Books of the year 2011

I've been trying to do a filtered keyword search in my brain for the overriding themes affecting novelists in 2011 and I'm coming up with nothing. For all the snobbery around readability versus literary worthiness (on both sides), I feel like I've read some piggin' amazin' books this year. Which made me feel quite blah about the whole Booker debate. Either way, with the worthy and the readable, neither lists ever massively appeal to me. It seems that the books I like on the longlist get pruned off for shortlist. I'm obviously not clever enough for the Booker.

But this isn't a blog about the Booker. It's a blog about books what I like. And I like a lot of things. I collated reviews of my books of the year here but here's what these books told me about this year.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead (Harvill Secker) is my favourite book of the year. Mostly because the more I read of his work, I have to just throw my hands up and say it and own it - he's my favourite author at the moment. Living, at least, and still writing. Every single one of his books has affected me in some way. Usually, it makes me think about writing and how I write. I've said this openly in the past A LOT, but Sag Harbor was the catalyst for Coconut Unlimited, my novel. But this is about Zone One. I love books that give you a different read depending on what you're projecting on to it. Zone One could be a 'literary' (and yet, readable... OH MY THEY CAN COEXIST) thriller about the days and weeks following a zombie attack. It could be an allegory for the effects of urban gentrification, of the rich moving into poor areas and changing them for the worse. It could be a love letter to a New York that doesn't exist anymore. It could be a book about memory and desperation enducing moments of quiet reflections on its victims. Whatever read you give it, it's all of these things. It is subtly political, it is overtly honest about humanity, it is textured and still and tense and all the parameters you want to give it. But it is also funny. Not funny in a *KLAXON* JOKE APPROACHING way, just wry and witty with language, and genuinely affectingly funny with dialogue. That's why it's my book of the year.

Home Boy by H M Nacqvi (Penguin) blew me away. I read it in two sittings on long coach journeys in India in January, having picked it up at Mumbai airport on a prize-winning whim. It finally got a UK release date in August. Finally. Listen. This book is hot. H-A-W-T HOT. Written in that grand tradition of bottle of whisky, burning cigarette dangling dangerously from the lips, the whoosh of an arrhythmical ceiling fan and the pounding of angry possessed fists on to a typewriter. It reads like poetry. It reads like a political manifesto. It reads like a libertine's diary. It's the first book to really properly capture the post-9/11 experience for Muslim Americans in a human way, rather than an issue-based way. It's wild and funny and well-drawn. And it's simple. Really simple. Four Muslim American metrostani hipsters load a car full of booze and drugs and go on a roadtrip looking for a friend. It ends badly. It goes wrong for them. America cannot process who these boys are and separate their faces from the faith of their fathers. It's an arresting book. Full. Of. Life.

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton) was Hari Kunzru getting better and better. I've always been a fan. I was worried when I read the press release for the book, thinking, 'it doesn't sound like it knows what it's about. The desert. People looking for something. What's it about?' But it instantly hooked me. I love the fragmented narrative, the call and response nature of a series of interconnecting stories that weave in and out of empty spaces in the Mojave desert, bringing together an autistic boy, an Iraqi refugee who works on a US military base and a religious wingnut cult. There's a lot of empty space in the book and it's about conflicting systems looking for patterns to converge. It's well drawn, ambitiously written and builds and builds in a satisfying way. Hari Kunzru really knocks this one out of the park.

Open City by Teju Cole (Faber) is almost like psycho-geography. First of all, reading it in situ in New York over the summer really brought it home for me. Secondly, as Julius traverses physical and social boundaries battling solitude, the conflicts his past and future inflict on where he is now, he is able to escape into the edges of the city's grid. The book was a punch in the chest, delivering a sermon about national identity, about race, about immigration, about self, about grief, loss - all the big guns in the ol' thematic department. The book is also so well drawn, the language melts and ebbs and flows with a controlled brilliance. I found this book so moving, I'll hold my hands up and admit a few tears were shed on Julius' behalf, and as I wandered around New York (and subsequently London), I wondered about the anonymity a city affords an individual and how that allows them to escape everything they were but the loneliness only builds. What. A. Profound. Work.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair) seemed to divide people, Marmite style. They either really thought it was something truly special or really hated it. Can you guess which one I was? I'll give you a clue... look at the title of this blog. It's brilliant. When I interviewed Dinaw Mengestu at the beginning of the year, he recommended it and it was brilliant. Apparently, everyone already knew Jennifer Egan was brilliant but it was the first time I'd heard of her. And Mengestu's great. Although when it was doing the rounds, people cleverer than me hated it. I gave myself to it completely, I love the loose structure of intersecting stories, how it deals with big themes and questions, about getting old and never truly knowing yourself an admirable warmth and lightness of touch. It's funny and engaging and hey, kooky maybe, but delivering its final chapter as a powerpoint presentation is genius. It's a great book. There. That's all you need to know. Fun fact: Booktrust won an award for best pub quiz team name this year for 'A Quizit from the Goon Squad.'

I'd like to honourably mention some books now, which I couldn't in good conscience give the sycophantic treatment above because they're my mates. So instead, I'll just list them here in true name-dropped fashion, cos they're my mates but that shouldn't detract from the fact they wrote some great stuff this year.

Stuart Evers' debut collection of short story, Ten Stories About Smoking was both beautifully packaged and beautifully drawn, a collection of stories about love, loss, life and lungs filled with accrid smoke. Made in Britain, Gavin James Bower's tale of three Northern teenagers desperate to escape the trappings of their lives took on a poignant air when it was released in the wake of the riots. Edward Hogan's The Hunger Trace is the only book both my wife and I read this year, and it was truly haunting. Joe Dunthorne is heroically brilliant and just the kinda writer I long to be like, and his sophomore effort Wild Abandon was every bit as clever and funny and warm and brilliant as his first.

So, to next year... I'm looking forward to a new short story collection by Jon McGregor, the debut novel by Stuart Evers and D W Wilson's collection too.