The Best Catholics in the World by Derek Scally
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
The Best of Me by David Sedaris
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
East-West Street by Philippe Sands
Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait by Francis Steegmuller
Wunderland by Caitriona Lally
1971: Never a Dull Moment by David Hepworth
The Dark Stuff by Nick Kent
All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
At this time of year, I usually take stock of what I’ve read over the previous twelve months and try to identify the titles that particularly impressed me. Of the thirty-three books I read this year, just five were published in 2021. I don’t tend to keep up to date with what’s new on the shelves and I have a long list of books I have yet to read from years ago. I am also conservatively inclined to be sceptical of new books as they all tend to be raved about in the hype industry of publishing.
But I do think Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the World deserved the many plaudits that came its way. It’s a cool and steady appraisal of the role of the church in Ireland over the last 150 years and because the author has lived in Germany for over twenty years, it has a distance that gives it extra resonance. Scally draws some unsettling but insightful parallels between the relationship between Irish people and the Catholic church and the relationship between Germans and the Nazis. He skewers the popular narrative that the clergy represented a brutal regime that oppressed the public and instead puts the spotlight on the tendency of the public to collude with the church authorities. His conclusion that Irish people need to follow the Germans and take collective ownership of the atrocities committed by the church is fascinating.
The quiet collusion of laypeople in a system that brutalised women and children is also explored in Claire Keegan’s sad and beautiful novella, Small Things Like These. Her long-awaiting follow-up to the similarly slender but powerful Foster reveals the rot beneath the Catholic poster-child Ireland of the 1980s.
Unlike the protagonists in this novel, I grew up in privileged circumstances, but Keegan’s depiction of life in a small rural town still caused me to feel a shudder of recognition. This could well be something that my imagination has filled in for me but I’ll see what my mother thinks of it. Everything about the book was perfect save for the silly, forgettable title.
Some of my favourite books were brutally honest memoirs. David Sedaris is perhaps the only author whose work makes me laugh out loud every few pages and his collection The Best of Me is a juicy collection of prime cuts. In the last section, he writes with extraordinary candour about how frustrated he is with his sister’s suicide and how it left him having to deal with interviewers’ questions about her and the impact her death had on him. When one asks him how he felt about the event, he says he is angry with her because the bitch owed him five hundred dollars.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was also hilarious and startling, a graphic novel in which the author explored her relationship with her closeted father, a complicated and troubled individual who had been arrested after being caught in sexual congress with some of his male English students and who later died after being knocked down by a truck. I read this one after my friends and I had chosen the follow-up novel, I am my own Mother for our Zoom bookclub. And I quickly tracked down a copy of her recent The Secret of Superhuman Strength.
An examination of her lifelong obsession with health and fitness, The Secret of Superhuman Strength also featured illustrated extracts from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, which I read straight afterwards and loved.
It had been years and years since I had read On The Road and imagined that Kerouac might be dated, proto-hippy stuff. But apart from the miserable attitude to women, The Dharma Bums was a thrilling read based around some mountaineering escapades with Gary Snyder. Reading of their freewheeling rambles into nature inspired me on my own, modest two day bike ride from Maynooth to Mullingar. Few books have so successfully communicated electric enthusiasm and a sense of utterly unfettered freedom. Sixty years down the road, it’s not hard to see why Kerouac was a publishing sensation in his day.
Another book that had a strong personal element was Philippe Sands’ masterly examination of the history of the main movers in the Nuremberg Trials: East-West Street.
Also wonderful was Francis Steegmuller’s story of the genesis and creation of one of the world’s most famous novels. In Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, he uses Flaubert’s brilliant letters to create a picture of a volatile and frequently hilarious man whose life was changed forever following the tortured birth of the book that launched his career. What I liked most about this one was its exploration of friendship. The childless and unmarried Flaubert managed to cultivate a group of friends who were as loyal and frank as friends could be and they helped one another out to an admirable degree.
There are few novels on my list but I did get an almighty kick out of Caitriona Lally’s second novel, Wunderland. The story of a brother and sister whose personalities range from the eccentric to the disturbed, the brother’s exploits as a wayward cleaner in a miniature world museum in Hamburg were weirdly, hilariously fascinating. I frequently laughed aloud while reading though I was sometimes uncertain as to whether that was the desired effect.
To be honest, I probably got more joy from books about music than any other reading matter this year. Maybe it’s the pandemic effect, but I’ve never listened to so much music or discovered more albums in the last twenty months. Eight of the 33 books on my list were about music and the best of them was probably David Hepworth’s thrilling 1971: Never a Dull Moment.
A book that really lived up to its title, it made for a convincing argument that 1971 was the greatest year in the history of modern pop. It was one of four books by Hepworth I read this year and along with an impressive wealth of knowledge, he also had some sensible things to say about music appreciation. The most notable for me was his insistence that a person’s interest in a certain kind of music or artist was simply linked to whether or not it made them want to move, hence his love of the long discarded term ‘beat’ music. Despite our frequent wish to appear sophisticated, our love of music is at heart a primitive thing.
The other music book that excited me this year was Nick Kent’s ‘best of’ collection, The Dark Stuff. It’s one I should have read years ago as I was aware of its reputation as one of the greatest pop tomes. Kent managed to get intimately acquainted with just about all of the main players in the 1970s and very few come out of the book with reputations enhanced. There is a seediness running through each of his essays and many of the stars are depicted as abusers of drugs and of women (a surprising number of them appear to be wife-beaters). Kent is brilliant at character sketches that are both grotesque and hilarious.
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