Ross Clark
I read no more enjoyable book published for the first time this year than John Kennedy Toole's novel The Neon Bible (Viking, £12.99; now also in Penguin paperback), the story of a Deep Southern boy driven to introspection and his first murder at the age of 19 by the small-town bigotry of the claustrophobic valley which is his entire world. It is just a shame that the author asphyxiated himself in 1969, at the age of 31.
I have not read all 1200 pages yet (a friend of mine only managed this when the cargo ship he was taking to Iceland broke down off the Faroes), but Peter Ackroyd's Dickens (Sinclair-Stevenson, £19.95) gains my vote as the biography of the year. I have a macabre approach to the reading of biographies, and generally flick straight to the back to see how the unfortunate subject met his end. In Dickens's case I knew of a more melancholy occurence and first sought out the Staplehurst railway accident. I kept on reading, all the way to the end, and now all I have to do is to go back and read about the first 49 years of his life.
The most overrated book of the year must surely be Hanif Kureishi's squalid little piece, The Bhudda of Suburbia (Faber, more than is worth paying). I have just returned from a long railway journey across Europe, and wherever I went (Athens, Salzburg, Stuttgart . . .) people kept asking me whether I had heard of Hanif Kureishi and what did I think of his novel. Only the hermits on the southern flank of Mount Athos appeared to be ignorant. If there was such a thing as a Eurovision Book Contest I fear this would win hands down.
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