Read and Appreciated in 2003
A Year’s Best List
6. Albion, Peter Ackroyd
Ackroyd’s non-fiction keeps getting better in the same measure as his fiction grows more disappointing. Here he uses the same technique of thematic classification he employed in London to tackle an even bigger subject—the history of English literature. So we get erudite, beautifully written essays on trees, on landscape, on rain, on melancholy, on gore, on ghosts, on the sea, on the art of the essay. It doesn’t necessarily do to trust Ackroyd’s conclusions too much, his is clearly an idiosyncratic vision, but anyone who can make you want to rush out and buy the works of the Venerable Bede must be doing something right. The chapter entitled “A Note on English Melancholy”, which touches on the composer John Dowland, on Robert Burton (obviously), on Hobbes and on Thomas Browne I found so impressive I read it through twice. “In particular the delight in demonstration, the vast expenditure of energy into words, characterizes this prose; there is no ontology, or metaphysic, but rather the plangent chords of a dying fall.”
7. The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts
I’ve decided that my own contribution to the book (consisting of translating one of the entries into Spanish) is sufficiently minor not to stand in the way of including this collection on my list. A kaleidoscopic array of fantasy, satire, surrealism and horror by some of the best fantasists working today. And John Coulthart’s meticulous, page-by-page design is appropriately over-the-top and some of the best work he’s ever done.
8. Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel García Márquez
The first volume of the Colombian Nobel prize winner’s autobiography, covering his upbringing in the magical coastal town of Aracataca, his first efforts as a writer and columnist and his days as a university student in Bogota, where he lived through the massive civil disturbance of 1948. The most vivid figure in the book remains the author’s beloved mother, who raised a dozen children (plus those her errant husband sired out of wedlock) and died just before reaching her hundredth birthday. This engrossing memoir was a runaway bestseller in Latin America, with pirated editions hawked by vendors on street corners. In a faithful translation by Edith Grossman. A review by yours truly is forthcoming on The Modern Word.
9. Hiding the Elephant, Jim Steinmayer
Steinmayer, himself not an actual performer but a well-known developer of illusions for some of the top current working magicians, takes the reader on a tour of the Golden Age of magic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, profiling not only the main figures (including The Maskelynes, Howard Thurston, Robert Houdin, and Houdini) but also providing concise, illustrated explanations of how the main illusions worked. Something of a non-fictional companion to Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil. If you’re into this sort of thing (meaning you’re the sort of person who, like me, rhapsodizes over Ricky Jay) it’s an absolute delight.
10. The Facts of Life, Graham Joyce
After two somewhat disappointing novels, Graham Joyce returns with his best book since The Tooth Fairy, an examination of post-war Britain through the lives of the members of the Vines family. A uniquely British contribution to the magical realist tradition, it feels like Joyce’s most personal work to date. A worthy winner of the World Fantasy Award.
