Of the 58 books listed, I’ve read just five. Carey’s list looks the best but Harrison’s was more interesting than I expected.

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When I started I was looking for something to motivate me to read more and I thought that aiming to finish a book every two weeks would do it. The target of was always somewhat arbitrary, after all it’s easy to meet the total by reading a few short novels. The point was to get myself into a habit and it’s worked very well. I read 26 books in 2006, 34 in 2007 and, so far, I’ve read 42 in 2008. What’s even more satisfying is that this year’s total includes three massive books: Tree of Smoke, War and Peace and Infinite Jest. Book 43 is pretty hefty too; hopefully I’ll finish it before the end of the year.

The project has taken on a life of its own, with nine other readers taking part this year. What’s interesting is that I think I’m the only one who has been motivated to read more simply by having a target. I’m not presenting that as either a good or bad thing, it’s just something peculiar to my personality.

A few 26 books bloggers are leaving us this year. We’re going to take this opportunity, time permitting, to rethink the site a little. One bit of feedback I’ve had is that the lack of commenting and community around the site is demotivating for some. I hadn’t really thought about that. For me, the blog was simply a motivational tool: if I have to blog about this book then I have to finish it. I get more than enough community at work. Still, that will be something to think about next year.

The other thing bloggers have asked for is more non-review content. Again, this wasn’t something I had thought about because it wasn’t one of my priorities. I’ve got other blogging outlets for my thoughts so I had a pretty narrow view of what 26 books would be. We’ll be rethinking that too.

Time, as always, is the problem. But I hope 26 books will be a more interesting site by this time next year. And, if I continue to increase my books-per-year, I just might have reached book 150 by then.

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In May Stephenson gave a talk at Gresham College about science fiction and its status as a literary genre. He turns out to be a very boring public speaker. That’s reassuring in some ways – I’m all in favour of talent being rationed. I point it out not to gloat but to warn you that the 40 minute talk takes a bit of effort to get through. It’s worth persevering.

His speculation about how literary fiction gets ‘made’ was particularly intriguing, even though it may strike some as being somewhat bitter:

“I’d imagine there’d be a weeding-out effect. It’s fun to imagine a comedy sketch with Robert Heinlein in a writers’ workshop having the first draft of Starship Troopers evaluated by a circle of earnest, young post structuralists. I don’t imagine that there is anything like out-and-out censorship but I do suspect that people who write about relationships, who write autobiographical introspective fiction from a subjective point of view are going to have an easier time of it in this environment from those who write SF.”

Despite his obviously dismissive take on post structuralism and his apparent belief that it rules every literary department of every university in the western world, he draws a plausible picture of how trends are shaped. In certain ‘trendy’ environments things that are different are shunned, in others they are celebrated and in neither instance does the quality of the thing itself have much to do with the reaction.

Which is only really tangential to the point he was trying to make.

His section on what happened to genres – westerns disappeared, romance merged with Hollywood and crime merged with television – is interesting and so is his description of sci fi as “idea porn”.

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There are some books on that list that I wouldn’t read if you had me at gunpoint (hello Paulo Coelho!) but it’s still weird to put a number, even an approximate number, to how many books I have left.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a pisstake, surely? I love the fact that his bookcase appears to be by the pool, which at least explains why he’s stripped his shirt off to do a little light reading.

Still, it’s the books that are the best. There’s werewolf stories (”all documented, all true”), the Occult Roots of Nazism (”every schoolchild should have this book”) and, best of all, The Lost Books of the Bible, in which the young Jesus appears as a seriously evil Harry Potter clone.

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Nevertheless, he has his moments and here’s one of them. Writing is Easy! is one of the columns Martin wrote for the New Yorker (you can read more at The Compleat Steve). He explains just how easy writing actually is and how much better it comes out if you do it in California:

I feel sorry for writers – and there are some pretty famous ones – who live in places like South America and Czechoslovakia, where I imagine it gets pretty dank. These writers are easy to spot. Their books are often filled with disease and negativity. If you’re going to write about disease, I would say California is the place to do it. Dwarfism is never funny but look at what happened when it was dealt with in California. Seven happy dwarfs.

He goes on

I took the following passage, which was no doubt written in some depressing place, and attempted to rewrite it under the sunny influence of California:

“Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.” – Milan Kundera.

Sitting in my garden, watching the bees glide from flower to flower, I let the above paragraph filter through my mind. The following New Paragraph emerged:

“I feel pretty,

“Oh so pretty,

“I feel pretty, and witty, and bright.”

Kundera was just too wordy. Sometimes the delete key is your best friend.

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It’s another WordPress blog and it uses the Freshy theme. I didn’t have to alter the theme very much – the only thing I’ve done is replace the banner with a picture of the 26 books I read last year.

I’d recommend Freshy to anyone looking for a theme for their blog. It’s very easy to customise. Many of the options can be changed from within the WordPress dashboard, which makes customisation a lot simpler. When I altered the design of the theme for this blog – the excellent Fast Track – I had to do most of the work in the PHP files themselves using Dreamweaver. Newer themes such as Freshy are changing all that, which is great.

I’ll still post the books I’m reading at this blog but they’ll be duplicated over at 26 books.

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January
Underworld by Don DeLillo

February
Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

March
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

April
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin

May
The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov

June
Q by Luther Blissett
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

July
The Falls by Ian Rankin
How to Score by Ken Bray
The End of Faith by Sam Harris

August
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

September
Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos

October
White Jazz by James Ellroy
The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre

November
The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carre
Smiley’s People by John Le Carre

December
Tailgating, Sacks and Salary Caps by Mark Yost
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Complicity by Iain Banks

And a few quick stats:

• The books are listed in the month I finished them, not when I started them
• All of the books were written by men. Not sure what that means.
• Five of the books were non-fiction
• Six of the books were translations
• Two of the books were published this year, four in 2005, three in 2004, one in 2003, one in 2001 and one in 2000
• Five of the books were published in the 90s, one in the 80s, three in 70s, three in the 60s and one in the 1920s

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Anyway, it’s done. Twenty-six books completed with two weeks remaining in the year. I could be a show-off and try to squeeze in book twenty-seven but I’m not going to. The next couple of weeks will be busy enough and I want to start fresh on January 1.

I’ve read a few of Iain Banks’ sci-fi novels, which he writes as Iain M Banks, but this was the first of his ’straight’ novels that I’ve read and I really enjoyed it.

Complicity is a superior thriller. For me, the difference between mass-market fiction and literary fiction is that the former is concerned with people doing things, while the latter is about what it’s like to be a person doing a thing. By that measure Complicity is firmly in the literary fiction bracket.
It’s the story of a journalist, Cameron Colley, who finds himself caught up in a series of murders. He’s looking into the deaths of several powerful men a few years earlier only to find that he is a suspect in a series of murders that are going on now.

Banks uses this set-up to study guilt and power. It’s everywhere through the novel, from the Civilisation-esque PC game, Despot, that Colley plays, to the S&M explorations in his affair with a married college friend. (Incidentally, Banks admitted earlier this year that his next novel would be delayed because he had become addicted to Civilisation.)

He takes the same themes from the personal level to the political level. Cameron spent time as a Gulf War reporter, his friend Andy served in the Falklands and one of the murder victims is an arms dealer. All three have their perspectives on guilt and power. All three are complicit in society’s ills.

The identity of the killer seemed obvious to me from about halfway through. I’m not sure whether Banks intended the reader to figure things out at that point or whether I got lucky but, either way, it doesn’t affect the enjoyment of the book. Banks uses the mystery to draw you in to the book in the first third but it quickly outlives its usefulness.

A quick read, well-written and highly enjoyable. A good way to finish the year.

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