The 2015 Tony’s Reading List Awards

A Happy New Year to you all from sunny Melbourne, and welcome to The Tony’s Reading List Awards for 2015!  Last year was the busiest so far for me and my little blog, with an incredible number of posts and several external reviews adding to the workload.  It’s only when you get to the end of the year, pausing to reflect on the past twelve months, that you get an accurate overview of how things have gone – and they’ve gone quickly, busily and pretty well 🙂

Anyway, we’ve got an extended cast of writers, translators, publishers and books lined up – let’s get this show on the road 🙂

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First up, as always, is the Most-Read Author Award, showing who has been making frequent appearances on the blog – and the winner is:

1) Jenny Erpenbeck (5)
2=) Alejandro Zambra (4)
2=) Patrick Modiano (4)
2=) Natsume Sōseki (4)

2015 saw Erpenbeck hit the big time in the UK with her much-praised Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky) winning the final Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.  Having read her recent German-language release, Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone), I can assure you that there’s plenty more to come in the future 🙂

Of the runners-up, Natsume Sōseki is an old friend, of course, but Zambra and Modiano were new additions to the blog in 2015.  Of course, with every man and his dog publishing something by Modiano this year, there’s a fair chance he’ll be making more appearances in 2016…

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After that close tussle, let’s move onto another one, the struggle for the Most-Read Country award – and the prize goes to:

1) Japan (28)
2) South Korea (26)
3) Germany (17)
4) Spain (11)
5) France (10)

The pendulum swings back across the sea (the name of which I shall not mention for obvious reasons…), with Japan regaining the crown Korea snatched away last year.  As you can see , it was a close-run thing, though.  As always, Germany and France are amongst the top five, but Spain is a new entry this year, in with a rocket at number 4.

If we look at the annual statistics for English-language books versus the rest of the world, you’ll see that my focus on literature in translation was better/worse than ever last year.  Of the 160 books I read in 2015, only 5 were originally published in English, meaning that an astounding/appalling 155 (of which I read 24 in the original language) were originally written in a language other than English.  That’s… a lot.  In fact, if you get your calculators out, that proportion of English-language books comes to around 3% – enough said 😉

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That was the quantity, now on to the quality.  Of course, firstly we must look at a lack of it…  As always, I’ve been keeping an eye on the duds of the year in preparation for the Golden Turkey Award, and for 2015 we have three contenders, with one translator mentioned twice:

Nacht ist der Tag (All Days are Night) by Peter Stamm
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The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura
(translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter)
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Salad Anniversary by Machi Tawara
(translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter)

And the winner is…

The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura

Unlike in previous years, where the blame has been placed squarely on the shoulders of the translator, this is most definitely not a case of poor translation.  Poor JWC is actually a great translator – these are just two books I really didn’t enjoy.  In particular, Mizumura’s treatise on language is such an annoyingly obvious piece appealing to those hugging the idea of Japanese linguistic exceptionalism to their chests that I couldn’t help but take it into the kitchen to start stuffing it for Christmas dinner.

That is *quite* a fall from 2014 best in class for Mizumura 😉

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It’s with great pleasure, then, that I lead you gently away from the year’s turkey to the splendour of my Book of the Year Award.  As is my wont, the list of the best books has been compiled by choosing the outstanding title reviewed on the blog each month (all links are to my reviews).  As I mentioned in a recent post, it’s an imperfect system, one which can exclude great books while allowing the odd weaker title to squeeze through in a quiet month.  However, life’s rarely fair, so tough 😉  This year’s top twelve are:

January – The Tale of the Heike, translated by Royall Tyler (Japan)

February – The Heart of Man by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Iceland)

March – The Ravens by Tomas Bannerhed (Sweden)

April – The Last Lover by Can Xue (China)
May – Sphinx by Anne Garréta (France)
June – The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (Japan)
July – All Souls by Javier Marías (Spain)

August – A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Norway)

September – The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (Italy)

October – The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai (Hungary)

November – Kassandra by Christa Wolf (Germany)

December – Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (England)

A great list, I hope you’ll agree, with most of the books worthy of their place (and it’s gender-balanced too!).  The latest dozen sees two titles from Japan and one from China, with the rest coming from Europe (one each from Iceland, Sweden, France, Spain, Norway, Italy, Hungary and Germany).  Unlike in 2014, there is also one Anglophone book on the list, with George Eliot sparing the blushes of my native language (and country).

A shortlist?  Why not? Let’s narrow the twelve down to six: 

The Tale of the Heike
The Heart of Man
Sphinx
The Tale of Genji
A Time for Everything
Kassandra

Finding the winner is always a tough job, especially when you have such a great selection to choose from.  However, someone’s got to do it (and I can’t see anyone else volunteering), so I’ve finally made my decision.  The Tony’s Reading List Book of the Year for 2015 is:

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

(translated by Royall Tyler, published by Penguin Classics)

An all-time classic, the best book I read this year, and a work I will undoubtedly return to several times in the future.  Yes, it’s long, yes, it can be disturbing to modern sensibilities at times.  You should still read it 🙂

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And that’s all for 2015 – it’s time to look ahead now to the eighth (!) year of the blog.  Sadly, I won’t be running January in Japan in quite the same way as in previous years, but I hope you will join me in trying some J-Lit anyway to start off your year.  Here’s hoping 2016 will be another year full of great literature – please stop by from time to time if you feel like hearing what I’ve been up to 🙂