My books of the year

My books of the year for the Sunday Herald (not online, so reproduced here):

A strange year of non-trendy reading, squeezed around musical projects. Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 (Fourth Estate) does exactly what it says on the tin, and reminded me (like I needed reminding) of just how impure the sources of the purest pop can be. From Edinburgh University, Claire Colbrook's Gilles Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum) also realizes its promise about the most difficult of modern French philosophers. And some fiction (though not enough): Jonathan Raban's Surveillance (Picador) is like Dickens revived to witness the Age of Terror; and Micheal Gardiner's Escalator (Polygon) is an elegant collection of short stories about life in Tokyo, from one of the most original minds in Scotland.