As ever, if I don’t list ‘em, I don’t remember all of them.
Books
1. Manhood for Amateurs -Michael Chabon
2. Naked – David Sedaris
3. The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
4. When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
5. Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde
6. Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
7. Barrel Fever – David Sedaris
Films
1. The Princess and the Frog
2. Invictus
3. Sherlock Holmes
4. A Serious Man
5. Up in the Air
6. The Ghostwriter
7. Shutter Island
I wanna join in! Lists of the year, PAH. Lists of the decade, HURRAH. Though, at the risk of turning into Toby Ziegler, why does the decade end this year, and not next year? Why is the decade not 2001-2010, rather than 2000-2009? Can we bring up the bit where there wasn’t a year nought, or is that all cliche and annoying? Anyway, moving on… Lists! Lists are fun. Top Tens! I can do books and TV and movies of the decade, although we should all bear in mind that I have not yet started watching The Wire. I probably can’t do theatre, not sensibly, since I don’t go very often (as often as I’d like), though I can wave my arms up and down and talk about the few things I did see and the plays that really stuck with me, and music. Hmmm, I’ll try, but that might get quite random, and will essentially be ‘Ten records what I have loved with absolutely no critical or aesthetic thought behind it’. I think they’re going to be unordered lists, because, well, trying to rank things like The Assination of Jesse James, The Lord of the Rings, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind against each other is kinda daft. They’re also going to be lists that mix up the things that I think have been really really good with things that have become a part of my personal furniture. So the Eyre Affair may knock Fortress of Solitude out of the books list because it has been a bigger part of my decade. Just be warned, it’s going to be a little bit bonkers, and pretty much all about me, with no real grounding in any theories of aesthetics.
Books. Ok, I give up. I’m having a fiction and a non-fiction list. No arguing from the back.
Fiction
Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Algebraist – Iain M. Banks
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
A Life’s Music – Andrei Makine
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J.K Rowling
Anathem – Neal Stephenson
Non-Fiction
Pedant in the Kitchen – Julian Barnes
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
The Zanzibar Chest – Aidan Hartley
Code 2.0 – Lawrence Lessig (I haven’t read Remix yet, but I suspect it’s more important for the noughties and the future).
The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism – Jonathan Lethem (yes, ok, it’s an essay, but do I care? no)
The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama
An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge – John O’Farrell (well, it’s not fiction…)
A History of Britain – Simon Schama
A Constitution of Many Minds – Cass Sunstein
Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
Movies
The Assassination of Jesse James
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Gosford Park
Infernal Affairs
In the Mood for Love
The Lord of the Rings (I will count three as one, but if you make me pick just one, I’ll go for Fellowship every time)
Pan’s Labyrinth
The Royal Tennenbaums
Shaun of the Dead
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
TV
Band of Brothers
Battlestar Galactica
Black Books
Bleak House
Doctor Who
Firefly
State of Play
The Thick of It
The West Wing
Veronica Mars
(plus a very honourable mention to Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which is not strictly television, but which must go somewhere on the list for being ACE)
Music
Carastini: Story of a Castrato – Philippe Jaroussky
DZf – Guy Barker
The Eminem Show – Eminem
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
Gua – Emmanuel Jal and Abdel Gadir Salim
The Lord of the Rings Soundtracks – Howard Shore
The Orpheus Suite – Colin Towns’ Mask Orchestra
Raising Sand – Robert Plant and Alison Kraus
Savane – Ali Farka Toure
Smile – Brian Wilson
Theatre I’m willing to jump up and down and wave my arms about… and I include ballet.
The Bacchae – twice over, Kneehigh’s version at the Hall for Cornwall, and the Alan Cumming starring version at the Edinburgh Festival
Giselle – The Royal Opera House, with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg.
Jumpers – Tom Stoppard, at the National Theatre
Noises Off – Michael Frayn (I was in actual physical pain from laughing so hard), at the National Theatre
The Nutcracker Sweeties/Orpheus Suite/Shakespeare Suite Triple Bill – Birmingham Royal Ballet.
The Real Thing – Tom Stoppard (I saw it at the Albery in January 2000, ok, so it counts)
Tristan and Yseult – Kneehigh Theatre at the Minack
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett, in Edinburgh with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart
War Horse – Nick Stafford, at the National Theatre
1. There’s tension involved in travel, even when you go on your own. The ‘why am I here’, ‘what’s my purpose in life’, am I just jumping through tourist hoops’ kind of tension. I think it happens every trip, and yet, when you come back you just sort-of forget about it. So, just learn that when it happens you should consider stopping seeing the things you’ve got on your list that you want to see – even if you really really really want to see them – for an afternoon and find a park or a sofa to sit and read a novel, or write screeds of nonsense working through your tourist-monkey issues, or email all the folks at home. And then go out the next day and get over it – chances are you’ll find something wonderful that makes you think that even if you are being a tourist-monkey, it’s probably worth it (hello, Kinkaku-Ji and Nanzen-Ji, Kyoto.
2. There’s more tension involved in watching other people travel – especially to historically sensitive places like Auschwitz. You have to work through that too – normally with the aid of pen and paper, but you’re allowed to talk to other people about it, ‘cos it’s not just emo-esque self-indulgent wank. It’s something worth thinking about. What kind of photos should you take in such places?
3. Japan. Despite the emo-tourist-monkey-ing moment, and the wearying aspects of spending three weeks in what is, pretty much Wonderland, with only a very few people to speak English too (damn my lack of Japanese), it was wonderful. And though when I came back I initially thought that it probably wasn’t going straight to the top of the list of ‘Places I’ve Been, Loved, and Want to Go Back To,’ it’s rapidly moving up the list. Mostly, I want to see Hokkaido.
4. David Mitchell. This is a vague corollary to the above, since I initially picked up Ghostwritten because I was looking for stuff to read about Japan before I went, and its first chapters are set in Japan. And then I fell in love with this wild and wonderful author, and found myself reading all four of his books (Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, number9dream, and Black Swan Green) between about March and September.
5. Various other authors, but most particularly Iain M. Banks and David Foster Wallace. I read The Algebraist at high speed whilst in Bulgaria for a wedding, but did at least manage to put it down for the duration of said wedding. Now I have a pile of Banks’ sci-fi to read, and am currently deep in The Player of Games. I came to DFW at the end of the year, sadly. Having heard so much about his work after his suicide, and hearing Joe mention that he was reading Infinite Jest, I borrowed a book of non-fiction essays from J, which contatined ‘The Host’, a DFW essay about conservative talk radio in the States. I’m hopelessly hooked, I’ve just finished Consider the Lobster, and ordered Infinite Jest, and I’m so sad that ever thing of his that I read takes me one step further to there being no more new DFW to read. I wish I’d discovered him earlier.
6. That despite the above, and my generally cultural snobbishness (Whaddya mean, you’ve never read Dickens???), I do have a soft spot for cultural candyfloss to leaven the load from the old brain-pan at times. It’s probably no coincidence that my affection for the awfulness of the Twilight series, and the insane camp colour of High School Musical Three: Senior Year hit me mid-supervisory crisis this autumn and further developed as I reached a point by Christmas where I was, quoth supervisor, “Written Out.” It’s also no coincidence that after a week away from the PhD I’ve started devouring non-fiction essays, high powered sci-fi and Simon Schama’s latest book, The American Future: A History.
7. Rhetoric isn’t ‘just words’. I knew it already, but after nine months of watching the US elections whilst concurrently writing a doctoral thesis about political thought and expression, all of which involves rhetoric, I have a much better understanding of it and what you can do with it, and what I don’t want to see the people running for things doing with it.
8. Economics matters. Still don’t understand it though. Paul Krugman is my guru. But I should probably pay more attention.
9. See above, re. physics and maths, which are really interesting, especially at that point where they meet theology and philosophy, but you need to have the basics down first. If only all physicists could write like Neal Stephenson did in Anathem.
10. It can still be hard to work out which friends you should make the effort to hang onto, and which you probably shouldn’t, but you shouldn’t get out of the game all together. Every so often you end up with the ones who come to visit for New Years and spend time drinking tea, reading novels and making up ludicrous top trumps games with you.
The annual attempt to keep track of at least part of my life…
Books:
1. Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
2. The New Kings of Non-Fiction – Ira Glass
3. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
4. Watchman – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
5. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Alan Moore
6. A Constitution of Many Minds – Cass Sunstein
7. America: Empire of Liberty – David Reynolds
8. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail – Hunter S. Thompson
9. America: Empire of Liberty – David Reynolds
10. The Men Who Stare At Goats – Jon Ronson
11. Starbook – Ben Okri
12. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life – Bryan Lee O’Malley
13. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes – Neil Gaiman
14. Lost in a Good Book – Jasper Fforde
15. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – Bryan Lee O’Malley
16. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: The Time of Your Life – Joss Whedon & Jeph Loeb
17. Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness – Bryan Lee O’Malley
18. Matter – Iain M. Banks
19. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
20. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together – Bryan Lee O’Malley
21. Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe – Bryan Lee O’Malley
22. The Wine Dark Sea – Patrick O’Brian
23. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace
24. Ghost – Robert Harris
25. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
26. The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
27. Turbulence – Giles Foden
28. Much Obliged, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
29. Men and Cartoons – Jonathan Lethem
30. Better than Sex – Hunter S. Thompson
31. This is Water – David Foster Wallace
32. The City and the City – China Mieville
33. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader – Neil Gaiman
34. A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil – Christopher Brookmyre
35. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
36. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
37. Lustrum – Robert Harris
38. And Another Thing – Eoin Colfer
39. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – David Foster Wallace
40. The Boys on the Bus – Timothy Crouse
41. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, volume 5: Predators and Prey – Joss Whedon et al.
42. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
43. The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway
44. Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that changed a Nation
45. Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
Films
1. Slumdog Millionaire
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
3. Milk
4. Watchmen
5. The Young Victoria
6. Frost/Nixon
7. State of Play
8. In the Loop
9. Let the Right One In
10. Wolverine
11. Star Trek
12. Coraline
13. Public Enemies
14. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
15. The Proposal
16. The Time-Traveller’s Wife
17. Inglourious Basterds
18. Funny People
19. District 9
20. Up
21. Taking Woodstock
22. Away We Go
23. The Informant
24. Twilight: New Moon
25. Fantastic Mr Fox
26. Where the Wild Things Are