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Looking back on 2015 it was quite a varied year in terms of reading, although I would liked to have read much more, if only time would allow it. However there were plenty of highlights during the year. Late in 2014 I met one of my musical heroes in the form of Steve Kilbey from the Australian band The Church. In January I read his excellent autobiography, Something Quite Peculiar (2014) and then met him again with the rest of the band in July when they toured the west coast (they were brilliant by the way...). When literature and music meet I’m a very happy man indeed.

My book club reads this year yielded both pain and pleasure, with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) taking the crown for the best book I’ve read this year. The Secret History was compelling, absorbing, manipulative and most of all just brilliantly written. Other book club related highlights include Ian McEwan’s succinct and stylish The Children Act (2014), Richard Flannagan’s Man Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) and Joan London’s The Golden Age (2014), which managed to both charm and move me in equal measure. Book club pain came in the form of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), which was not mediocre by any means, just long winded and intensely and neurotically self-conscious. It was also a fascinating and challenging read, so in the end I’m grateful to have read it and I will certainly remember it for a long time to come.

If The Secret History was the best book of the year (in fact one of the best I’ve ever read...), then the biggest disappointment was Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977). Perhaps Chatwin had great adventures in Patagonia, but he managed to make it totally boring on paper. Luckily there were plenty of other highlights from my own (non book club) reading to make up for the tedium of Chatwin. Miranda July weirded me out in a good way with her debut novel, The First Bad Man (2015) and Michel Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976) was simply a great piece of experimental cult fiction. Other highlights were Axiomatic (1995) by Greg Egan and Seven Eves (2015) by Neal Stephenson, both of which left me wanting to read much more of their work.

As for next year I aim to finish the thousand plus pages of Peter Watson’s Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (2006). I’m reading it a bit at a time, mostly late at night, so hopefully I’ll get through it! What I really have my eye on though is my first love - science fiction. After reading Egan, Stephenson and then recently Huxley, it’s time to catch up with contemporary science fiction and some of the classics that I’ve never got around to reading. Maybe I’ll even read Philip K. Dick’s crackpot The Exegesis of Philip K Dick (2011) this year - now there’s some holiday reading....

The Children Act - Ian McEwan (2014)

So I’ve finally read my first Ian McEwan novel. Where have I been all these years? McEwan has only been nominated for the Man Booker Prize six times, winning it once for Amsterdam in 1998, amongst a whole plethora of other awards. McEwan was also named as one of the fifty greatest writers since 1945 by The Times. All these nominations and accolades are all very well, but it doesn’t mean much to me actually. My interest has to be piqued in sometimes curious ways for me to approach a writer with enthusiasm. In this case the book cub I run at the library has forced my hand and The Children Act ended up sharing the train journey to and from work with me. Actually it was good company; Ian McEwan is an excellent writer.

The Children Act features a brilliant opening scene in which high court judge Fiona Maye sits surround by her court papers, nursing a drink and being outraged by her aging husband who is appealing for the right to have an affair. The remainder of the novel more than lives up to this initial scene, with McEwan perfectly encapsulating the dilemma of a dysfunctional personal life interfering with professional responsibilities, in this case the complex case of a seventeen year old Jehovah Witness needing a life saving blood transfusion. The Children Act is compelling reading due to McEwan’s deft handling of character psychology and the collision between religion and secularism. Fiona Maye is a finely drawn character and the reader is totally drawn into her world across the duration of this short novel. McEwan gets everything just right with almost cold precision; his writing style is brilliantly tight and sparse. Nothing is wasted, although some readers may find the legal aspects of the narrative a bit dry, however the legal details serve to highlight the contrast between Maye’s hermetic legal world and the psychological challenge of making a sound judgement.

Although I finished reading The Children Act three weeks ago the power of the emotive penultimate scenes are still with me. McEwan’s descriptive skills are such that I can still picture the interior of Maye’s apartment and his depiction of London in winter. Such staying power is always the hallmark of a quality novel. The Children Act has made me an instant McEwan fan. It’s almost made up for the pain of the infamous Finkler Question.....