2008 books

62) Thomas Healy, I Have Heard You Calling in the Night, 2006
Thomas Healy was a hard-drinking Glaswegian rarely on the right side of the law, until one day out of the blue he bought himself a Dobermann pup he called Martin. The result is a story of redemption, a tale that sets Healy's alcoholic ups and downs firmly within the context of his family, his relationships with women and his loyalty to Martin, but sadly it's not one in which the reader learns much about the character of Martin himself which is what I'm personally hoping to encounter when reading books about individual dogs. Healy's writing is straightforward and honest with a slight tendency towards mawkishness, particularly when relating his eventual slide towards Christianity, but even though this felt incomplete it's still a rather touching memoir.

2008 books

63) Ian Watson, The Embedding, 1973
Watson's debut is notable for its ambitious conceptual and linguistic speculations, combining high drama in the flooded Amazon basin, English children raised to communicate outside of normal language structures, and some aliens arriving in orbit with some bizarre and rather ghoulish trade suggestions involving their search for their own version of God. The Embedding is often a brutal book, populated with human monsters of all kinds. No one comes out looking good but Watson himself made everyone sit up and take notice, and this is still reckoned to be one of the most important British SF novels of the 1970s. I noticed several ideas in here revisited or borrowed a decade later by Suzette Haden Elgin in her strident Native Tongue but, all things considered, this is by far the better book.