The drains have backed up again

Bookish

The 39 best books of the year so far BBC

My, doesn't time fly when you're having fun? Another quarter of a year, another best-books-of-the-year-so-far list, courtesy of those BBC Culture vultures Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker.

This time, there's thirty-nine of the damned things to wade through. That's the other thing about time flying, the best books of the year list just gets longer. (oldman)

Once again, someone, somewhere at Most­Trusted­International­News­Broadcaster Towers has taken the easy way out, and simply replaced the previous list with this one. Once again, therefore, it's impossible to say whether this is a completely new thirty-nine must-reads,* or whether having read the previous twenty-six means that we've earned ourselves a little respite; a head-start towards the finishing line, as it were. Anyone who needs to know will just have to consult the BBC's hive mind, AKA Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Either way, it's at times like this I give thanks that—like Laurence and Baker—I don't actually read the bloody things myself. (pipe)

Of Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man, Laurence does the dirty and borrows from The Guardian's review:

The Last White Man is "a short novel of very long sentences" that is, writes The Guardian, "[a] strange, beautiful allegorical tale… compellingly readable and strangely musical, as if being recounted as a kind of folktale to future generations."

Rebecca Laurence, The 39 best books of the year so far 2022, BBC Culture

I think that's supposed to make the novel sound more compelling. The only thing that meant anything to me is that the same author also wrote 2007's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which my wife thought was bloody marvellous, recommending it for me to read. I got about halfway through, before putting it down for good.

* Actually, I vaguely recall the synopses for James Cahill's Tiepolo Blue, Jack Parlett's Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise, and Amy Bloom's In Love: A Memoir of Love; the cover of NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory; and that Margaret Atwood had been previously mentioned. So I guess that's at least five titles that we've seen before.