Books in 2008

I read 50 books this year, fewer than in the years before. Notably these:

• Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, 2003 - a rather beautiful and moving novel on memory, anticipation and loss.
• Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, 1997 - Hickey is funny and provocative on music, art and aesthetics, lightly excavating truths that, once they're in front of your eyes, feel utterly self-evident.
• Ian Fleming's James Bond books, 1953-66 - as a body these comprise a great double-portrait of Fleming the self-exiled, nostalgic author and his self-loathing, consumption-addicted and often incapacitated character Bond.
• James Wood's How Fiction Works, 2008 - like Hickey, Wood is a great handler of words. As a critic he's sometimes accused of privileging psychological realism above all else, though the last sections of his book address this fairly directly.
• JM Coetzee's Disgrace, 1999 - extraordinary and pessimistic post-colonial novel of relationships tested, torn and abused, of the costs of wielding power, of cultural and gendered difference.

Going forward I plan to consume ever fewer books, and instead to create more writing, art, and other stuff.

(Elsewhere in 2008: Matt Webb's, many others', and books I wish I'd read.)