset Maugham prize-winning second novel ‘Jack and Jill’). The story of a young wife watching a clock that seems forever stuck at three-in-the-afternoon is a stirring dissection of domestic servitude of the everyday, married-with-a-child sort. The Tasmania setting is not so much exotic as ethereal and feels as humdrum and hemming-in as downtown Surbiton.
... and the worst
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2011's turkey
This was a close one, with non-poet Jarvis Cocker’s pulp-worthy book of lyrics for Faber, Jo Nesbo’s overrated clunkers and Jack Kerouac’s ‘lost’ first novel all in with a chance – but the annual ‘read this and weep’ accolade must go to ‘The Inner Man: The Life of JG Ballard’ by John Baxter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) for its spitefulness, misguidedness and overall irrelevance. A powerful, enduring example of a missed opportunity.
The best of 2011 in London
The Time Out editors have all picked their favourite events and moments of 2011. See if you agree with them.
- Art exhibitions
- Books
- Cabaret moments
- Classical music
- Clubbing
- Comedy shows
- Dance shows
- DVDs
- Films of the year
- Food & Drink
- Gay & Lesbian
- London events
- London music
- The best albums of 2011
- The best songs of 2011
- People of the year
- Shopping & Style
- Theatre
- TV shows
Comments & ratings