Lee Ward
@leewardmister
It's books and music all the way down.
56: Still Life, Sarah Winman. Stupendous, compendious, Eastenders Go To Florence, sentimental as hell, brilliantly read by the author. Sunshine pours from the pages.
55: Shy Creatures, Clare Chambers. Another sad beautiful perfect novel plucked from an intriguing newspaper cutting.
This, from very early in Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy. Sinon’s plan. You wonder if Nolan read this - the movie’s theme more clearly spelled out here than anywhere in the poem.
The Goodies, absolutely, but this book was foundational to the adolescent me. RIP.
54: The Son, Philipp Meyer. Epic, a sweet spot between McCarthy and Lonesome Dove.
53: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones. Vampirism among the Blackfeet. Strains for historical seriousness, but is just a little too silly to really work.
51: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark. Rather brilliantly read by Miriam Margoyles.
50: Transcription, Ben Lerner. Altogether fitting you can see the outline of my phone in the photo.
49: Victorian Psycho, Virginia Feito. Open a page at random: “dead babies in boxes”. Fun for everyone
48: The End of Everything, M John Harrison. If each actual sentence didn't make perfect sense, this would be a work of high modernism. Favourite line: "There aren’t many anagrams of the word insect."
47: The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker. Brilliant. My feeling is, we’re not going to see Matt Damon throw Hector’s infant son from the walls of Troy.
A Canticle for Leibowitz [1959]. A post-apocalyptic Name of The Rose, so good.
45: A Canticle For Leibowitz, Walter M Miller Jr. Dialectical and ecclesiastical and sci-fictional hardly at all.
44: The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham. Chocky, but there's loads of em. Again, taken with the pains JW takes to think through the implications of his set-ups.
43: Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban. Flirts with the bleakness of a Hangover Square but at least something lives at the end, even if it’s just a water beetle.
42: Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Great fun. I'll think twice before twatting the next roaming house spider in a panic
41: Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut. Some authors just aren’t for you. Mercifully short, should’ve been shorter.
40: White Noise, Don Delillo. More of a clear influence on M Amis than I’d supposed.
39: Love, Nina, Nina Stibbe. Couldn’t face another novel straight after JSAMN, this was a decent palette-cleanser. Needed more AB.
38: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke. Incredible. Stories within stories, wheeling like the ravens of John Uskglass. And it's no wonder that Clarke didn't write again until Piranesi: it contains everything.
37: A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhirst. Read this through the night, absolutely gripping.