Book of the Year 2012

The grand year of 2012 may be a very distant memory, but I still haven't handed out my award for the best book I read during that golden age, and the literary community are getting on my back about it. I thought, given the four books that won my quarterly battles have shed enough blood for a lifetime, that for this final installment I'd give them a rest from scrapping and just choose my favourite. So here are the contenders to be named my Book of the Year 2012: firstly, from the icy depths of January-March, the hypnotic Japanese odyssey of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; from April-June, Stephen King's thrilling dystopian novel The Long Walk; from the icy depths of July-September (it was not a good summer), David Foster Wallace's mind-boggling short-story collection Oblivion; and from October-December, Philip Roth's Nazis-in-the-USA imagining The Plot Against America.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was my fourth Murakami novel, and the one I'd been waiting for. I previously found his style and imagination amazing, but was just looking for everything to come together in the perfect package, and Wind-up Bird was that package. It made Murakami one of my favourite authors. Wind-up Bird is the story of a typical everyman (the same as nearly every Murakami main character) whose wife (and cat) leaves him and forces him into a twisted narrative full of fantastical characters and mind-bending adventures. I loved everything about this book and it left me really excited to one day visit Japan.

The Long Walk proved to me that Stephen King is a truly great writer, when previously I'd always put him alongside more pulpy popular authors. It's the story of a not-too-distant-future-sport in which a hundred teenage boys gather at the northern-most point of the USA, and walk as far as they can, non-stop at a minimum of four miles per hour, until gradually they drop and are slaughtered by referees and only one is left standing, the champion, winner of "the prize". I was absolutely mesmerised by this novel, and for a long time afterwards it made me concentrate on every step I took, noticing any tiny niggle, wondering how long I could keep going before I collapsed. In a strange way it was a knackering experience to read as I followed the slowly dying boys as they strived to just keep moving down the road. A phenomenal book, both with a great original idea and told excellently. I'm surprised that it doesn't have a higher reputation, and I'd love to see a film version.

I read a lot and have come across many different authors, but David Foster Wallace stands alone as a truly unique voice. Every word he uses seems to be chosen with scientific precision, and he brings stories to life in a way that I've rarely seen matched. Sometimes he can become a bit too much, and although I would one day like to read his gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest, for now I found it a lot easier to read the short stories collected in Oblivion. Every one concentrates on subjects I would never have expected to be entertaining, and is told in such a way that no other writer could imitate. I've since heard that he's got even better shorts out there, so considering how highly I rated this collection I think I'll be in for a treat when I get around to reading some more of his stuff.

The Plot Against America is a frequently terrifying novel, in which Philip Roth fantasises a 1940s in which the USA becomes progressively infatuated and embroiled with Hitler and the Nazis. At first, it seemed so far-fetched that it was unrealistic, but it's shocking how little Roth actually has to rewrite history to make it plausible that America could have sided with Germany, a possibility that doesn't bear thinking about when you consider the impact such an alliance could have had on our world. Roth focuses his story on a personal level by showing how this creeping Nazism would have ostracised and affected America's Jewish population, and the awful racism his characters endure is made all the worse when I briefly reasoned that it was just fiction, that this didn't happen, but a split-second later realised that, of course, this happened to Jews all over Europe at the time. Scary reading, but brilliantly told, and the fact that the central characters are all based on himself and his close friends and family makes it all the more realistic.

I read a ton of other great books in 2012, but these made the final shortlist, and though it's a very tough choice (I almost decided at the last second to switch to The Long Walk), I'd have to give this prestigious award to the book that made me fall in love with an author I know will be one of my favourites for a very long time, was constantly inventive and engrossing for over 600 pages, and made me desperate to go to Japan. Cue the wild celebrations, my Book of the Year 2012 is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. And, just for fun, it picks an Uzi off the ground and blasts the hell out of the other three.