Reviewing my year’s reading is an annual ritual and this year, like any other, has been one of many delights and some disappointments. I’ve been able to read more during 2020 because … well, the pandemic and so forth. Add on a couple of operations and time to read while convalescing, and my total was greater than last year. This isn’t going to be anywhere near a comprehensive list but here are the highlights.
As I read for research and in order to teach writing, there will always be the ‘reading for the job’ aspect. This year many of those books were to do with theories of creativity, neuroscience and the search for meaning, which have helped me clarify some of my thinking for the book I’m writing on mindset for writers.
When it comes to novels and short stories, I loved Pat Barker’s The Silent Girls, C.J. Sansom’s Tombland, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, Susannah Rickards’s Hot Kitchen Snow, Geraldine McCaughrean’s Where the World Ends and Susan Fletcher’s Let Me Tell you about a Man I Knew – the last of which took me back to Provence in the heat of summer, in its account of Vincent van Gogh’s sojourn at the asylum in St Rèmy de Provence. All of these offered me what I love most: beauty of language, being transported in time and place, something memorable to stay with me after I closed the covers.
For sheer gorgeousness, Jackie Morris’s The Unwinding, which I subscribed to via crowdfunding publisher Unbound, was so very beautiful I bought her second version, The Silent Unwinding, where the text is removed and the illustrations remain so you can use it as a notebook. (Did I? No! Too beautiful!)
In non-fiction, Halle Rubenhold’s account of the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper, The Five, was a powerful portrayal of the blighted existences of women toppling into destitution in heartless Victorian times – a true-crime contradiction of the message of A Christmas Carol. No one here is saved. Raynor Unwin’s very human and uplifting account of tracing the South-west coast path with her husband, in an act of desperate life affirmation in the teeth of illness, took me to Devon and Cornwall once more. (I’ve just been given its sequel for Christmas.) Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am was heartstoppingly good – especially the first part. Oh my. Unforgettable.
In the weeks of recovery from a major operation, I indulged in comfort reads. Escape reads. Reading that washed over me, lulled me, took me out of myself when I was in pain. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were fluffy reads: I like a good thriller so Tess Gerritsen featured – The Shape of Night. Clare Flynn’s Penang trilogy (The Pearl of Penang, The Prisoner of Penang and A Painter in Penang) described the lushness of the Far East but also the privations of war, loss and betrayal. JJ Marsh’s Odd Numbers was a spikily intelligent multi-voiced thriller, ranging through a satisfyingly wide array of locations. But there were also the heartwarming reads: Carol Drinkwater’s The House at the Edge of the Cliff (south of France once more!); Barbara Erskine’s Time’s Legacy (she is the diva of time-slip novels) and Debbie Young’s warm and witty cosy crime novel Best Murder in Show, with its gentle satire of village life.
As I said, this is just a selection and I really feel it was a good year of reading, this one. But you’ll see from the image I have picked four highlights.
First, Maria Popova’s Figuring. Now, in no way is this an easy read. It’s the kind of book that highlights just how much you don’t know. And it is all about connections. You may have heard of Brain Pickings, Maria’s blog, where she highlights the wisdom of philosophers, artists, musicians, scientists and writers. That description completely fails to capture the breadcrumb trail of fascinating quotes and snippets she lays and the way she dances you from one to another, spinning the lines of connection between them. You can spend whole days just clicking links! Well Figuring is this in book form: she explores the lives of women astronomers, artists, writers, thinkers. Some well known, like Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson, others less so, like Margaret Fuller, Maria Mitchell and Harriet Hosmer. She shows them trying to create lives of mental and social independence in contexts of greater or lesser restriction, simply because they are women. It is dense, knotty, incredibly detailed, often hard to follow as she tracks to and fro between lives and eras, at times utterly gripping (there is a shipwreck scene that will etch itself on your brain), and always fascinating. It took me weeks to read but I am so very glad I did.
Next we have Anna McGrail’s A Life in 26 Letters. It is exactly that: Anna uses correspondence she sent or was sent to trigger memories of stages of her life. I am proud to say I read this book in draft and am so glad to see it in print. I love everything about it. Her voice is precise, mordant, utterly non-self-pitying. I love her observations: unsentimental but capable of triggering tears and sighs of recognition and fellow-feeling. I love her wit. I love that she and I share the same generational background so every detail – alien, no doubt, to editors of publishing houses who don’t share those memories and experiences – strikes a chord. In short, you identify with her. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Thirdly, Jane Davis has explored the position of women in 1950s society in her compelling novel At the Stroke of Nine O’Clock. She interweaves the stories of three women: an aristocratic grande dame, a club hostess and a famous actress shunned for her extra-marital affair, as all three are affected by the fate of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged for murder in England. The sense of the era is impeccably evoked, the dialogue brittle and resonant, the tension between public life and private secrets is ever-present and the overall effect poignant and powerful. (Jane’s previous novel, Smash all the Windows, was my book of the year 2018 – read about it here.)
Finally, Mary Oliver. Upstream is a collection of essays. Meditations celebrating the importance of just … living, seeing, noticing. I knew her already as a poet, but this book blew me away. It is so profound, yet that profundity is couched in prose often deceptively simple. Lucid, limpid, wise, with phrases to roll around your tongue and preserve in your brain, memorable, incantatory – a kind of blessing that such a brain and voice should have existed, a comfort in a world of Covid and climate change, yet hers is not a sentimental, escapist brand of nature-loving. It looks things in the eye. This is a book that looks at the preciousness and littleness of life and celebrates its significance in every form it takes, on this lovely, blighted, vulnerable planet of ours.
OK, I mentioned disappointments at the start of this review. There are always disappointments. Some books lose the power to charm us, even if we loved them once. Some hold no appeal, ever. Some are shallow, some repellent. What disappointed me most this year – and I am not going to name them – were the books that could have been better, had they been properly edited. And they were all trade-published books. I’m sorry, but really. There were gaping plot-holes and trailing plotlines. There were factual inaccuracies and anachronisms, howling errors in grammar and spelling. There were rushes to unsatisfying endings, as if the editor had told the writer to tie it all up in the last 20 pages, thanks. One of these had been shortlisted for the Booker a few years back, another was from a multi-published thriller writer whose previous book I had enjoyed. All started well, but then failed to deliver. And that is disappointing.
But that may be the editor in me speaking. I read as a reader. But I read as an editor too – I cannot for the life of me switch that beady-eyed perspective off!
Signing off, looking forward to the books I’ll read in 2021!
