The Year in Reading: 2022

 

Although this blog is about the books I read, what can often happen is the things going on in your life can have a strong influence on what you end up reading. This year was eventful and life changing. I began it pretty much crippled by a right hip that needed replacing. I ended up having nine weeks off of work and had the surgery in May. This meant that I've read less book club books this year, which also meant I got around to reading some books I had been meaning to read for a while, such as The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (2002), which is my book of the year. I read Mars by 1980 by David Stubbs (2018) during this period as well, which meant that I had time to listen to the weird early electronic music referenced by the book. It really helped me get through the recovery period, as did reading Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman (2020), which, for obvious reasons, was really appropriate. 

Donna Tartt - responsible for the read of the year

I'm pleased to have finally read some Philip Roth (Sabbath's Theater  - 1995), and the Alan Garner novel I'd been carrying around from move to move since 1980 (Red Shift - 1973). Some of these were fitted around and during two great holidays post hip replacement, including a cruise off the Kimberley coast, which was a life-changing experience. Weirdly this was were I finished reading Sabbath's Theater! Reading is also somewhere you can take solace, and it helped enormously during the aftermath of my mother's death at the end of October. Appropriately by the time that had happened I'd finished Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (2021), which thematically was mainly about her mother's death. Strangely even reading The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971) helped in this regard, perhaps because it was so irreverent. As usual I wished that I'd read more, but there was a lot going on. As always there's the worst book of the year, and that prize goes to Something to Hide by Elizabeth George (2022), which I could not even get half way through. By default it was also the worst book club book, the best being Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (2021), which featured the usual Franzen qualities we know and love. So, onto next year, onwards and upwards - ever upwards forever in fact!

Sabbath's Theater - Philip Roth (1995)

 

Rating: Excellent

My first Roth novel, finally. It didn't disappoint either, although at times it was too much to handle. Excessive is a suitable adjective to describe Sabbath's Theater, a novel dominated by the grotesque, yet strangely sympathetic character of Micky Sabbath. Sabbath is a sixty-four year old ex-puppeteer, at the tail end of a life dedicated to sexual debauchery. This is an outrageously dirty novel, full of lusty sexual proclivities that often veer into taboo territory, or at the very least into the realm of perverse transgressions. It's heady stuff, not least because of Roth's intensely verbose and dense prose style. Obviously seasoned Roth readers would be familiar with his dark rococo narrative style which manages to be both digressive and startlingly direct at the same time, but for yours truly, a first time reader, it was overwhelming. At times I found the novel to be impenetrable, then intensely entertaining, and then boring and indulgent, sometimes within a few pages. Ultimately, however, I couldn't help but be drawn into Sabbath's self destructive raging against the dying light of what it is to be a lusty heterosexual man, although one who has a very dodgy moral compass.

At some point I wondered just why Roth would have created a character such as Sabbath. Then I realised that he represents the primal sexual urge inside every man, no matter how conservative or repressed he may be, an urge that is both monstrous, but perfectly natural in essence? Perhaps.... As with Charles Bukowski's work, I wonder how women feel about Sabbath's Theater? Or Roth's writing in general? Roth is just as funny as Bukowski. Humour in literary fiction is difficult to pull off effectively, but here Roth excels, so much so my partner would often ask me what I was laughing about (I would get her to read some of the lines, which didn't have the same effect on her, perhaps answering my above question, although she does appreciate Bukowski). There's some incredibly funny scenes, such as when Sabbath places bets on an AA patient's blood-pressure, or his perverse adventures at his former producers' apartment, revealing himself to he the ultimate bad guest. Although sometimes Roth was totally over the top stylistically I will certainly read some more of his novels, including the infamous Portnoy's Complaint (1969), which I have an original hardback edition knocking about the house.