Well, someone forced me to do it.  In so far as they challenged me to do it.  Or rather, they told me that someone else who’d just arrived at their sixtieth birthday had taken this challenge on.  Same difference really. Anyway, I have one default response to a challenge – as long as it involves a literary or cultural feat rather than anything physical:

Challenge Accepted.

So, 60 books in 60 days, starting on 31 July, finishing on 28 September.    This is the penultimate instalment of my reading diary, with the final one to follow on 24 September.   I will, of course, endeavour to avoid spoilers.

Rules?  To summarise:

• No re-reads unless the original read was at least 40 years ago.
• Series: e.g. a trilogy will count as 3 books if it has been published as 3 separate books even if it has later appeared in a one-volume edition.
• Books can be fiction (all genres, including childrens/YA) and non-fiction (other than reference books and instruction manuals), playscripts, a volume of poetry, or a collection of short stories (in the latter two cases, I must read all the poems or stories).
• I’ve added one further rule, on reflection – no two books by the same author.  That will stop me meeting my target by devouring a whole raft of Kate Atkinsons or whatever, which would be fun but not really in the spirit of the challenge.  So, sixty books, by sixty writers.

11 September. Day 43  Finished Aminatta Forna’s The Devil that Danced on the Water. Brilliant, fascinating, moving.  The narrative was labyrinthine, moving around from Before (before her father was arrested) to After (what happened to the rest of the family after his arrest) but only towards the final pages coming to that terrible truth at the heart of it all – what happened to him  and ultimately how and why he died.  Extraordinary.

On to Livi Michael’s Succession.  I have read most of her adult novels (Inheritance, All the Dark Air, Their Angel Reach) and read to my daughter at least one of her stories about an intrepid and resourceful hamster called Frank.  This one is historical fiction, the first in a trilogy set during the Wars of the Roses.

As a child and a teenager I devoured historical novels.  Rosemary Sutcliff, Henry Treece, Geoffrey Trease, Leon Garfield – each of them in my memory evokes a particular period of history.  Later on I read Margaret Irwin, Edith Sitwell’s books on Elizabeth I (Fanfare for Elizabeth and The Queens and the Hive), and Rosemary Hawley Jarman’s We Speak no Treason.

This last is particularly relevant to the Livi Michael trilogy, and I’m quite excited about reawakening my earlier fascination with this period of history, and rediscovering a writer who I know through novels with a very contemporary setting.

I’m also about to start on Philip Roth’s The Plot against America.  From fictionalised real history to an ‘alternative’ history, in which Roosevelt is defeated in 1940 and Lindbergh becomes President. Intriguingly, it’s an alternative personal history too – the history of the Roth family had events turned out in this way.  I think my first encounter with alternative history was in Joan Aiken’s terrific, gothic children’s book, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, set in the reign of James III, when a channel tunnel has been built, via which wolves have migrated into Britain in large numbers.   Probably the majority of works in this genre, however, have taken World War II as their setting, positing some crucial moment at which everything changed, allowing a Nazi victory in Europe (and beyond).  The more one knows of the ‘real’ history, the more fascinating (and potentially contentious) this is.

Also on my reading pile (though probably not as part of this project) is Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, written in 1935, and positing the rise of a far-right demagogue to the Presidency…  That title was echoed in a film I dimly recall watching, and being horribly chilled by, It Happened Here, subtitled ‘the story of Hitler’s England’.

The Plot… will also, as it happens, be my first Roth.

Caitlin Moran’s piece ‘Reading is Fierce‘ seems especially pertinent in light of this project.*  I allowed myself an unseemly moment of hubris when she mentioned the ‘challenge’ of reading fifty-nine books in five months as a judge on the Baileys Prize (ha!  Try sixty books in under three months, you lightweight!).  But then, there’s this.

And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation.  That old lady on the bus with her Orwell; the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell; the teenager roaring through Capote – they are not engaged in idle pleasure.  Their heads are on fire.  Their hearts are flooding.  With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss –  you are the mathematical calculation that plots the trajectory of the blazing, crashing Zeppelin.  You – pale, punchable reader – are terraforming whole worlds in your head, which will remain with you till the day you die.  These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone.  And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia, or Jamaica Inn, or Gormenghast will still be there: as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them – hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on a bus.

That’s my life she’s writing about, my life with my head in a book, from a four-year-old just graduating from Janet & John to real stories (never ‘just a story’, stories matter, stories can make you fly), to a sixty-year-old powering through novels and memoirs and poems for some daft challenge, reading on buses, in waiting rooms, last thing at night and first thing in the morning.  Singing that ‘unseen, life-changing duet’ with each writer I encounter.  Glorious.

Oh, and I can’t ever ever read Moran’s piece ‘To Teenage Girls on the Edge’ without having quite a big cry. It’s everything I wanted to, tried to, meant to say to my own teenage girl when she was in that place, but said so much better than I ever could.

Ooh, this Livi Michael is good.

12 September. Day 44

A difficult day but in what free time there was, I progressed mightily with Succession. Once one has got one’s head round the Dukes of This and Earls of That (another disadvantage with a Kindle, BTW – Livi Michael kindly provides a cast list at the front of the book, but it’s far more faff to refer to it in an electronic book than in a real one) the narrative is compelling, the characters fascinating (especially the two Margarets) and the writing beautiful.

I’ve always taken the view that any hierarchy of literary merit must ignore the notion of ‘genre fiction’.  There’s good writing, and there’s bad.  There are literary prize winners that are unreadable, ‘classics’ that are turgid and dull, and crime or horror or historical novels that are written with such power and depth that they stay in the mind and the heart long after the last page is turned.  Of course many novels refuse to be categorised, but there are fine writers who are not only unashamed to be part of a genre, but also exploit and transcend the constraints of that genre.  Historical fiction as a genre includes plenty of dross, some of which I read (and quickly tired of) in my teens – but there’s plenty of excellent writing too, and this is a great example.

13 September. Day 45 – Finished Succession.  Obviously given my self-imposed rule about not reading more than one book by the same writer, I can’t go straight on to the next title in the trilogy, but I will look forward to it immensely once this challenge is complete.   Michael tells her story through a number of different voices, those of major players in the events and those of very minor players, mentioned but unnamed in the chronicles.  And she threads the accounts in the actual chronicles through her fictional narrative, so we read of the events in the words of writers who lived at that time, and then she takes us into the thoughts and feelings of her protagonists so that they live and breathe for us.

The Plot against America is splendid.  And chilling.  Roth shows how the Lindbergh presidency allows prejudices – primarily anti-semitism  in this context – which had previously been whispered or shared only with those of like mind to be spoken clearly and loudly and without shame.  We’ve seen that very recently on the streets of the USA.

On now to another writer who I’ve loved for many years, and who very sadly died only a few months ago, far far too young, Helen Dunmore.  It’s another historical novel, but much more recent history.  The Betrayal is the sequel to The Siege, set in Leningrad after the Second World War, and I’m looking forward to it, and glad that there are still a few of her novels – and all of her poetry – for me to enjoy.

14 September. Day 46 – The Betrayal takes us into the world of Stalin’s oppressive dictatorship, where everyone has learned to speak quietly because there’s always someone listening, where everyone lives in fear of a denunciation or just of coming to the notice of the powers that be, for good or bad reasons.  It reminds me in that respect of another recent read, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter which evokes this atmosphere very powerfully.

15 September. Day 47 – Finished The Betrayal.  Brilliant, beautiful and sad.  It really does evoke that world where ‘they’ can do whatever they want, regardless of truth, regardless of sense, regardless even of self-interest, and you – the ordinary citizen, even the Party official, should the wind change direction – can do nothing to prevent it.   The central characters (who carry over from The Siege) are (as one of the reviews pointed out) perhaps unrealistically beyond reproach.  However, they are vividly and sympathetically drawn, and what Dunmore shows is how their integrity, their courage, their dignity is of so little use to them in the face of paranoid tyranny.   It shows also how hope survives, just.  They told themselves after the siege was over that things would get better.  And despite the betrayal of that hope, there is still a glimmer at the end of the novel.

Next up, from Stalin’s USSR to present-day Turkey, for Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve.  

Also finished The Plot against America.   A couple of the reviews give a spoiler-free flavour of the book:

I called the book ‘astonishing’, but what astonishes is not this wild counter-history – it is presented too plausibly for that – or any fireworks in the prose, which is uncommonly sober, though always elegant. What’s astonishing is the way Roth puts together the stories of the shaken Jewish family and an America that can’t see what’s happening to it, that isn’t shaken enough. ‘They live in a dream,’ Philip’s father says, ‘and we live in a nightmare.’ (Michael Wood, London Review of Books)

Roth … dramatizes two vast and contradictory principles simultaneously: on the one hand, the susceptibility of American individualism to the cult of celebrity, and of American faith in democracy to a tyranny of the majority, leading to a particular vulnerability to unscrupulous politicians who win widespread popular support and gain a grip on the three branches of government; and, on the other, the distinctively American sense of freedom, stiffening the will to resist such political depravities, a will that’s integral to the country’s values, heritage, and history. The novel’s great tragic power lies precisely in the clash between the two. (Richard Brody, The New Yorker)

The New Yorker piece, notably, is recent (February 2017, whilst the book was actually published in 2004).  It valiantly avoids spelling out the all-too-evident contemporary parallels (particularly given that the current incumbent of the White House drew explicitly on America First rhetoric in his campaign and in his inaugural speech).

16 September. Day 48 – Started two new books.  Three Daughters of Eve has already captivated me.  Its protagonist, Peri, is engaging and fascinating.  We meet her first in the present day, a woman in middle age, attempting to hang on to her self-confidence in the face of an eye-rolling teenage daughter.  Yes, I think we can identify…  But the narrative gets very dark, very quickly.   The setting is not familiar to me – of course I know a little of Turkey’s history and recent events, but not enough, and I look forward to deepening my understanding.

The second new one is The Loney, by Andrew Michael Hurley.  That’s been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile for ages, and I’m still not 100% convinced it’s ideal bedtime reading, so if it gives me nightmares I might have to swap.  So far, so undefinably creepy.  We know things are off, but not quite how, let alone why.  Not yet scared but definitely uneasy… It comes with a ringing endorsement from Stephen King who is the master of unease (he also does full-on gross-out grue, of course, but it’s the unease, the uncanny, the sense of a place being just a bit wrong, that I think he does best).

17 September. Day 49 – Finished Three Daughters of Eve.  Whilst it’s not short on action, it is preoccupied with questions of spirituality and faith (not only religious conviction but feminism), exploring them through Peri’s ill-matched parents, and through her encounters as a student at Oxford, where she becomes one of the eponymous ‘three daughters’.  Peri is introspective and constantly questioning – she characterises herself as ‘confused’ because she cannot resolve the contradictions she has either inherited or acquired.   Shafak weaves the philosophical debates into personal and political crises as she moves between the different time frames – the present day, unfolding almost real time at a posh Istanbul dinner party, childhood, and student days.  Fascinating.

Treating myself to the new Lesley Glaister, The Squeeze.  Another writer who I’ve enjoyed enormously over the years (along with Livi Michael, Glaister was involved with the MA Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, during the period when I worked there).

18 September. Day 50 – Lesley Glaister has never been afraid of going to dark places – often there is a strong element of the gothic, often there is murder and always there are terrible secrets.

Glaister’s territory is suburban Gothic, but unlike Angela Carter or Margaret Atwood, she’s not interested in folkloric excursions into fairy tale forests or the thornier thickets of feminist irony. Her stories, couched in humour and social observation, are firmly rooted in the domestic and mundane. Babies are dropped on floors, young women locked in attics and fathers murdered in their beds, but they are usually polishing off a Pot Noodle in between last breaths.

This novel is no exception.  It begins with two lives which would seem to have no possible connection – a teenager in Romania, dreams of University abandoned, struggling to provide for her family, and a married, Norwegian businessman.  But connect they do.

Excellent as always, and makes me want to revisit her earlier novels.

Off to Ghana now, where I spent some of my childhood.   Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ Tail of the Blue Bird is a whodunnit, set in ‘the Ghanaian hinterland’, where old and new worlds clash.  So this one ticks two boxes, one for genre and one for setting.

And it’s a delight.  The storytelling is shared between Kayo, the young forensic pathologist armed with all of the science stuff, and Opanyin Poku, the old hunter who is armed with proverbs and stories.  Parkes trusts his story and its tellers to communicate with readers even though they may know nothing of Ghana, its languages and its legends.  He’s a poet and that shines through on every page. He makes you see the colours, taste the food and the palm wine.

19 September. Day 51 – Finished The Loney.  The word that comes to mind is bleak – the bleakness of the landscape, the bleakness of a faith that focuses inexorably on sin, punishment and damnation, and the bleakness of the loss of faith.  There is evil, and its pull is as relentless as that of the deadly tides.   Is it a horror novel?  It shares some tropes with that genre but there is an entirely deliberate ambiguity in the narrative:

“you knew something had happened, but quite what it was or why, you weren’t entirely sure.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/11/andrew-michael-hurley-there-is-no-place-more-terrifying-than-your-own-mind

Hurley suspends the story in a limbo between the supernatural and the merely strange: it is not clear whether the fantastic has occurred, or whether characters are mad, or which of these would be worse.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/the-loney-andrew-michael-hurley-review-gothic-novel

Now reading The Silent Wife, by A S A Harrison.  This is a psychological thriller, and it’s both Harrison’s debut and her final novel as she died before completing her second.   It was greeted by the inevitable, tiresome cries of ‘this year’s Gone Girl/Girl on the Train‘ – I enjoyed both of those enormously but it’s irritating that we need to pigeonhole everything so that Amazon can tell us that, if we liked x, we will like y.  Not necessarily so.  Anyway, so far it has drawn me in very neatly, so that although I don’t exactly like either of the main characters, I do very much want to know how (as we’re told from the start will happen) Jodi becomes a killer.

Also reading Roddy Doyle’s Two Pints.  The origins of this collection of short dialogues are interesting, as all of the entries appeared on Facebook before being gathered together in a book.  Doyle ‘used the social network as a home for a series of conversations between two middle-aged men, perched at a bar, analysing the news of the day and attempting to make sense of it.’

20 September. Day 52 – Finished The Silent Wife.   I didn’t end up liking either Joni or Todd any more by the end of the book than I had at the beginning but contrary to popular wisdom that isn’t essential (did anyone like either of the protagonists in Gone Girl?  Really?), though I was certainly rooting for her rather than him.  Unlike Gone Girl, this isn’t a narrative that depends upon twists – rather it builds its characters and its plot little by little, and whilst both narrators are unreliable, they’re only unreliable in the way that anyone is in recounting their own life.  It’s a very clever, subtle portrayal – we see, little by little, below the beautifully arranged surface of their lives, see the fault lines in their relationship, and in their own pasts, fault lines which open up and engulf them.  Susan Harrison only ventured into fiction in her 60s.  She died of cancer, aged 65, just before her debut novel was published.

Just started another debut novel, Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage.  Published in 1985, it’s set in the late 50s, and tells the story of one family who made the journey from the West Indies to the UK in the hope of a better life.  It’s similar territory to that explored by Andrea Levy in Small Island, published twenty years later, though her immigrants arrived here in the immediate postwar period,  rather than the late 50s.

Finished Two Pints.  Wickedly funny, very rude and sweary, and surreal (check out young Damien’s scientific researches…).  The two drinkers talk about all the things that two blokes in a pub might talk about.  The missis, the kids, the football, politics, religion, sex – and they mark the passing of various notable people who’ve just died, in ways that manage to be funny, rude and sweary, and often very poignant.  I’ve read lots of his more recent ‘obits’, and I particularly remember the Two Pints tribute to Bowie…

-I remember once, I was havin’ me breakfast. An’ I saw me da starin’ at me. So, I said, ‘Wha’?’ An’ he says, ‘Are yeh goin’ to work lookin’ like tha’?’ I still servin’ me time and, like, I was wearin’ me work clothes. An’ me overalls were in me bag. So I didn’t know what he was on abou’. ‘Get up an’ look at yourself in the fuckin’ mirror,’ he says. I was still wearin’ me Aladdin Sane paint. Across me face, like.
-You were ou’ the night before.
-Not really. Only down the road. Sittin’ on the wall beside the chipper, with the lads. Sneerin’ at the fuckin’ world. But that was what it was like. Bowie was our God.

Off to Italy now for a spot of crime and detection, with Inspector Montalbano.  Andrea Camilleri’s August Heat will be my first Montalbano (and I haven’t seen the TV series either), so I’m looking forward to discovering another new crime writer.

21 September. Day 53 – Enjoying The Final Passage.  I keep having to remind myself how young Leila is, when I get frustrated with her for getting entangled with Michael who is so so obviously a wrong ‘un, feckless, faithless and by and large useless.  But she’s hardly more than a child herself, and girls and even grown women who should be old enough to know better do fall for feckless, faithless and useless men. I dare say the reverse is true but surely to a lesser extent – there’s a whole culture of women standing by their men, when the sensible thing would clearly be to kick him out or walk away.  It’s rarely that simple and in many situations – particularly where there’s a child involved – neither of those options may seem possible.  Of course the relationship between Leila and Michael is only one aspect of the novel – the passage from Jamaica to England is what drives it, and that’s powerfully done.  The contrasts are both obvious – from heat and humidity that saps the energy to cold that gets into the bones – and less so. Even though they come from what we would see as poverty, the squalor of living conditions in London horrifies them, the dirt and the broken things that no-one bothers to mend.  It’s a desperately sad account, and hard to see much hope for the future, given where the narrative leaves Leila, so profoundly alone in a strange land.

22 September. Day 54 – Montalbano is delightful.  Despite the heinous nature of the crime being investigated, there’s a great deal of humour in the characterisation and the dialogue.  But there’s another thread running through it, of political commentary:

How had Papa Dante put it?

Ah, servile Italy, you are sorrow’s hostel,

a ship without helmsman in terrible storms,

lady not of the provinces, but of a brothel!

Italy was still servile, obeying at least two masters, America and the Church, and the storms had become a daily occurrence, thanks to a helmsman whom she would have been better off without.

Montalbano cares about justice.  And meantime he spends much of this particular novel stripped to his underwear in the office, with only a small hand-held fan to keep him cool as he navigates witness testimonies, police bureaucracy, corruption and protection rackets.

Two new books to start now:  Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Ali Smith’s Hotel World.

23 September. Day 55 – Neither O’Connor nor Smith is totally new to me.  I’ve read A Good Man is Hard to Find, and The Whole Story and other Stories – strangely both collections of short stories, which I tend not to favour.  O’Connor is fascinating – Southern Gothic if one has to pigeonhole her, but she herself responded to those who called her writing cynical or brutal that:

The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. …When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

Smith’s short story collection was terrific, and I’ve wanted to read one of her novels for some time (especially since hearing and falling rather in love with her on Desert Island Discs a while back).  And Hotel World is glorious.  It’s clever (a Guardian reviewer said that ‘I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory … so cleverly insinuated into a novel’), but it never felt to me that it was ‘look at me! look at me!’ cleverness, just virtuoso writing with heart and humour and humanity.  She reminds me in a way of Jon McGregor, whose work I love.  Note to self: read more Smith, and read McGregor’s  latest, Reservoir 13.

24 September. Day 56 – Just finished Fay Musselwhite’s Contraflow. I’ve taken my time over it – each poem needs to be savoured, not just consumed and then on to the next. There are some astonishing moments here:

From ‘Firewood’:

then we rouse in it

a thing with breath to rage against dim,

to syncopate our undertones, rid the roomscape

of straight edge and flickered repeat.

Or this from ‘Last night’:

             mist rolled in –

a settlement of pale net layered itself

on the hillside opposite, and sagged

into gardens and lanes, bleared terraces

of gable-ends, nestling in to stifle all

but its own rumour, letting only the pin-glow

of street and window lights poke through.

It flattened valleys, lagged farm and woodland,

swallowed Dark Peak and Bradfield’s mound

into a sky white with it, tasted our tongues

as we talked of it, beaded our hair and lashes

Finished Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.  Billed as ‘A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption’, it’s also a comic novel, as O’Connor herself insisted, adding ‘and as such, very serious, for all comic novels must be about matters of life and death’ …  It is certainly very dark comedy, violent and bizarre.  I’m not sure that I would want to immerse myself too often in that world view but it’s brilliant, strange and fascinating.

Just starting two new books, Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality, a collection of pieces he wrote after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and  Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, described in a Guardian review as ‘a minor masterpiece of death and delusion in a Nordic land’.  Hmmm, neither would seem to offer much prospect of cheeriness.   Will have to ensure that my final tranche of reading includes some lighter fare.

My final reading challenge blog will probably appear a week today, to allow me to reflect on the project, and on what I’ve read (and to catch up on sleep/eating/other activities which may have to be postponed whilst I read the last few books…).

I can’t believe the end is quite so nigh.  I read 15 books this fortnight, which would obviously be fine if I’d done that well in the previous few weeks, but I fell behind and haven’t fully caught up.  My total now stands at 52, so in the next four days I need to read 8 books.  Of course I can do that.  No worries.  Piece of cake.

* See also this: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/11/02/mary-oliver-upstream-staying-alive-reading/  and this: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/13/rebecca-solnit-faraway-nearby-reading-writing/)