L LOYD E VANS Books of the year? Always a dilemma. Do
you confess your true reading experience or do you pretend you’ve absorbed a sizeable fraction of the new stuff while maintaining your weekly quotas of Augustan poetry, German metaphysics and classic Russian fiction? Here’s an honest breakdown. I loved Gimson on Johnson (Boris Simon & Schuster, £17.99) but perhaps only because I was quoted in it twice. Even more delightful was Michael Simkins’s hilarious theatre memoir, What’s My Motivation? (Ebury, £7.99), although that doesn’t count as it came out in 2003. I was in tears at the end of Ali Smith’s The Accidental (Penguin, £7.99) which won last year’s Mann Booker Prize. You poor judges, I sobbed, if that was the best, what were the losers like? The most entertaining, informative and nugget-crammed book I read was Kalendarium, My Diary &c. by John Evelyn, written between 1640 and 1706 and published in 1818 (Oxfam £1.49, reduced from £2.50).
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