Best and Worst of the Year - 2018

When I did my last post I realised that it had been a great year of reading. In the eight years of Excelsior I have only awarded the sublime rating thirteen times. This year I rated four books as sublime. I choose to believe that my critical faculties have not deserted me and that these books were genuinely brilliant. Two were collections of short stories: Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges and Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley, and two were novels: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima. Truth be told I cannot separate them and collectively they were the best literature I read this year and indeed, for many years.

None of the above were book club books, but the best of those was definitely Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, read way back in January. The book club was responsible for the worst book of the year, which was by far and away The Shadow District by Arnaldur Indridason, which was one of the dullest novels I have ever read, although the writing was technically proficient, which ultimately saved it from the rare occurrence of a reprehensible rating.

This year also saw the adoption of a new method of choosing books to read. I realised that many of my unread books were never really considered because they were stored in parts of the house that I didn't really go to when choosing something new to read; so I began selecting one book from the six main areas where I store books in a systematic fashion. Books that I've had sitting there unread for years are now getting a look in and I even suspect that this is why I've had a cluster of sublime ratings; the gold has been sitting there and I haven't been digging it up! Now - ever upwards into 2019....

The Shadow District - Arnaldur Indridason (2013/2017 in translation)

Rating: Mediocre

The Shadow District is the second crime novel I've read in fairly quick succession, due to the crime genre theme we are exploring in the Subiaco Library book club. Once again, I am reasonably unfamiliar with crime fiction, however I know a great novel when I read one and unfortunately Indridason's novel is not one of them. Technically the novel is much better written than Belinda Bauer's Snap (2018), however unlike Bauer's novel The Shadow District is just plain dull. I'm not sure if it is a problem with the translation but the writing style has absolutely no dynamism, no shifts in tone and for a crime novel, almost no tension. The cold case mystery is intriguing enough, but due to the previously mentioned problems when all is revealed there is no excitement or satisfaction generated at all. It reads like how I'd imagine a police report would be presented, just the bare bones of what happened with no stylistic finesse at all. 

The narrative is set in Iceland both during WWII and in modern times, although really it could have been set anywhere. The characters too are uniformly dull; the two inspectors in the WWII sections, Flovent and Thorson are serviceable, and a little better is retired cop Konrad, who solves the mystery of the cold case during the modern era, however they are all mostly forgettable. It's a shame really, I did want to enjoy The Shadow District, but it merely served to pass the time, read out of duty until the next book on the reading list comes along, which is Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses (1969). I'm hoping for better things from one of Japan's greatest writers and I'm certain I'll be rewarded.