My Books of the Year 2011 – Non-Fiction

Posted: December 30th, 2011 | No Comments »

OK, here’s what I thought worth reading in non-fiction this year (I’ve only listed books I’ve actually read as there’s a ton I wanted to but ran out of time). Again, no order of preference, just the order they came to mind:

The Hare with Amber Eyes – Edmund de Waal – OK, probably a 2010 book but I read it early last year and fell for it in a big way as millions of others have

Charles Dickens A Life – Claire Tomalin – a doorstopper but if Dickens doesn’t deserve a doorstepper bio every decade or so then who does?

Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream – Francis Spufford – more Soviet kitsch than you can shake a stick at

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them – Elif Batuman – the funniest non-fiction book of the year (her New Yorker articles on things Turkey are also excellent) by a wide mile

Karaoke Culture – Dubravka Ugresic – probably only former Yugoslavians living in Amsterdam can produce crtitical social commentary like this

Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness – Michael Symmons Robert and Paul Farley – The Edgelands, we know them so well yet ignore them for the most part – here they are praised and revered

St Pancras Station – Simon Bradley – give in, it’s the most gorgeous railway station in the world

The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex – Mark Kermode – I don’t watch many films, I don’t care that much about the film business but Kermode is eminently listenable to on Radio5 Live and now on the page too

Stet and Somewhere Towards the End – Diana Athill – it took me a long time to give in and read Athill. I’m glad I have found her now

The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice, Countess de Janze – Paul Spicer – Can’t quite move on from the White Mischief, Happy Valley thing – it keeps on being fascinating

Arguably – Christopher Hitchens – I think I had read all of these essays, some multiple times, elsewhere. But given the loss of Hitch this year they were all worth re-reading and remain state of the art

Stalin Ate my Homework – Alexi Sayle – a very funny autobio and a great recreation of life on the hard left in Merseyside after the war

Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built and How it Changed the City Forever – Christian Wolmar – Grew up on the Tube and so books about it appeal to me

The Blitz: The British Under Attack – Juliet Gardiner – Gardiner is a great historian of the 30’s and war; it’s the anniversary of the Blitz and it remains a moment in British history it is now so hard to reallty appreciate the horror of – this book does a good job of recreating the fear, terror and genuine Blitz spirit (not quite the same as the mythical spirit)

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham – Selina Hastings – at last, a bio of Maugham worth reading

And here’s the great man himself – W Somerset – who, for all his style, had something of the retired prize fighter about him:

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