I read some books in 2021.
Of course I had read Sherlock Holmes before, but 2021 was the first time I sat down and read straight through the corpus. I mentioned, in writing about the first volume of the Doubleday edition I was using:
Things I noticed this time: how often evil comes from abroad, whether it’s the mystic East or the only slightly less heathen North America, and how often the notion surfaces that “blood” explains people’s character; this must have been a popular notion at the time as it courses through the veins of a great deal of Victorian fiction. It seems quaint now, but I suppose it’s no more naive than the notion so many in our time adhere to that this or that gene directly determines people’s characters.
Having finished the second volume I said:
We’ve all dipped into them: an adventure here, a strange case there, a Baskerville hound when we had a little more time, and the stories and novels of Sherlock Holmes are always fine. The ideal way to read them, though, is, as I’ve just learned, to follow the detective and the doctor from beginning to end in one go. The reason for this is that Doyle created in his stories and novels a world, and the best way to enjoy that world is to immerse oneself in it over the time it takes to consume the tales.
Also, brandy is a cure for everything.
I read and reread an old favorite, Eliot Weinberger. Can there be any doubt that he is our best essayist? “Happily,” I noted, “the facts he recounts displace the feelings and moralizing that characterize too much essayistic writing.”
Having been stunned again by Beckett’s late novels in 2020 I decided to keep it going and read everything Beckett wrote in (or translated into) English. Having finished the early novels I remarked snarkily: “Now I think I’ll go read a mundane account of Brooklyn hipsters in a failing marriage or a mid-Westerner who has become uncertain that his sky god is there for him all evoked in the most pedestrian of prose imaginable—not!”
I read a lot of Shirley Jackson and arrived arrived at this conclusion after reading the novels she published in the 1940s and '50s:
The Road through the Wall is fine, but both her vision and her prose are more piercingly effective in the latter three novels. In Hangsaman and The Bird's Nest we follow young women who are losing their grip—Jackson was as fond of females in trouble as Hitchcock—and then in The Sundial we move on to the end of the world. The novels are unnerving in the way much of Jackson's work is, but they are also—and many people forget this about Jackson's fiction—funny. One would like to say that her growth and development continued after she published The Sundial, but the truth is the later novels, though very good, are not better. She reached her peak here, and remained there.
Of Ian Penman’s It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track: Objects & Essays, 2012-2018 I wrote:
Excellent essays about excellent music, Ian Penman’s It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track is the sort of music writing that is all too rare. His starting points are icons like, among a few others, Charlie Parker, James Brown, Donald Fagen, Elvis, and movements like the Mods, and from these he spins meditations that resonate and would repay rereading. Sometimes the critical essay seems like the most exciting writing out there.
In the Lit Crit department, it seems to me that Stephen Booth’s Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets can serve as a model of what academic criticism should be, and Philip Hoare’s Serious Pleasures: The life of Stephen Tenant, who was one very odd cat, was lots of fun.
And beginning with The Wine of Angels I was happy to discover the Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series about an exorcist in contemporary England. They’re a sort of mash-up between supernatural (Merrily makes the point that it doesn’t really make sense to believe in God but not in any other supernatural force) and crime fiction, and surprisingly it works. I’m happy the series is long-running.
Looking forward to some good words in 2022.
—David
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