When you stop to think about it, reading is one of man's many remarkable skills, arguably the greatest. The act of writing gives words a portion of permanence and the reading of that script allows reception and adaptation to mediate the text. Reading is a singular experience - yet it opens up to communal reception. It is in that context that compiling this year's Advent calendar has been a privilege. Not all of the books reviewed have been of the first rank but even the feeblest of them has provoked thought and added to my sum of knowledge.
A year in which you read The Leopard and Behind the Scenes at the Museum can be nothing but a good one. These are remarkable novels. It is then all the more notable that neither of those offerings is quite the best thing I have read this year. That accolade belongs to a book I had been running scared of for too long. Booker Prize winners can disappoint and Midnight's Children is probably the most trumpeted of those victors. It is a six-hundred page slab of a book, a size that can be forbidding. If you have not read it yet, don't delay any longer. For once the back-cover blurb is right, quoting the New York Review of Books, 'One of the most important books to have come out of the English-speaking world in this generation'. This is a generous, mordant, uplifting and magical history of the miracle that is modern India. It defies easy definition.
So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents - the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.
That is it for another year. It has been a blast. Happy Christmas and may your god go with you.
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