200 years on, we’re still hunting down great reads. Read on for 2017’s finest
The Scotsman has always taken its books coverage seriously. When the paper was first published, in January 1817, it was subtitled “Edinburgh Political and Literary Journal.” Its inaugural books section began with a glowing review of the latest additions to the Encyclopedia
Britannica (“an honour, not to Scotland alone, but to the age”) and there was also an anonymous poem, dedicated to “a Crocus which the Author found blooming in the midst of a Snow Storm.” Two centuries later, we still run book reviews (although it’s been a while since we reviewed an encyclopedia) and we still carry a poem every week in The Scotsman
Magazine.
The sheer volume of books now being published in the UK would have amazed the journalists of 1817 – we receive dozens of new releases in the post every day, and deciding which ones to cover is never easy. In the proud Scottish tradition of internationalism, we try to be as wide-ranging in our choices as possible – this year we have reviewed literature in translation from Spain, Turkey, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and Poland, as well as novels from the United States, Australia and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But at the same time we are mindful that our readers expect us to cover the latest releases from leading Scottish authors, as well as introducing them to homegrown writers who, while perhaps not household names today, may very well turn out to be the household names of tomorrow.
This supplement contains a selection of reviews of Scottish books that have appeared in The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday over the last eleven and a half months – not just books by Scottish authors, necessarily, but also books that are of particular interest to Scottish readers. Even with 24 pages and no pictures except for the book jackets, we don’t have anywhere near enough space to revisit every review that meets these criteria, so we have had to set some ground rules. Firstly, only broadly positive reviews have been considered. While this supplement isn’t intended to be anything as reductive as a “best Scottish books of the year” list (you’ll doubtless find plenty of those online) its goal is to draw attention to the books we believe are worth investing some time in. Secondly: only one review per author. We have run reviews of multiple books this year by such prolific writers as Chris Brookmyre, John Burnside and Alexander Mccall Smith, but it would seem unfair to run reviews of two books by one author while another misses out altogether. Where two books by the same author have both received glowing write-ups, we have selected the book that seems the more significant of the two (so, much as I enjoyed John Burnside’s dystopian novella Havergay, this supplement only contains Stuart Kelly’s review of Ashland & Vine, unquestionably his major book of 2017.)
If we’d wanted to we could have crammed more reviews into this supplement by running heavily-edited versions of the originals, but if we’d gone too far down that route we wouldn’t have ended up with much more than empty soundbites, shorn of context. While a few trims have been necessary here and there, as far as possible we have tried to reproduce the reviews in full. There are only 51 books featured here, but they cover a dazzling range of topics, tastes and styles. We hope you enjoy reading our reviews as much as we enjoyed writing them, we hope that, somewhere in these pages, you find at least one good reason to visit your local bookshop, and we hope that you’ll join us in the New Year, as we crack the spines of the first new releases of 2018, and pen the first reviews of The
Scotsman’s third century.