Books of the year, from indie presses

Deciding to put my money where my mouth was, in 2010 I only read books from independent presses. Excluding thin volumes of poetry, and children's picture books, I read 61 books. This is down on a normal year - Five Leaves' annual report (see last posting) makes it clear why. The year is not quite over but I know that the books I am due to read by the end of the year will not make it into my top ten, as they are for background research. I should confess the number does include three books from conglomerates - a William Trevor book I read to settle an argument (don't ask), a Stanley Middleton novel, because I wanted to remind myself what he was like and The Time Traveller's Wife, because I had to lead a discussion on it. There are some very big independents here - Bloomsbury being the most obvious, but they are members of the Independent Publishers' Guild, and Quercus. But I did say indies, not small indies. Here's my top ten - in no particular order. Not all were published in 2010.
* Bringing it all back home - Ian Clayton (Route) - a memoir of music, and working class life in Featherstone
* Just my type: a book about fonts - Simon Garfield (Profile) - stories about typesetting
* Once upon a country - Sari Nusseibeh (Halban) - Israel and Palestine, Nussebeibeh lives in East Jerusalem, and I read his book while staying down the road from his mother
* Even the dogs - Jon McGregor (Bloomsbury) - a novel, by the best fiction writer in the East Midlands
* The lowlife - Alexander Baron (Black Spring) - Hackney Jewish life in the 1960s, round the dog track
* Before the earthquake - Maria Allen (Tindall Street) - another Nottingham novelist. Her first novel, set in rural Italy a century ago
* A bookman's tale - Ronald Blythe (Canterbury) - not his best set of essays but many are still excellent
* Millennium Trilogy - Steig Larsson (Quercus) - cheating I know, but I read them one after another
* Common Cause - Francis Combes trans. Alan Dent (Smokestack) - the story of communism, in verse, on the basis that next time we'll do it better
* Depresso - Brick (Knockabout) - a graphic novel on depression; read it twice to spot the visual gags scattered throughout
runner up - White Tiger - Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)

Did I feel that I missed out by only reading books by indie presses for a year? Not really. But I would have read, and will soon start Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet, Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, and Stanley Middleton's posthumous A Cautious Approach. And, gritting my teeth, I'd better read The Finkler Question.

Books of the year

Everyone else does it, so here's ten books I read this year I would recommend... I wouldn't say they were my favourite books of the year (I published those ones) and they are in no particular order. Just ones that come to mind.

Deer Hunting with Jesus: guns, votes, debt and delusions in Redneck America by Joe Bargean (Portobello). Anyone reading this would have known the sub-prime market would collapse. See? One book could have saved the world's economy. Read this and weep. Yup, fucked over, heavily armed, anti-union... this lot will vote Palin for President if they get the chance.

Edward Carpenter: a life of liberty and love by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso). The big biography of the most interesting of sandal wearers, a socialist, a vegetarian, an adult education lecturer, a believer in “dress reform” and feminism who lived in an openly gay relationship near Chesterfield at a time when such things were considered impossible.

Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War by Daniel Gray (Luath). This is the book that told me that in my home town workers took over a knitwear factory to make clothes for Spanish people and ran it as a co-op. Didn't learn that in school.

Every Secret Thing: my family, my country by Gillian Slovo (Virago). A re-read here, in prep for interviewing the author at Lowdham Book Festival. The family in question were Joe Slovo, who became a cabinet member in Mandela's government and Ruth First, assassinated by the apartheid regime.

Who was Sophie? by Celia Robertson (Virago). Celia's search to find out what had happened to “Sophie”, her grandmother, once a poet published by the Hogarth Press, who became a bag lady on the streets of Nottingham.

Cello by Frances Thimann (Pewter Rose). A book of short stories by a new press in Nottingham. Delightful cover, elegiac short stories about old age.

Writers on Islands edited by James Knox Whittett (Iron Press). An anthology by mostly well known writers about the islands around the coast of Britain and Ireland, including Kathleen Jamie, JM Synge, George MacKay Brown and many more. Lots of good short pieces.

Cold Granite by Stuart Macbride (Harper Collins). McBride's first tartan noire book, set in Aberdeen. Mentions many of my old haunts and it is good to know that police still feel unsafe visiting the Fersands estate where I used to live!

The One That Got Away by Zoe Wicomb (The New Press, USA). Internet only for this one for the moment, short stories set in South Africa and Glasgow, mostly with South African characters. One story, “N2” is near perfect.

Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair (Hamish Hamilton, but due out in paperback in February). A rag bag, mishmash, rattle bag of Sinclair's usual concerns featuring a cast of the missing, the eccentric, the fictional, the even more unlikely factual.

There are probably others that would have been top tenners that I've forgotten, loaned out, returned to libraries, misplaced, but this seems a good enough selection. It was a good reading year, despite the misery in the book trade. Five of the ten were written by women and (phew) six were from independent presses.