The Guardian's Blog, page 89

Readers' 10 best books of 2014

These are the books our readers picked as the best of 2014 – from searing polemic to stunning fiction and a story of very intimate science

But which book did you enjoy most this year, regardless of publication date? Discuss it hereWriters and critics pick the best books of 2014

We asked you to nominate your favourite books of 2014 and here, in no particular order, are the results - the 10 books that attracted the most consensus. Below you’ll find acclaimed fiction, memoir, fantasy and polemic. Interestingly, the list differs greatly from readers’ choices halfway through the year – take a look at those here.

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Reading the tea leaves – literature's best brews

We celebrate international tea day with a round up of some of the finest beverages in books. But what have we missed? Give us your favourite fictional cuppas below

“Under certain circumstances,” declares Henry James at the opening of The Portrait of a Lady, “there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” There are also few novels that are not agreeably enhanced by the presence of a good brew. As James says, “whether you partake of tea or not … the situation is in itself delightful”. Introduced to the English court in the middle of the 17th century by Catherine of Braganza, the fashion spread to the middle classes in the 18th century, offering an alternative brand of refreshment to the excitements of the coffee house.

“What part of confidante has that poor teapot played ever since the kindly plant was introduced among us,” observed William Thackeray in The History of Pendennis. And, as he remarks ironically, “what a series of pictures and groups the fancy may conjure up and assemble round the teapot and cup”. Here are some of literature’s best.

Tea was neither greasy nor sticky – grease and stickiness being two of the qualities which Miss Matty could not endure. No shop-window would be required. A small, genteel notification of her being licensed to sell tea would, it is true, be necessary, but I hoped that it could be placed where no one would see it. Neither was tea a heavy article, so as to tax Miss Matty’s fragile strength.

These I steeped in hot water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one cup of I don’t know what for Estella.

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter. “It’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

There lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business-table, and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea: the quietest room, you would have said, and, but for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in London. Right in the midst there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde.

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another –
Let us hold hands and look.”
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

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Poem of the week: Bodies by Miriam Gamble

An aspect of a horse’s training provides some unsettling analogies with the powers that humans learn to accept

Miriam Gamble’s new collection, Pirate Music, extends her interrogation of human-animal relations, and includes an affectionate focus on horses. But no one approaching this week’s poem, Bodies, should be lulled into thinking “Oh, another horse poem – been there, read that …”. Gamble’s anthropomorphism is distinctly not of the obvious or sentimental kind.

Bodies contains a parable woven around the two particular things the junior horse “must learn” – namely, “to carry its own weight/ through the use of its quarters” and “to take a contact on the mouth”. The colt learns instinctively to balance upright on four legs, although the word “use” might hint at more intrusive burdens later on. But the “contact on the mouth” implies a sharper curb, the horse made subject to a human control that’s immediately seen as problematic.

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Tolkien's myths are a political fantasy

In a world built on myth, we can’t ignore the reactionary politics at the heart of Tolkien’s Middle Earth

It’s a double-edged magical sword, being a fan of JRR Tolkien. On one hand we’ve had the joy of watching Lord of the Rings go from cult success to, arguably, the most successful and influential story of the last century. And we get to laugh in the face of critics who claimed LotR would never amount to anything, while watching a sumptuous (if absurdly long) adaption of The Hobbit.

On the other hand, you also have to consider the serious criticisms made of Tolkien’s writing, such as Michael Moorcock’s in his 1978 essay, Epic Pooh. As a storyteller Tolkien is on a par with Homer or the anonymous bard behind Beowulf, the epic poets who so influenced his work. But as works of modern mythology, the art Tolkien called “mythopoeia”, both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are open to serious criticism.

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Personalised books for children shouldn’t have a bad name

I used to think that inserting a particular child’s name into a story was missing the point of imaginative stories. Reader, I was wrong

I used to be entirely snobbish about personalised books, chalking them up not as “proper stories”, but vehicles for custom-tailored self-centredness; shouldering out the crucial development of empathy in favour of a narrowly-focused me, me, me. All that changed when a less lemon-lipped friend gave my train-crazed three-year-old a personalised Thomas the Tank Engine book for last year’s birthday.

It came with a preschooler-pleasing certificate from the Fat Controller, but that wasn’t its main appeal. When my daughter realised that she was actually IN the story, having a birthday party on board Annie and Clarabel and being allowed into the cab to sound Thomas’s whistle, she expanded with silent bliss, like one of the balloons tied to the beloved’s buffers. True, “You” and the Birthday Surprise might not have been a staggering work of literature, but her evident joy in it made reading (and rereading) it at bedtime much less taxing than ploughing through some of her other favourites, “straight” Thomas books included. She still seeks it out on a regular basis (and has not yet, at least to the casual eye, lost touch with reality).

Biography’s Victorian values: why do modern Lives adhere to a 19th-century model?

Literary form needs refreshing in any genre, but most modern life stories seem stuck in a deadening past

The history of the novel is the history of the reinvention of the novel. Each generation seeks to find its own “novelty”, not just in terms of substance, psychology and subject but as regards form, structure and voice. By contrast, biography seems remarkably consistent. There is a deep similarity between those worthy (and often fascinating) 19th-century volumes – Scott’s Napoleon, Lockhart’s Scott, Carlyle’s Frederick The Great, Froude’s Carlyle – and the contemporary biographies of figures like Philip Larkin and Roy Jenkins, Muriel Spark and Margaret Thatcher. Most biographies tend to take the advice of the King in Alice In Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop”. Moreover, they also tend to emulate the King’s style. Carroll tells us he says this “gravely”.

Why hasn’t biography been as daring as the novel? Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians is often cited as breaking with a reverential and panegyric tradition. Such a tradition did exist – Lockhart’s invented deathbed scene of Scott sagely dispensing wisdom is unlikely, given the poor man had been trepanned, filled with opium and left thinking he was King Lear. But some of the shock value of the 19th-century biography has been forgotten: revealing the state of the Carlyle’s marriage brought no end of problems for Froude. But Strachey’s cock-snooking, slightly sophomoric tone did not change the basic narrative form of the biography.

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The Choice of Life: Dr Johnson’s Christmas message

Rasselas, his bracing 18th-century novel about the search for happiness, has wisdom worth remembering in the 21st

As Christmas heaves into view and we try once again to convince ourselves that we can eat, drink or otherwise consume our way to happiness, reading Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas should be obligatory. Originally titled The Choice of Life, Johnson’s wonderfully wily and energetic tale reminds us – like hangovers, bloat and post-Christmas blues – that happiness may just be a little more elusive than we think.

Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week in January 1759 to raise money for his gravely ill mother. But the speed of composition, and the melancholy circumstances, seem only to have quickened and compressed his formidable wits. Although it begins like a slice of neo-classical sermonising, in a few deft lines it erupts into irresistible life. “Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy … who expect that age will perform the promises of youth … attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.”

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Poets' holiday greetings cards: an intimate glimpse into genius

How did Charles Bukowski wish friends and family a merry Christmas? A new exhibition reveals not just legendary poets’ softer side but the stages of their lives

One year, Langston Hughes’s Christmas cards were elegant and unique, printed with a line illustration, Africanesque, by fellow Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas. Another year, he scrawled a quick greeting on the back of a mass-produced card with a generic holiday verse printed on the back. Sometimes, even poets get too busy to put their personal stamp on the holidays.

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December’s Reading group: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

This month, we’ll be investigating a book that is generally agreed to be a true classic of crime fiction. Will we agree?

Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon has been pulled out of the hat for our celebration of Noir Christmas. This strikes me as an excellent choice. It was probably the most nominated book this month, it gives us an excellent excuse to enjoy the Humphrey Bogart film over the festive period, and no gumshoe is more celebrated than the hard-boiled wisecracking detective Sam Spade.

The hat’s decision comes agrees with many judgments – Robert McCrum recently selected the 1929 novel as one of his 100 best of all time. Not many people seem to have objected to the choice on that thread, but it will be interesting to see what kind of discussion it provokes here. For the moment, I’m in no position to comment because I haven’t read it. Which makes me all the more intrigued and eager. Not least because I’ve just seen the first paragraph:

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Ayesha Siddiqi: 'We need to stop waiting for permission to write'

In our series interviewing women who write on the web and shape its discussions, we speak to Ayesha Siddiqi, the editor in chief of the New Inquiry

Ayesha Siddiqi spurs conversations across the internet. Whether she’s working in her capacity as editor in chief of the New Inquiry, an online magazine, or tweeting about the ethics of pledging allegiance, Ayesha plays an important role in advocating for the work of anti-oppression and anti-racism.

I spoke with Ayesha not about only about Twitter and love of Kanye West, but how her Muslim identity informs her framework for justice and how she brings her values to the New Inquiry.

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