​The year started well. Back in January, we had a new novel by Julian Barnes and a new book about Shostakovich. In this household, either or both would be welcomed, but this was two-in-one. Barnes had applied his meticulous research, sensitivity and beautiful prose to the life (and times and music) of Dmitri Shostakovich.
 
The focus of The Noise of Time, inevitably and rightly, is on the compromises which Shostakovich was forced, and forces himself, to make in order to survive and this theme is made manifest on the very first page. He is standing by a lift in a state of terror, waiting to be taken by the secret police after Stalin had walked out of a performance of Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk: ‘All he knew was that this was the worst time’.
 
Or maybe not, because it is one of three crisis points – ‘conversations with Power' - which allow Barnes to create a series of monologues within the historical context, and despite the echo of Dickens in the opening line, it is to his great love Flaubert that Barnes nods in this desperately sad story of a man coming to terms with his betrayal of himself.
 
The inversion of Marx’s famous dictum may be glib, but it is true. ‘History repeats itself; the first time as a farce; the second time as a tragedy’.

​Which is an appropriate thought upon which to remember my summer reading, the complete works of Simon Raven, of whom it was famously said that he had ‘the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel’. It will not come as surprise to learn that I rate the Alms for Oblivion sequence to be funnier, more insightful, more telling, and superior to the Powell parallel, Dance to the Music of Time. And I admire, amongst so many other things, his description of his writing: "I arrange words in pleasing patterns in order to make money . . . I try to be neat, intelligent and lucid; let others be 'creative' or 'inspired'."
 
And so to the autumn, when it gets later earlier and my thriller and detective story writers invariably publish their latest novels. This year, Lee Child, Ian Rankin and Michael Connolly all had new books out on the same day and all, to a greater or lesser extent, disappointed. The Harry Bosch, The Other Side of Goodbye was probably the best; the new Jack Reacher, Night School, by some measure the worst, leaving the new Rebus, Rather Be The Devil, somewhere in the middle. Not bad, but, well, you know, haven’t we been here before?

​The other problem with these was that in the days before I turned to them I had been fortunate enough to read an uncorrected proof copy of a first novel by Rick Gekoski, who normally figures in my favourite non-fiction books.

​The eponymous protagonist of Darke is an extraordinary creation and the writing intelligent and intellectual, full of allusions and half-familiar references which haunt the reader as much as the narrative. It is one of the best novels I have read for many a year – but that’s all I have to say for the moment, because it will not be published until next year. But I promise you it will be worth the wait.

​And finally, another first novel: A Time for Peace by the poet Marg Roberts. Like Barnes, she combines the inner life of her characters with a well-researched insight into historical events, in this case the occupation of Serbia in the first world war. If I have a criticism, it is that too much pure research has made its way onto the page, but the writing is spare and sparse and the characters, which could so easily have become stereotypes, are beautifully drawn. I commend it to you.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Just created a lunchtime playlist for Wilde's. Dylan, Dead, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Ry Cooder, Miles Davis, Yo la Tengo and loads more. It's great!

According to John Sutherland, reading well is almost as difficult as writing well. Which is probably why I have been struggling this year, giving up on such acclaimed publications as A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. I even failed with my annual re-reading of Ms Austen. It’s been that kind of year.
 
But there are a few books, fiction and non-fiction, with which I have persevered, and which will remain on my Kindle or on the culled bookshelves for whatever reason; as I anticipate a plethora of book tokens at Christmas, and therefore yet more stuff to read, it’s worth recording those which have made their mark on my consciousness in 2016.

​They have not necessarily made me a better person but as FE Smith remarked to a judge who claimed that after listening to the evidence he was ‘none the wiser’, ‘No, m’lud, but far better informed’.
 
It is, clearly, to non-fiction that I turn in order to learn. This year, four have stood out.
​

​The first reflects my unfashionable and unreconstructed fascination with and adherence to existentialism; whatever that is.

​Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café (with the wondrous sub-title of Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails) places existentialist thought in the context of existentialist living – praxis I think we used to call it – and is both a deceptively simple introduction to the works of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty et al but also a fascinating The Mandarins-like account of their feuds, debates, politics and love affairs. (It also makes the unreadable Heiddegger interesting which is an achievement in its own right.)

​There is an unlikely parallel with my second choice, The Pitch That Killed by Mike Sowell.

​In August 1920, Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was struck on the head by a ball thrown by Carl Mays of the Yankees. Mays had joined the Red Sox on the same day as Babe Ruth before moving on, and the Sox players were among the most vehement in their condemnation of the pitch. Mays, after all, had form. It is a tragic event in the history of baseball, but Sowell places it in the context of class and culture, money and major league politics, the contrasting characters of the popular, charismatic Chapman and the surly, churlish Mays as well as the pennant race of that year. The story itself is tragic; the context is fascinating and brilliantly told.

e​The telling of the tale as much as the tale itself is also the key to The Candidate by Alex Nunns, the story of the improbable election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party – the first time.

​It is a political thriller which has, unsurprisingly, received little attention from the mainstream media, which emerges with about as much credit as the majority of Labour MPs and the party administration. To read this book is to become intimately acquainted not solely with the factionalism on right and left which has plagued the party, but also with the larger picture: what is the Labour Party? What's the point of it in a post-Brexit world?

​And finally, with pleasure, I return to Bob Dylan Dream: My Life with Bob.

I read – and reviewed - this exemplary memoir by poet, critic and uber-tweeter Roy Kelly earlier this year. Despite the sub-title, the most interesting sections are Bobless, because although we may measure out our lives in Dylan albums and shows, we are not defined exclusively by our relationship with him. What interests us is what draws us to Bob, those Wordsworthian spots of time which make us what we are.

​Roy’s book is his own Prelude and I commend it to you.
 
Next time, fiction.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob from 1989. It’s a while now and I had forgotten just how good those shows were.