I read 74 books this year. I’m not reviewing them all; I don’t remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Did nobody think to tell me about Doris Lessing? The name had a familiar ring, the kind of sound a name gets when it’s called great, but only ever in the middle of a list of other great names. I can’t really understand how I made it this far without somebody insisting I read this book.

The setup is ostensibly simple: semi-autobiographical protagonist Anna is an author and an active leftist in 30s, 40s Britain. She keeps four notebooks simultaneously, each for different strains of thought and experience. One is in the form of a draft for a novel, based on her own life.

At the bottom of the spiral you have Ella, a writer character in a fiction that is written by Anna, a writer character that is written by Doris Lessing — the writer character who existed in the same world as you and I. Each writer reflects on the story unfolding and about what of themselves they’re putting into their characters, and what their characters are showing them about themselves.

So yes, it’s a book about writers writing, and it’s no surprise I should like that kind of thing if executed well. But it’s also the proof of this idea… that the form of the novel was invented to depict the internal life, to depict subtle psychologies that aren’t discernible in other forms. The level of detail and the extent to which I believe these women are real and complex — it goes beyond anything I’ve ever found in another novel.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this book ever since I picked it up. The ambition of it and the execution being so good that you never feel the construction of the layers within layers. It’s my book of the year and it’s expanded what I thought was possible.

In the final act of Barton Fink, John Goodman’s Mundt character finally flips. As he runs down a burning hotel hallway past the writer protagonist, wielding a shotgun, he screams over and over: “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”

The Magus by John Fowles

I read The Collector a few years ago, and that was the impression I had of John Fowles. It’s a claustrophobic, captive horror story with an antagonist with a twisty, turny psychology. When I started reading The Magus and it opened up on this beautiful Greek island, a setting that’s bright and open from sea to sea, I figured if it was going to be a completely different beast.

It’s was and it wasn’t. It plays out over a much grander stage and time scale, and very gradually walks you from Mediterranean wish fulfilment to a psychological horror that totally unseats your sense of reality.

I love a horror story where the characters make perfectly reasonable and smart moves but still cannot get out of dodge. I can’t fault Nicholas, I’m sure I’d end up in just the same bind. His torturer plays on his sense of good manners, his vanity, his desires, and his curiosity. The layers just keep coming and coming.

The Interrogators by Allan Prior

There is a bookcase in an apartment in Mallorca. It’s full of wrinkle-spined paperbacks of a certain age that get more crispy and soaked with salt and suncream year after year. It’s got books in languages that I can’t really read. It’s got Italian yellow fiction, the original ones with the eponymous yellow spines. It got some classics, some modern classics. Every year though, I try and pull something off there that is in English and is unapologetically genre.

Last year, I read an original 80s paperback edition of Fletch and The Man Who, and this year I read The Interrogators. It was first published in ‘65 and the Pan Books copy I had can’t have been much younger than that.

Get your bingo cards ready. In a fictional town in Northern England, a jaded detective (name of Savage) takes on one last case. A girl is abducted, sexually abused, and murdered by a depraved killer who is still on the loose. Savage is assigned a naive rookie as a partner, and together they try and crack the case. If it weren’t for these politicians and higher-ups, they might have a chance.

It couldn’t be more rote, and I’m not even here to claim that this is more than it says on the tin because it’s not. But it was an unputdownable, workmanlike detective fiction that saw me through a couple of afternoons by the sea. It was my annual reminder that clichés exist for a reason and that I need to get over myself once in a while.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

A poet writes a novel and the prose is beautiful. I had never heard of Kaveh Akbar before this year and I was drawn to this book at first based on the physical object. The cover is arresting but it was also in a format I hadn’t seen before: a European trade paperback. It’s sort of equivalent to the hardback I’m used to. It comes out first, is pricier. It’s just a bigger paperback. All of this to say, a larger than life book with a great cover, an unknown, and a title like Martyr!, always with exclamation mark. It got me.

It’s a confident, swaggering book. Dream sequences, notoriously pointless and annoying, in Akbar’s hands are touching and very funny. Humour runs throughout this pretty tragic story. He knows how to joke about US-Iranian relations, the search for God, and the search for his mother.

I can’t really get it across to you how brilliant the prose is in this chaotic, swerving but beautiful book. Great books often feel like a magic trick by the end. All the scraps laid down for you suddenly come together and the author reveals a live dove that flies away. Martyr! certainly does that; the ending is a beautiful culmination. But what makes it special is you feel like Akbar could do this all day.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

No shit, it won the prize. Orbital is a real athletic piece of prose writing. It contains some of the best sentences I’ve read this year (Martyr! has the others) and possibly ever.

Billionaire megalomaniacs looks at space and know exactly what it’s for. Scientists look at it and though they don’t know, they’re confident that the point of themselves is to study it until it becomes clear. I think the rest of us have a tendency to look and think: all well and good, but what’s it really got to do with me?

After completing the first ever spacewalk, Alexei did a crude colouring pencil drawing of the sunrise because he felt it needed to be understood in ways other than an image recorded by a lens and photosensitive film. When Alan Bean got back from being the fourth person to walk on the moon, he likewise felt compelled to paint it. All the photographs of the moon show it to be monochrome and in fact it is, but he wanted to paint it with colours because human experience is different.

Samantha Harvey has done the writing that most effectively explodes the so what feeling about space, I think. I’m sick of the Carl Sagan clips and Neil DeGrasse fucking Tyson and even sweet, dear Chris Hadfield. Harvey’s descriptions of the infinite filtered through the minutely personal still take make me feel something and look up.

Money by Martin Amis

I came late to this continuum of English men that seems to run through Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, then somehow to connect with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and into the murky depths of modern “rationalist” movements and “free thinkers.” I worry that if I’d been exposed to it at the right stage of being an angry young man, I’d be more insufferable today.

Putting all that to one side for a minute, McEwan and Amis are both very good at writing pointy stories about horrid men. Money is particularly interesting at the moment because it’s hard not to read the protagonist as Trump, isn’t it? This man lusts and sweats his way around New York, ugly and moving always in a patina of, if not the reality of: money. The hollow in the middle of the man. His downfall as a result of his own stupidity and the avarice of the wronguns around him. It all has echoes.

The foul, brilliant narration is impressive if exhausting. The inclusion of the author as a character gets a little bit of an eye roll from me but I don’t mind it terribly. In the end, I come away wondering quite why these men of dubious intellectual circles are so good at writing these male monsters that want to make you tear your own skin off. And yes, I come away entertained.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, tr. Adrian Nathan West

I love books about an intellectual scene and I love books about Fucked Up Little Guys(tm). These two interests often intersect. Other examples include Bright Young People, about the social set that dominated British tabloid headlines in the 30s and were sent up in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction and Grand Hotel Abyss, about the lives of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. They’re all messy weirdos who bounced off of another and brilliant to read about. Also you get to sound intellectual whilst basically just reading tabloid gossip.

When We Cease to Understand the World concerns itself with the figures responsible for the rise of quantum physics. Schrödinger, Heisenberg, all the boys are here. What Labatut does that is particularly good is depicting the psychological effect of the discoveries. The scientists finding these irresolvable truths and actually understanding them basically all lose their marbles, and Labatut does a good job at depicting why to an innumerate audience (me).

There’s something pruriently exciting too about the intellectual 20th century scene. Heads up, fascism is coming, do your equations and figure it out before the bombs start falling and the camps are built. You can feel the precipitous acceleration towards mechanised society and the nuclear bomb from all the way back to the 1910s, when the secrets of the subatomic are revealing themselves to these neurotic little guys — and freaking the fuck out.

Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

This is the first Boyd I’ve read and I picked it up after listening to an interview the author did, presumably on the press tour for his new spy novel Gabriel’s Moon. I learned in that interview that he’s known for his spy fiction and after some time poking at other things, he’s back on the espionage and it’s quite good. I also scratched down the names of the early career-defining titles. I picked up Brazzaville Beach.

It does not spoil the book to tell you that Brazzaville Beach is not a spy novel. You’d be able to figure that out by reading the back, which I usually don’t. It’s a book that is set amongst a community of experts studying a colony of chimps in the Republic of Congo. Our protagonist is Hope and she’s seeing the chimps do things that upset the theories of the lead scientist in the camp, and her benefactor. Hijinks ensue.

This story goes places. It’s a great high wire act that is remarkably propulsive and at the same time adept at peeling back the psychological layers of the protagonist through flashbacks. Where it doesn’t go is espionage. Hilariously in hindsight, I spent about the first half of the book waiting for somebody to subtly tip their hand as intelligence. All right, enough with the monkeys, who’s spying on who, I thought. Nobody, obviously, that’s the other ones.

Future Sex by Emily Witt

It’s strange how the cultural moment say, eight years ago can feel so much more outmoded than two decades back. It’s the narcissism of small differences, maybe, that made me recoil in irritation from this book. It’s a micro-memoir, it’s a piece of gonzo reporting about love and sex in a particular corner of the modern age: Silicon Valley in the years of optimism.

The author is a Googler living in the Bay Area. She finds herself at sea with the evolving landscape of relationships and dating. She asks good questions about where the free love moment has actually landed us. Do we have new, better models to follow in our love lives? Or are we just fucking it up in novel ways?

She goes some way in looking for answers. She looks at dating apps, the production of professional porn, chat girls, something called orgasmic meditation, sex parties, polyamory. She does in-person gonzo reporting. She reflects through the lens of her own relationships. All the while, there’s a feeling building in me (no, not that kind), and it culminates in the Burning Man section.

God I hate these people. Yes, self-awareness pours off the page, about being a rich tech worker ruining San Francisco, ditto ruining Burning Man. It failed to inoculate me from the feeling that whatever the answers are to the cultural questions of the moment, I wish this distorted region of the West Coast wasn’t treated like the laboratory of society. It’s an idea generally in decline, and this book only makes me glad to see the back of the cultural moment.

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

I just wrote a very negative review of a autobiographical book written by a coastal media figure. It’s another story young woman of a young woman trying to figure shit out, whilst also swimming in fairly elite circles in an American world city. I couldn’t stand it. So why do I like this autofiction by culture writer Marlowe Granados?

Cynical take: it’s set in a New York-y and draws experience from the media scene there, and that’s a milieu I’ve spent some time on the fringes of myself. It’s about a person in the arts (broadly defined) and not somebody in a full-throated tech job (like I, self-despisingly, am).

Generous take: it’s good! The self-insert Isa and her best friend are self-regarding and directionless in a way that is so authentic that it makes them irresistibly likeable. This isn’t a book that goes somewhere, but the Brownian motion of the protagonists through New York is the point. The observation is delicious and bitchy and from time to time the writing reaches out and slaps you with something unexpectedly lovely.

So maybe I like this because I turned thirty and I’m reflecting on my twenties sort of fondly, sometimes spent in places sort of like these. Maybe it’s because it reflects the side of my world I embrace rather than the side I reject.

So Much For Life by Mark Hyatt

The artist who is discovered posthumously, an all-at-once unsealing of a voice that almost lost to us, is seductive. Mark Hyatt was practically never published during his lifetime and he never lived on his writing. He was a gay Romani man who was born in South London and died by suicide in Lancashire in the 70s. He spent some time on the edges of London’s 60s bohemian scene but he was fringe and it sounds like he struggled in life and love. And he wrote poems.

I’m crap at discovering and reading new poets. All the poetry I’ve ever read was put in front of me by others and while I’ve never regretted reading it, I’ve never sought it out. This book was a thoughtful birthday present from the person I love and it’s the life of a man told in arrestingly direct and passionate verse. He talks about wanking, cruising, fucking. He talks about friends and betrayal and money.

His friends saved his poems and now they’re seeing the light of day with a nice little foreword laying all this out for me. It’s one of those works that makes you think about a life, what mark you leave behind, and whether you’ll be known and understood by anyone when you’re gone. It’s ugly and beautiful.