I'm not sure I will hit fifty owing to the illness of my mum, but I will nonetheless post the books I have read in order here with a brief comment.

14 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
There's a very funny line in a David Berman poem where he says something like "if you're the kind of person who laughs out loud at the jokes in Shakespeare, don't take it wrong when I say you're trying too hard." Well, I was laughing out loud at this, so much so that Mrs VSR turned to me and asked me what I was laughing at so I read a bit and she was stone-faced.

Ah you had to be there.

13 James Joyce, Ulysses
The 1982 version for RTE, unabridged and read in full. How do you glibly review Ulysses? You don't.

12 John le Carre, The Looking Glass War
Critics thought it a poor follow-up to TSWCIFTC and provided none of the white knuckle thrills of that book. The last part is right but the assessment is incorrect: this is le Carre getting better and deeper and richer. It's a spy novel where all of the spies are utterly inept, their motives cloudy, fuelled by self-justification, and spurred into action by poorly vetted information. The other side of the coin of espionage, all panic and pomposity, and no joy. Great read.

11 John le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
I'm working backward through le Carre and come at TSWCIFTC from the perspective of his slower and more traumatised material from the 1970s. This one is more pacy and clipped; Leamas goes from agent runner to failure to prison to double agent in 10 chapters, clearing the middle of the book for some cat and mouse interrogation scenes. I liked it though there are some slight narrative contrivances.

10 Eka Kurniawan, Kitchen Curse
Collection of short stories by an Indonesian writer I had never heard of. Have to say I really liked this, and I don't know whether it is the translation or Kurniawan or just some of the peccadillos of Indonesian culture but I felt throughout that I was at once in this world and also watching a world that was like our own but twisted out of recognition. Like a lot of great short stories, meaning only comes with an artfully inserted sentence right near the end that makes everything before fall into place. One or two read a little more like creative writing student tall tales, but most of them are excellent.

9 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital
Almost impossible to rate in a sense: Harvey's book is a companion to Marx's Capital, and patiently unpacks what Marx is saying and why he is saying it, including an aesthetic defence for the drudgery that is reading the first few chapters of Marx's original text. That's all fine, but it gets better when Harvey is using what he has told us to look at his own specialisms in human geography and uneven development. It's only so much easier to read than the original too; Harvey wants to be precise and as such he isn't going to breeze past the whole barrel of wheat/bolt of cotton stuff, let alone the shifting sands of value/exchange value/use value. I do feel edified for reading it, and it did make me feel that I had some of Marx wrong and some only too right.

8 Dennis Potter, The Art of Invective: Selected Journalism 1953-1994
Spurred on by 7 I picked this up for cheap on ebay. As the title suggests - mostly television reviews and journalism from Potter as an Oxford student, then as a professional writer. It's mostly funny and waspish, and quite aware that 'Dennis Potter' had quickly become a persona that he could use to his advantage to champion causes in politics and on television. It goes down well and raises a lot of laughs, but I don't think this trumps Potter the screenwriter.

7 Jonathan Meades, Pedro and Ricky Come Again: Selected Writings 1988-2020
On page 941, in an otherwise laudatory review of a collection of Dennis Potter's sporadic journalism, Meades declares Potter's television work "tirelessly self-plagiaristic." When you thumb through extensive index of this weighty tome, there are two references to the Worcestershire resort town of Stourport. In both examples, written three years apart, Meades' cites the same bon mot from Niklaus Pevsner about the town being "wholly occasioned by a canal." Meades also made two Pevsner-related shows in 1998 and 2001.

Still, one can be guilty of the same thing you accuse someone else of and have the remark carry some weight. More to the point, Meades makes the point of being up-front about what doesn't work about something in order to make the shower of praise jet with greater force. It is also the technique employed by this short review.

6 Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas
Rapid-fire novella about a horse trader desperate for revenge after suffering an injustice and seeing the proper channels blocked. Can't tell if it is postmodern before modernity, or if it is so Romantic in character that it seems weird to our 21st century minds. Tore through this in two sittings.

5 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy
As Pickstock writes: "As between the two preconditions, one can assign no priority since, if, as I would claim, a spatialised ontology is without real, objective warrant, its secret motivation is the imposition of a mathesis." I'm swayed by what I can parse from Pickstock's writing (that hymns and prayer are uncolonised time spent in the presence of the divine, and that we should approach life with a greater sense of ritual and purpose toward God) but her sense of history of things like Futurism is just incomprehensible. Opaque.

4 Derek Sayers, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History
A really likeable and readable history of Czech culture and identity and how that sustained itself against multiple groups who contested the fertile crossroads at the centre of Europe. The Czechs have nearly been wiped out by the Catholic Church in the Hussite Wars, by the Germans during the Thirty Years War, the Habsburgs, the Soviets, and the Nazis, but have persevered, fought, lost, won, and carried on despite splits within the groups, to produce an interesting body of non-conformist and weird work: Kafka, Svankmajer, Hasek, Capek, Teige, Kundera + all their cinema of the 60s.

3 Jose Luis Borges, Fictions
Minimising re-reads as best as I can, but I couldn't resist. This is probably my favourite collection of short stories. Nothing else is really close.

2 Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango
Read immediately after watching the film about the residents of a collective farm who are tricked. I was very impressed with the contrast between the film and this; where the film uses duration and weight to support its portrait of existential and spiritual dread, the book uses powerful descriptive passages. The film is 7hrs+. The book is a sprightly 240 pager. They both, in different ways, say approximately the same thing.

1 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture
Pop theoretical account from the 1960s of the wave of culture that related to the post-nuclear condition. Jazzily written and some nice observations but mostly didn't chime with this.