2012: My Regrets of the Year

So last year I did a quick post on my 'Regrets of the Year' --- that is, the books that came out that I wanted to read, but couldn't because of this stupid quest. I actually think it'll be really handy in another couple of years when I'm finished with my list, because it'll stop me forgetting about things I was intrigued by, but never had a chance to investigate further. I might be late to the party on all these, but that's not gonna stop me, dammit!

So, here are my biggest regrets of 2012:

Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías.

Aaaaand already I'm sorta cheating. This wasn't a 2012 book, it just came to my attention this year. Anyway, it looks and sounds incredible. After splitting up with his wife, Jacques Deza begins to discover he has an incredible gift: he can interpret subtle cues in a person's face today to predict what they will do tomorrow. He can, on a very small, personal level, predict the future. Then he gets recruited to a spy organisation of dubious purpose, and the whole thing turns into a weird, philosophical thriller.

'Philosophical thriller' sounds right up my alley. I was close to buying this instead of Crime and Punishment, but it's friggin' huge, being sold in three separate volumes that total about 1300 pages. However, one of my colleagues at work flew through the lot in about two weeks, so it seems like it's still pretty page-turner-y.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.

Billy Lynn just has one of those set-ups that seems kind of perfect. After surviving a famous skirmish in the Iraq war, the remaining members of a heroic company are doing a whirlwind publicity tour back home. Scheduled to appear with Destiny's Child at halftime at a Dallas Cowboys game, they have to spend the day schmoozing with mega-rich corporate types, trying to score with the cheerleaders, humouring the hulking war-hungry players ... all while trying to protect the secret of what really happened over there.

I don't know about you, but I want to read that fucking book. It helps that it's been getting fantastic reviews, and is apparently hilarious. We run a book club at the store, and the fact that it divided our (generally pretty staid) book clubbers is another plus for me (don't tell them that).

HHhH by Laurent Binet.

Another war novel, this time set in WWII, it deals with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's coldest, cruelest lieutenants. The two men responsible, Jozef Gabćik and Jan Kubiš, were themselves discovered and killed almost straight away, and many details of their lives and their heroism have been lost to history.

Binet's novel, though exhaustively researched, isn't shy about admitting that there are elements of the story that will remain forever unknowable. Binet deals with this by inserting himself into the book, debating whether it is a greater tribute to imagine the interior lives of the two assassins, transforming them from real men into legends, or if it is a better, truer course to only write what is definitively known. So as well as a thriller, it becomes a meditation on how we remember our history, and how our selective remembrances can change the past.

The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood.

I was kind of 50/50 on this one: I liked the sound of the plot (a group of brilliant students at Cambridge get carried away by their leader's macabre experiments to do with music and death), and I loved the authors getting name-checked on the book's jacket (it was compared to Donna Tartt, Zadie Smith and Evelyn Waugh), but it could so easily have been one of those over-hyped debuts that has publishers hot under the collar, but never delivers. But then one of our regular customers, whose opinions are pretty close to my own, read it and loved it. I'll always be looking for another Secret History, hopefully this is a worthy successor.

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus.

I've heard wildly disparate things about this one, and some people have flat out hated it, but the basic concept is enough to keep me intrigued: a new kind of virus sweeps the globe, making parents get gravely ill at the sound of their children's voices. I don't know much more about it than that (other than the fact it's got a really beautiful cover ... yes, I know that's how you shouldn't judge books), but that's enough to get its hooks into me. The possibility for exploring some really interesting stuff to do with families and the ties that bind us, and just what would happen when suddenly the world's children hold all the power. And god, so so pretty ...

So those are my 'want-to-reads' from 2012. Any of you guys read anything brilliant this year that I should add to the list?

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Persuasion by Jane Austen
books to go: 76