Karl Whitney: Don’t let the spoils of the old year ruin the lure of the new 

End-of-year lists can flatten culture into sameness; real taste is built by curiosity, scepticism, and a willingness to stray off the well-worn path

The wheelie bins are full of wrapping paper and empty bottles; the decorations are ready to be returned to their cardboard boxes for another 11 months. However, good books are for life, not just for Christmas. Picture: iStock

The new year begins surrounded by the spoils of the old. 

The wheelie bins are full of wrapping paper and empty bottles; the decorations are ready to be returned to their cardboard boxes for another 11 months; books received as presents sit in an uneven pile in the corner.

Now that the season has safely passed, it’s worth saying that it can be strange to see what makes it onto end-of-year lists. Many great books and records don’t get a look-in.

The typical list consists of the recommended cultural products that hit the shelves that year, not a full account of what the recommender has read or listened to over that 12 months. 

I could have been happily working my way through the complete works of Emile Zola but, when it comes to recommending a book, I’d most likely panic and choose something everyone else is talking about.

I’m obviously not against writers seeing their sales boosted by a recommendation in such lists. They depend on publicity to sell books and survive. 

I just wish that those lists had more variety, dipped into more interesting waters, and gave the reader a more complex picture of the literary world, past and present.

As a writer, you’re cultivating a distinct perspective in the hope that it helps to shape a style and approach that makes your work distinctive too. 

You follow your nose and are led to all sorts of arcane and supposedly outdated writing because that’s what interests you, what keeps you engaged with what you do. 

You don’t think of it as seeking the obscure — rather, it’s about trusting your judgement and following paths wherever they lead.

I will, however, admit that I’m only human: I too pay attention to best-of lists. 

I have presents to buy and love to communicate through the imperfect medium of consumerism. I keep an eye, albeit a slightly sceptical one, on the books being recommended by other writers.

I still buy the end-of-year music magazines to find potential presents. This is a habit I adopted in the years before my father died. 

I’d spend a few weeks reading through lists in Mojo or Uncut, listening to records online before finding one that I thought he’d like.

It was rarely anything mainstream, but was always melodic, often country-tinged, and essentially something I thought he’d find enjoyable but wouldn’t have heard — or even heard of.

There might have been the occasional misfire, but generally I think he appreciated the effort. I went in search of something specifically for him.

How should a person’s taste be? Not necessarily unique but certainly particular.

The musician and writer Ian Svenonius, who has been a singer in such great bands as Nation of Ulysses and The Make-Up, had a song with another group of his, Chain and the Gang, called Music’s Not for Everyone. 

(Later the phrase was adopted by the late producer and DJ Andrew Wetherall as the title of his radio show.) 

Svenonius’s point, I think, was that trying to make your work universal is a doomed approach. 

By appealing to everyone there’s a risk of losing the specificity that makes a piece of work interesting and appealing.

I suppose that’s what I abhor when I flick through the pages of a much-recommended book and find it to lack the kind of writing I increasingly crave. 

My taste has become quite specific over the years, shaped by reading and thinking critically about books.

OK, I’ll admit it: I’m hard to buy for.

That’s not to say that I don’t read widely. I recently read a short-story collection by a writer I admire. 

I enjoyed the writer’s flair but couldn’t help noting that the short story was an ill-fitting form for such a helzapoppin’ imagination, like trying to tuck an octopus into a skinny T-shirt.

Form can be a useful constraint for a writer, but sometimes a writer needs to create their own form to fully express their talent. 

Once you wander into developing new forms you might discover that you’ve become uncategorisable. You might enjoy your status of being not easily pigeonholeable but what end-of-year list will you go on?

I’m interested in authors whose attention to detail yields surprise. That attention to detail shouldn’t be overpowering. It’s best if it doesn’t strangle the energy of a piece of writing. 

We’re used to writing that lulls us, pushing our buttons but not really asking us to think deeply. 

Fine. We need to be entertained. But, once you’ve experienced enough of that, either you begin to feel a need for something more or give in to being a passive consumer.

Giving in to the algorithm is a seriously boring option. 

Machine-made text, generated by AI systems and infiltrating what we read, is an only slightly distorted mirror image of the lack of imagination one can already discern in culture.

Bored by endless hobbits and the glitch-free banality of a machine-cut universe we may well instead seek the unrefined, the mistake-riddled: The human.

Or we might not. Maybe we’re getting what we deserve. So many of the rules absorbed by AI systems are, after all, drawn from the conservative structures that our stories already follow.

Too much repetition can force our minds to rebel. 

Imagine listening to the same song, 24 hours a day for the rest of your life. Eventually, perhaps by hour three, you’d never want to hear it again.

We’re not averse to familiarity but chafe at the dead-end of endless repetition. We crave, at the very least, novelty: A trick that makes the familiar seem new. But really, we’re in search of what’s different and relatively unexplored.

A few years ago, I spoke to the music critic Paul Morley about his book A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music. 

Morley had made his name as a journalist writing about post-punk music such as that produced by Joy Division. As is common in music, the sounds that emerged from a specific historical period were later recycled as a style.

At the time we spoke, in 2019, he mentioned that friends of his wondered why he wasn’t writing about the Irish band Fontaines DC, who exemplified the latest iteration of a vaguely post-punk musical style.

But, as a restless listener looking for new sounds, he wasn’t interested. Instead, he turned towards classical music. He felt that, when it came to post-punk, he had heard it all before.

Just because you liked something once doesn’t mean you want to be fed it, or similar material, endlessly. 

Finding something new or unfamiliar is essential to our psychological state. 

Switch off and give up — or remain open to the new and the potentially challenging. Consider what you’re reading or listening to and why; stay sharp and learn to trust your judgement.

I think about all of this because I think about the kinds of practices that might make a good writer. 

And, when I start to think about what makes a good writer, I think about the kind of attention you need to pay to your own writing, to what you read and how you engage with not just writing and art, but with the world.

And that alertness filters back into your work, perhaps not immediately but eventually.

We can do that by staying interested and engaged, seek out writing that isn’t just the latest thing, or what’s acclaimed as the best of the year. 

Good books are for life, not just for Christmas. Or, to put it another way: some stay with you while others fall away.

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