On Chesil Beach is a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I read some reviews about it and one compared it to Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things (my choice for best book from the past decade) which got me realy exited about it, even if the same review said that McGregor’s was much better. Another review about it, a positive review, mentioned that “It is all so terribly sad but so believable that there are surely lessons for us all here,” which made my interest peak.

The book itself is about, as the website of Waterstone’s put it, “how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken,” and it reflects this by telling the story of Edward and Florence, an old fashioned couple who get married on Chesil Beach, and unable to discuss their anxieties about the wedding night, which will end p affecting them for the rest of their lives.

So, as soon as I am done with Outliers, my next date will be with On Chesil Beach. Cheers.

When I was a young man, well, younger still than I am now, I wasn’t used to listening to music. Sure I listened to the radio from time to time, and there were a couple of songs that I liked, but I didn’t have any favourite bands, and I knew only a handful by name. There were no songs I had learnt by heart, I did not have any CDs that I could call my own, and I had never downloaded a song.

And then the year 2005 came along, and with it, the movie Sin City, which I grew to like quite a bit. One day, I was watching videos over at YouTube and I stumbled upon the trailer, and I discovered that the trailer music made something inside mi tick. Another video about the same movie used the same song – an instrumental version of Cells by The Servant – so I checked the comments and found its name. For the first time, there was a song I wanted to download. Soon I had that song, both in instrumental and regular versions, and then other songs by The Servant, and later on by other bands as well.

All of a sudden, I had become an alternative rock junkie, and all because of one song. A song that, even without all this meaning, would still top my list of favourite songs. A song by a band high up there in my list too.

So I raise my glass to Cells and to the former band The Servant, and to their then front man, Dan Black. Cheers!

And then I began reading If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, also by Jon McGregor. I was mesmerized. I enjoyed its slow pace and serene setting, its simplicity and the suspense it carried along, a clash of the senses. The movement from present to past, and the not knowing how that past affected the present, even if it was clear it did. And then I got to the ending, and just like a true piano masterpiece, there was a change of pace as things got intense, and then a resolution that returned to the serenity previously portrayed. The perfect ending, and one that actually left me in shock for the greater part of one day.

At the very last gasps of the year, of the decade, I had found my true book of the decade, one written back in 2002 and with which I stumbled upon not until 2009. One that flashed a fantastic picture of contemporary Britain, one that received raves and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2002, and which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003.

And Jon McGregor, I have only flowers for that man. Two books  in one decade, two books in his lifetime, one on my shortlist for book of the decade, and the second one a winner. I take my hat off to you, you brilliant Englishman.