A Year of Magical Reading

A short story collection from Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the world’s biggest short story award. In translation, a thick new novel from Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore); a slim one from Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Memories of my Melancholy Whores), and some handsome volumes of Tagore, Bankim and Saratchandra from Penguin India.

There have been some excellent memoirs. Alexander Masters won the Guardian First Book Award for the biography of Stuart, a homeless psychopathic man who died before the book was published. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion documents the loss of her husband. In Two Lives, Vikram Seth writes about his uncle and aunt, and part of his own early life.

The new Harry Potter book, the sixth in the series, ends with a tragic death. In this category of fat books is also the new Calvin and Hobbes: Not really new, but a complete edition, 1440 pages, in hardback; also Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (of 2004) which won the Hugo Award this year. And Dracula returns in Elizabeth Kostova’s new lit-thriller. To take up more of your reading time, there is a comprehensive DVD edition of The New Yorker.

A year of losses, too: Notably, John Fowles, Nirmal Verma, Amrita Pritam, and VK Madhavan Kutty. In Mumbai, Lotus closed down, and the pavement bookstalls at Flora Fountain were evicted; in Kolkata, Coffeehouse bookshops were gutted in a fire; and in the US, Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare lost much of his work to Hurricane Katrina.

Gregory “Shantaram” Roberts still hangs out at Cafe Leopold, and IWE debates still rage in the books pages of magazines. Some things never change.

In India, second books from two non-resident Indian writers, Siddhartha Deb (Surface) and Chetan Bhagat (One Night at the Call Centre), symbolise two poles of Indian writing in English. Between these poles are new books by Altaf Tyrewala, Neelum Saran Gour, Siddharth Chowdhury, Sudeep Chakravarti, Samit Basu and Tarun Tejpal.

Harold Pinter, awarded the Nobel Prize, makes a searing acceptance speech, lashing out at those who employ language “to keep thought at bay”. In his splendid new work The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen writes about India’s tradition of debate and scepticism. In The Assassins’ Gate, George Packer looks at the American presence in Iraq. And in the category of columns-stretched-to-books, Thomas Friedman says the world is flat, Maureen Dowd asks whether men are necessary, and Stephen Levitt plays with freaky economics.

The publishing world has been active. Google starts putting books online; the Poetry Archive will do the same with historic recordings. Random House comes to India; so does Playboy. Print publisher Penguin turned seventy, online publication Salon turned ten.

EH Gombrich’s Little History of the World, banned by the Nazis, was published for the first time in English, while Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk faced prosecution for speaking out against the Armenian massacre of the last century.

In the category of books turned to film, Narnia tops the list, taking us back to CS Lewis and his fantasy world of lions, witches and wardrobes, never mind the critics. The dragons have grown up in the fourth Harry Potter film, and so has Emma “Hermione” Watson. Yet another screen version of Pride and Prejudice has Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet in a screenplay adapted by Deborah Moggach.

A fine year, for books in general and the novel in particular. Even at Oprah’s Book Club, where they read Faulkner this summer. But there is one novel that upstaged all the others this year, and it was published fifty years ago. Arguably the world’s best novel, by arguably the world’s best novelist, this is how it begins: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”