William Boyd
An odd year for me of intermittent reading (a novel was being written) still managed to produce some rare treats. Jamie MacKendrick won the Forward Poetry Prize for his third collection, The Marble Fly (OUP, £6.99) — clever, wry, rich, lyrical — a wonderful poet already and a major one in the making. I powered through Geoff Dyer's book about his inability to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (Little, Brown, £16.99). Funny and self-laceratingly candid but with a nice Nabokovian spin on the fatal and irresistible allure of procrasti- nation — a disease we all suffer from, alas, perhaps writers more than others. But no such problems, apparently, for the industri- ous John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello in their continually illuminating, fascinat- ing, highly readable and therefore ideally scholarly biography of John Stanislaus Joyce (Fourth Estate, £20), the monstrous father of the more famous James.
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