Christmas Books I

Rupert Christiansen

How embarrassing. The authors of the four books I have most relished this year – Nicola Shulman’s elegant monograph A Rage for Rock Gardening (Short Books, £9.99), Virginia Nicholson’s exuberant Among the Bohemians (Viking, £20), Giles Waterfield’s brilliant satire The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (Review, £14.99) and Selina Hastings’ fascinating biography of Rosamond Lehmann (Chatto, £25) – are all friends of mine, and the etiquette of this exercise therefore inhibits me from nominating them.

So I turn instead to three books which in their different ways prove profoundly illuminating of the dilemmas of 20th-century Mitteleuropa: Eric Hobsbawm’s dodgy but enthralling autobiography Interesting Times (Allen Lane, £20), Sandor Marai’s Blixenish novella Embers (Viking, £12.99) and Sebastian Haffner’s pellucid Defying Hitler (Weidenfeld, £14.99). Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (Fourth Estate, £17.99) transcended all its hype – a funny, moving, generous-spirited novel of real artistry. James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry (Viking, £14.99) explained verse forms with the utmost eloquence, and The World’s Worst Poetry (Prion, $8.99), crisply edited by Stephen Robins, brightened many an otherwise dreary visit to the lavatory.

Anita Brookner

Nothing has pleased me much this year, although the desire to read a well-made book is if anything sharper than ever. Exception is made for The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (Bloomsbury, £16.99) and Any Human Heart by William Boyd (Hamish Hamilton, £17.99). From the beginning of the year I liked Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Methuen, £6.99), the ancestor of all novels of suburban America, from John Cheever and John Updike right down to Richard Ford and Jonathan Franzen. My favourite authors let me down badly: A. S. Byatt (A Whistling Woman, Chatto, £16.99) and John Banville (Shroud, Picador, £15.99) were both infuriatingly self-indulgent and lacked a clear sense of cause and effect. The self-scrutiny which is probably the basis for all novel-writing seems to be in abeyance.