Books of the Year

I seem to have read a few more books than normal this year, partly because I've got into online and eBooks (Project Gutenberg is a good resource for that). Many of my choices have been inspired by watching TV or film adaptations of novels.

The Adventures of Phillip by William Makepeace Thackeray

I started the year with the sequel to the unfinished novel I ended 2021 with, A Shabby Genteel Story.

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc 

Belloc was a great walker and this travel journal with his own illustrations documents the pilgrimage he made in 1902 from Toul, the French town where he had completed his military service, to Rome.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

I've had this on my bookshelves for years, and finally got round to reading it after seeing another TV adaptation of it. 

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

A very topical novel set in a plague struck seventeenth century Lombardy, with both religious and class themes.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I read this after watching the film, which has significant plot differences from the novel. Steinbeck interleaves his tale of Dust Bowl refugees in thirties California with political commentary generalising from the experiences of its characters.

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

A classic example of how you can turn a longish short story  into a two hour film.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust

Having read Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's famously long novel In Search of Lost Time, I moved onto the second, in which the upper class Parisian characters travel to a Normandy seaside resort for the summer.

The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France

France appears as a character in Proust, which led me to this, his best known work.

The Card by Arnold Bennett

Having lived in Stoke as a student in the early nineties, I recognised many of the locations in this Potteries-set comic novel about an ambitious young man.

Walking the Woods and the Water by Nick Hunt

A modern recreation of Patrick Leigh Fermor's classic interwar tramp across Central Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musill

Also set in Central Europe, at a military academy on the edge of the Austria-Hungarian empire before WWI, this novel strongly prefigures the militarism and fascism about to overwhelm the continent.

Hell Is A City by Maurice Proctor

I blogged about the film based on this Mancunian detective thriller here, although there's a major plot difference at the end of the novel.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

I think we all know what this book is about.

Ritual by David Pinner

The novel on which the film The Wicker Man is loosely based, although again there are major plot differences.

Adam Bede/Felix Holt/Middlemarch by George Eliot

A midsummer blitz of works by the English Midlands most famous novelist.

The Professor/Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Some unkind critics have claimed that this is really the same novel written twice, one with a male and the other a female protagonist, and both draw on the author's experiences teaching at a school in Brussels.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Political crisis wracks England as a mysterious virus from the Far East sweeps across Europe and climate change threatens human existence in this prophetic sci-fi novel.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré

Somewhat ironically, I read this Cold War spy thriller straight through while sheltering indoors on the hottest day of the year.

The Decembrists/The Devil by Leo Tolstoy

An unfinished sequel to the much longer War and Peace, although started before it, and a short story about a love triangle involving a rich young man who inherits a country estate.

The Misfits by Arthur Miller

A cinematic novel based on the screenplay for the modern Western which was the last film of both Miller's then wife Marilyn Monroe and her co-star Clark Gable.

The Attack on the Mill/The Flood/The Fête at Coqueville by Émile Zola

Having  read most of his Rougon-Macquart series of novels, I whipped through a few of Zola's short stories, the first two about disasters striking rural communities, and the last a comedy about washed up barrels of wine overcoming ancient enmities in a Normandy fishing village.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame based the character of Toad in his Thamesside children's story on the politician Horatio Bottomley, but his boundless ego and reckless self-promotion inevitably brings to mind the first of this year's three Prime Ministers.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

You can't read this novel, which combines espionage, comedy, romance and religion, without thinking of the title character in the film version played by Alec Guinness (like Greene, a convert to Catholicism who often struggled with his faith).