Reflections on time and place: The 2010 TBR awards

This year I have read 37 novels, plus 15 non-fiction titles that weren't entirely for work. Of the fiction titles, the authors represented 11 countries: 17 were by UK writers, 14 by Scandinavians (mostly Swedes) ...  and none were American, and none were French.

But I don't suppose where they were written, or where they were set will be the defining aspect of 2010. More important, I think, will be how I read them. 

I am drawn to the physicality of books - I like owning them, looking at them, holding them, and feel offended - unclean! - if their physical state betrays any hint of being read.  But this year I read three books on iPad and bought at least half a dozen used books from Amazon... and some had broken spines and creased covers!

Anyway, I have enjoyed 'discovering' two "forgotten" writers from not so long ago, Patrick Hamilton and Simon Raven. Hamilton's Hangover Square will make my book of the year shortlist and two titles in I am hooked by literary scoundrel Raven's Alms for Oblivion series. (If my bookshelves were better organised, I would undoubtedly be adding John Lawton to this section over the coming months).

I always focus some of my reading around travelling. I didn't expand my geographical horisons greatly in 2010 but I did visit Croatia and learnt a lot from Celia Hawkesworth's Zagreb: A Cultural and Literary History. This led me to excellent books, Slavenka Drakulic's collection of post-Yugoslavia essays, Cafe Europa, and Dubravka Ugresic's unsettling Ministry of Pain (some of which is set in Amsterdam).

As for events, the highlight was undoubtedly meeting and listening to Maj Sjöwall, and I didn't discover a crime novel that made as much impression on me as the Martin Beck series.

So, here are the shortlists and winners of the much-coveted TBR awards!

2010 Best non-fiction title

I knew I would thoroughly enjoy Francis Wheen's Strange Days,  was pleasantly surprised by one of my iPad reads, Life, by Keith Richards, and learnt a great deal from Ted Nield's Supercontinent but the outright winner was ...

It's All About The Bike, by Robert Penn

 2010 Best Fiction Title

I've already said Liza Marklund's Red Wolf was my favourite crime read - not the necessarily the best, but the one I enjoyed most. Some of the other contenders for the shortlist would include my former colleague Brian Page's Still Lives (almost too sharply observed an account of of life on a North East newspaper to feature in Scoop!), Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, Karin Boye's unsettling Kallocain, and, if I had read it as a child, Astrid Lindgren's inspiring and unflinching Brothers Lionheart.

Here are my contenders:

• Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton
• The Rich Pay Late, by Simon Raven
• The Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman
• The Journey of Anders Sparrman, by Per Wästberg, trans. Tom Geddes
• Hash, by Torgny Lindgren

Anders Sparrman is an extraordinary  book, a "biographical novel" reconstructed from the known facts about a Swedish naturalist and explorer who sailed to China as a ship's doctor at 17, joined Captain Cook on his expeditions to Antarctica and Tahiti, unsuccessfully curated the Swedish Cabinet of Natural History and ended his days blissfully in love with a semi-literate servant girl. Along the way he became  a fierce opponent of the slave trade  - the descriptions of its Swedish incarnation are almost unreadable.

It would have been my book of the year... until I read the first few pages of Hash. A miraculously old man is looking back on his life as a newspaper reporter who made up all his stories, was sacked, then travelled the farthest reaches of Northern Sweden in the company of a man who may have been Nazi war criminal Martin Bormann in their gourmets' pursuit of the perfect hash.

Trust me. It is brilliant.  

Comments

[Jo Fawkes]

In the late 70s, I was publicity manager for the publishers of Simon Raven's novels and spoke to him often about promoting his books - which of course I read with great enjoyment. I always remember that Anthony Blond who first published him paid for him to stay in a cottage and write the early volumes. I waited in vain for someone to make that offer to me....
BTW did you read Black Water Rising by Attica Locke = vv good.

[Philip]

Wow! From what I have picked up so far, dealing with Raven must have been fun! I am going to finish Alms for Oblivion before reading his biography.