A Reading Year: Twelve Books That Rearranged Something

I read ninety-one books this year, which sounds impressive until you learn that thirty of them were for a prize jury and I would not choose to repeat the experience. What follows is not a best-of. It is the shorter list: the ones that moved something and left it moved.

The ones about work

Three of my twelve were novels in which people are shown doing their jobs at length and with competence — a species of book I will always defend. There is no faster route to a reader's trust than a character who genuinely knows how to do something. Give me a chapter on how to reglaze a window and I will follow that narrator anywhere.

It is also, quietly, a class question. A great deal of literary fiction is set among people whose work is either invisible or unnecessary. The novels that show labour — its rhythms, its boredom, its small pride — are doing something politically as well as formally interesting.

The ones that broke a rule

Two books this year did something I would have told a workshop not to attempt. One withheld its protagonist's name for two hundred pages. One changed tense mid-chapter, repeatedly, without apology. Both worked completely.

I find this reassuring and slightly humiliating in equal measure. The rules are real — they encode a great deal of hard-won knowledge about how attention works — but they describe the average case, and no one has ever loved an average book.

The one I will reread

There is always one. This year it was a slim novel about a translator, roughly a hundred and forty pages, in which almost nothing happens and I twice had to put it down and walk around the room.

I will not name it, because recommendation flattens things and I would rather you found it the way I did — badly shelved, wrongly categorised, on the strength of a single sentence read standing up in a shop. That is still the best way to find a book. It is worth the inefficiency.