…of the Year

2023 is almost over and I thought I would self-indulge myself with a little end of year round-up. Please think of this less as one of those round-robin letters you receive from Auntie Jean at Christmas and more of a friendly ‘Hey, did you see/read/hear this? I think you might like it’ smattering of recommendations.

I switched off social media this year. It began as an experiment, a temporary measure to see if I would, or could, do something more productive with the time I had been spending scrolling through Twitter, but it soon grew into more of a commitment as the months went on. Did I miss it? Not overly, but there were drawbacks, more on which later. Did it miss me? Again, not overly. I would log back on once a month or so in case there were any messages for me, but these were few and far between. I did get a bit of a flurry of contact in the autumn when a small press I used to work for announced they were publishing a memoir by a famously obsessive transphobe, mainly from people who wanted to check I had nothing to do with it*, but outside of that things remained pretty quiet.

So what did I do with all this additional time? Well, Parkinson’s Law kicked in to an extent, with my existing work, mainly freelance editing, expanding to fill the space. Did I get lots more work, or did I just do the same amount of work more slowly? The jury is out on that one.

There were a few literary festivals to attend, to promote our Literary Cats book. My co-author, Judith Robinson, and I gave talks in Portsmouth, Oxford, Penzance and Bath which all seemed to go well – nice audiences, sold some books. At the Bath event someone turned up from our publisher to present us with the Japanese edition of our book which was a) certainly a surprise and b) more than a little odd seeing as it had been out for five months without anyone telling us. It is, however, a handsome volume, and I now know how to write my name in kanji.

I had hoped to explore a few writing projects that have been on the back-burner for a while. Ha, who am I kidding? They weren’t on the back-burner—they hadn’t even been taken out of the cupboard where I keep all the pots. Their location is irrelevant, really, as I didn’t get round to them at all. To be honest, I just wasn’t feeling it.

I did make a concerted effort to read more books, attend more gigs, go to the movies and generally culture myself up a bit, and that went pretty well. Which finally brings me to the point of this post… a list of faves.

Few things filled me with more joy than Scrapper, Charlotte Regan’s feature-length directorial debut. Bittersweet, with two cracking central performances. It just had so much heart. I know it is a film I will return to regularly from now on just to top up my happy.

One of the aforementioned drawbacks of my social media blackout was that I didn’t experience that wonderful osmotic book recommendation experience that Twitter offers—seeing the same books pop up in your timeline repeatedly until you feel you have to check them out—and, as a result, I read very little that was published during 2023. I still read loads of good stuff though, making a concerted effort to explore some of the books on my shelves that I have been meaning to get round to for years, in some cases decades. Two of these that really stood out, blew me away actually, were Agota Kristof’s trilogy of The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie, as well as DM Thomas’ The White Hotel.

The former tells the story of two children, brothers, sent to live with their inhospitable grandmother during an unnamed conflict (presumably Hungary during WW2 but never specified). Together they train themselves to be invulnerable to pain or emotion, in order to survive. Kristof’s prose, translated by three different translators across the trilogy, is spare, matter-of-fact, almost perfunctory, and reflects the manner and philosophy of the boys. It is a style that renders the horror of certain scenes, and the mystery and magic of others, all the more striking.

The latter also tackles the repercussions of war, but with a far more elaborate and varied style. Each chapter of the book feels like a whole new world, ranging from poetry to case histories to erotica, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it until it all came together with a chilling and unforgettable ending.

Speaking of which, the final few minutes of Dear Jassi, the latest film from director Tarsem Singh, may have been the most harrowing I have ever witnessed, even though very little actually happens on screen. I am not sure if it will get proper UK distribution but if you can track it down, I recommend doing so. Just brace yourself, as it is not an easy watch.

2023 saw the demise of Camp Cope, one of the most essential rock bands of the past decade. Their last two albums were best of the year contenders for me and it will be a source of eternal regret that I never got to see them live. Their final ever show, at Sydney Opera House in October, was a little bit far for me to travel. I do not intend to make the same mistake with their fellow Australians, Press Club, a 2023 discovery. They have new material out next year and I hope that means a UK tour at some point.

Holly Throsby is another Australian musician I admire, as a solo artist and a member of part-time supergroup Seeker Lover Keeper, but it was her novel Clarke that I want to mention here. Barney is more than a little alarmed when the police turn up at his house in a small rural town wanting to dig up his backyard in the search for a woman who has been missing for years and used to live there. His next-door neighbour, Leonie, was friends with the woman and she and Barney, born a generation apart, bond over the search and the impact it has on them both. One of the most satisfying reads of the year for me. It is quite hard to find in print in the UK, but the ebook is available to download in all the usual places**.

Nineteen of the books I read this year were research for Mastermind questions (I am one of the specialist subject writers for the show), and my brain has already forgotten most of them, and the information within them, now I no longer need to retain it, but I did thoroughly enjoy Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy. The contestant did OK with the subject, and certainly did not disgrace herself, but tripped up on a few of the harder questions.

Quite a number of the films I enjoyed most this year I either watched on Mubi or are now available on there. The Innocent (both a great heist movie and an excellent romp), How to Have Sex (beautifully observed, completely natural, very uncomfortable viewing), Return to Seoul (looked great and sounded great) and Holy Spider (Iranian serial killer movie) are all worth watching if you have not already. And you are welcome to use my referral link for a free month’s membership, during which you can watch them all.

One of the absolute best books I read this year was Twenty-Eight Mirrors, a privately published memoir by the reclusive author Miles Gibson. At least, it says reclusive on his Wikipedia page. I actually hear from him quite regularly. A couple of times a year something—a collage on a postcard, a concertina of cardboard that folds out into a story—will plop through my letterbox bearing Gibson’s GUARANTEED GENUINE WORK OF ART ink stamp. Recently it was a paperback book in which he recounts his childhood and early life through twenty-eight themed memories. Some of them are funny, many poignant, a few are tragic, but all of them sing with a beautifully-weighted sense of nostalgia. I must confess that the chapter about visiting his grandparents brought a tear to my eye.

My musical year was bookended, sort of, by Fenne Lily. I saw her at Islington Assembly Hall in the spring, where she played much of her new album, Big Picture. She’s a really compelling live performer, who gives good chat between songs.

And in the week before Christmas, she played a residency at the tiny, but delightful, Paper Dress Vintage in Hackney. She was performing a different album each night. I went with my son to the first two. The support both evenings was Katie Malco, who I had not listened to before but she was also wonderful live and also gave good chat. I liked her so much I bought her album and a t-shirt, and wore the shirt on Christmas Day.

Other top nights were had seeing Hand Habits and Jana Horn at Omeara, This is the Kit at a church in Reading, Ane Brun’s celebration of 20 years in music, all of them as an independent artist, at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and, despite the fact they made me deaf for three days, Dinosaur Jr at the Garage.

However, if I had to pick one cultural moment, one thing that was my favourite of the year, then it would be this song, and its accompanying video, which is simultaneously funny, heartbreaking, empowering, silly and glorious. A beautiful love song about the risks of intimacy and why a fuck-it attitude is often the best one to adopt. Nothing has made me happier this year.

Please, if you have managed to read to the bottom of this, do feel free to leave a comment suggesting some of your highlights of 2023. I hope your 2024 overflows with even more.

*I had actually resigned from my role in 2021 when they decided to publish a painfully unfunny novel that attempted to satirise the trans rights movement as I felt it would act as a transphobe magnet. I was subsequently proved right, with major league transphobes seemingly lining up to work with them. On the flipside, a number of their existing authors refused to carry on working with them after that novel but they managed to keep that quiet.

**I read a lot of books from Australia and New Zealand and during 2023 I set up an Amazon Australia account and registered an old Kindle to it. That way I can get access to books that are not published over here at a fraction of the cost of purchasing the print editions and having them shipped over.