My back pages ‘25

About an hour ago , by Richard Lutz

THE new year means scrolling through an annual book list, those that I’ve devoured, politely digested or slogged through like a route march through literary hell (writes RICHARD LUTZ).

It’s an annual disgorge of titles. Good, bad, indifferent. Some are works of art. Some are, to misquote Capote, exercises in typing. Some I couldn’t put down. Some I didn’t want to so much as toss aside as catapult to the far side of the moon.

I try to read a book a week. Those without basic maths may want to know that’s 52pa. Sometimes I fail miserably. Other times I burst the ceiling. This year I finished with 59.

So, first to the winners:

For 2025, it’s been a matter of the last shall be the first. The final book I finished is by far the best. It gets the blue riband. It is:

James by Percival Everett. The novel recounts Huckleberry Finn, not through the white child’s eyes as he rolled down the river but through the fertile spirited voice of Jim, the fugitive slave with him on his Mississippi raft. This is a story that is explosively angry, illuminating and, at times, funny as Jim battles the demeaning universe of Southern slavery. It is a giant re telling of one of the great American myths. It rightfully won The Pulitzer Prize.

A Month in the Country by HL Carr. A novel about memory, loss and a brief surge of happiness that brightens a young man’s life after the horrors of The First World War as he’s hired to slowly uncover a forgotten English church fresco. The story is framed from the view of the main character as an old man. Carr is an elegant writer.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. This uncovers the brutality of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland where nuns abused unwed mothers and their children for decades. A local coal merchant runs across the horrors of the forced labour and has to decide whether to ignore the outrage or point the finger at the corrupt practice. It’s Ibsen in Ireland, in effect.

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld A grand ‘What If…’ tour de force. The author imagines what would happen if Hillary Rodham didn’t marry Bill Clinton and carved out her own life and her own history. On the way, she meets Trump, Obama and a host of other American topdogs, including tech billionaire Bill Clinton!!!

Never Had It Made by Jackie Robinson

Robinson endured racism and hate to break through the bigots’ barrier to be the first black American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era. His autobiography is not really about his time batting and fielding with The Dodgers but about his challenges and battles off the field. He was an abrasive opinionated man who took on the media, the bosses, the rednecks in the stands and even his own team mates. An angry take on the American Dream and still relevant.

Others obtaining Honourable Mention are: Precipice by Robert Harris- a novel about British PM Herbert Asquith; Ratpack Confidential by Shawn Levy- a rollicking lowlife tale about Sinatra and his Los Vegas buddies; and, Orbital by Samantha Harvey- not such much a narrative as a deeply reflective essay on endlessly circling the earth as an astronaut.

And losers? The deadbeat books, the schlockpile. Kurt Vonnegot’s late novel Bluebeard was a mess, a series of fragments about a picaresque painter that didn’t come together; Cold Service by Robert B. Parker was a dire tired Boston cop thriller that didn’t thrill and wasn’t much cop; Double Indemnity is a museum piece by James M. Cain that was even more tired and dated and smelled as if the author typed by numbers and then….and then there was this guy:

Who? Well, it’s not other than Erle Stanley Gardner. Behind those menacing cold eyes lay a writing skill that Evelyn Waugh called the tools of the best American writer of the century. Not sure about that- his noir thriller Widows Wear Weeds was absolute nonsense, to be chucked on the bonfire of the inanities, filled with dames, cynical private eyes, pistols and blackmail and tired, tired, tired. But as for Mr Gardner himself, well, his life is worth a book or two. Better than his endless stream of novels in fact.

Finally, the 2025 list includes Hear My Voice. No idea about this book. It’s down as having been read, done and dusted. I looked it up and down on Google. Couldn’t find it. Don’t remember it. A mystery book. Anyone ever heard of it?

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