Books of the Year 2021

Reviewing the books I’ve read over the course of the year has thrown up some interesting revelations, the main one being that (discounting the 1.2 million words of editing and appraisal for editorial clients) a third of my reading has been fiction and two thirds non-fiction, which is a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years. Fiction has played such an important part in my life: it has been an entertainment, distraction, comfort and escape. So why am I not such an addict these days?

Maybe it takes a lot for me to feel that huge excitement - the excitement of discovery. So many books are fine. Just that: fine. They do the job. They don’t reinvent the wheel. Which is also fine. The wheel is a necessity and reinventing it is not. But, well, often the response when reading or finishing is a tepid meh. There are books which are competent. Books I don’t dislike but which haven’t dazzled me in terms of language, plot or approach. I think I may have been around the block just too many times.

This is not to say there were no enjoyable reads! Examples were Summerwater by Sarah Moss, The Terror by Dan Simmons, Blood Rose Angel by Liza Perrat, Hidden by Linda Gillard, How Icasia Bloom Found Happiness by Jessica Bell, I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections by Nora Ephron and A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson. The to-be-read pile didn’t shrink either, so 2002 won’t lack for reading material!

Why so many non-fic reads? Well, quite a number were for research for the book I’m writing. Some of these overlapped with reading I would have done anyway in a year where I was pretty obsessed with pain and the mind-body interface. Books like Katherine May’s Wintering. I read books about breathing and resting and overcoming pain, about brainpower and memory, about escape and ageing and education and race. I read autobiographical quests for identity and meaning. All of these topics spoke to me and some of these books will stay with me for the rest of my life. Highlights included Bluestockings by Jane Robinson, Remembering by Lisa Genova, a re-read of How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell and Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge.

It was, of course, difficult to pick the top reads and I don’t want to settle on just one, that’s for sure, so here are my favourites, against strong competition.

Carol Cooper: The Girls from Alexandria. This novel was a lyrical feast spiced with wit and memory. It transported me to Alexandria in the 1950s, casting a sensory spell.

Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other. This was a deserving Booker Prize winner (and, may I say, should not have had to settle for being a joint Booker winner, either). An extraordinary range of voice and experience, a revelation. Verve.

Clare Chambers: Small Pleasures. Non-operatic, quiet, beautifully observed, poignant, tragi-comic. A gem as fine as those one of her characters works with.

Natalie Haynes: A Thousand Ships. There is a vogue these days for Greek mythology recast as fiction. I loved Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles some years back and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls last year. This novel gives voice to the women of the fall of Troy and does so with exquisite changes of voice and perception.

Bessel van der Kolk: The Body Keeps the Score. A densely informative and often shattering exploration of how trauma takes root in our physiology, often without our recognising what it is doing to us over the decades.

Susan Cain: Quiet. As an introvert, but one who can play to the gallery when I need to, I found this book echoed many of my thoughts about a world that favours extroversion. Introverts the world over can reassured: it’s OK - it’s more than OK - to be an introvert.

Bernardine Evaristo: Manifesto. Yes, Bernardine again, with a frank and pointed journey through her familial, emotional and creative life, against the backdrop of a society not on that keen on people like her finding their independent place within it. Inspiring - again.

Caroline Criado Perez: Invisible Women. I lived through feminism’s second wave and thought we had it all sorted. We don’t. Her thesis is that there is bias, often unconscious, in the data that help to form aspects of our daily lives, from dosages of medicine to the safety of cars to the electoral and educational systems. Revelations to stop you in your tracks.

Rachel Clarke: Dear Life. Trust the title. In the midst of illness and death, this doctor, who has since written just as powerfully about the pandemic, describes how she found her path to palliative medicine and how the joy and worth of life shines through, no matter what. I defy you to read this and not shed tears. Her work should be obligatory reading, along with the two previous books I’ve mentioned, for every politician of whatever party.

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Books of the Year 2020

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.

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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.

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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!

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My favourite reads of 2019

Well, hey, it’s that time again: time to look back over the past year. Time to take stock. I’m starting by selecting some of the books I’ve enjoyed most in the past twelve months. My year has as usual involved lots of ‘professional’ reading: searching out examples of writing technique for workshops, books that compare with clients’ work so I can give guidance as to genre and market etc. To be honest, I’ve been feeling that I’ve lost some of the joy of reading fiction. Too often, my editorial brain kicks in and I start analysing, spotting flaws, inconsistencies and repetitions and coming up with ways to improve the structure or the prose. This means that I find myself enjoying non-fiction more and more, as you’ll see from the list.

It also means that some books disappointed me. Some of these were ‘big-hitters’ with huge marketing clout behind them. It wasn’t that they were bad, as such, just that they weren’t quite as mind-blowing as I had hoped they’d be. And two of them, one a heavily-promoted debut, the other a prize-winning historical novel, really could have done with serious editorial advice! The debut started brilliantly, then followed the law of diminishing returns, culminating in an unbelievable ending, sketchily executed. The historical had gorgeous language and detail but neither gripped nor convinced me.

Right, now I’ve got the Scroogey curmudgeonly stuff out of the way (and no, I’m not going to name the books in question!), time for the goodies. These are books that stood out for me as jolly good reads.

Fiction:

I like crime novels and the stand-outs for me were Lisa Jewell’s Watching You and JJ Marsh’s Behind Closed Doors (the first in her Beatrice Stubbs series – strangely, although I’ve read several, I hadn’t yetread the series starter!) and Bad Apples. I love how these books combine crime and mordant wit along with a wonderfully unconventional heroine and her eccentric circle of friends. A bonus is the range of European backdrops for Beatrice’s adventures. Her latest, Black Widow, is on my list for 2020.

Emily St John Mandel: Station Eleven. Now, it took three goes for me to get into this book but once I was in I was really in, increasingly awestruck by the architectural complexity of a post-apocalyptic story full of intelligence, pathos and the celebration of human creativity in a destroyed world. It was gripping, memorable, haunting, clever. One I will definitely re-read.

David Nicholls: One Day. I was late to the party on this one but loved how he captured the different eras of his characters’ lives. Great dialogue, great social observation.

Non-fiction:

Michael Palin’s Erebus is about a famous ship, lost for more than a hundred and fifty years under the icy waters of the Canadian Arctic. It was one of the famous Franklin expedition ships and that’s a subject I’ve been fascinated by for decades so I couldn’t wait to read the book. What was a revelation, though, was the story of that ship before it became part of that doomed expedition: the gallant Erebus had led a life of adventure for many years, including voyaging the stormy seas of the Antarctic. Palin is genuine in his enthusiasm and the deceptively light touch of his narration is a delight.

Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad about my Neck has all her trademark sharp wit. Wry laughter and recognition throughout. I wish she were still around.

Bernadette Murphy’s Van Gogh’s Ear is an extraordinarily detailed examination of the mystery of the famous event in Arles. She applies the skill of a detective and the familiarity of someone who lives in that region to unpick the legend and get to the bottom of what really went on. I bought this at the ‘Van Gogh in London’ exhibition at Tate Britain, one of the highlights of my year.

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland is an exploration of the hidden places of the world, deep under our feet, deep in the bowels of cities, caves and mines. It is gorgeously written and it is profoundly thoughtful, so much so that it’s one of those books you can only read in instalments because it feels like too much for you to take in. Plus some of his accounts are quite horrifying, if you are at all prone to claustrophobia. I remember when I was 19, crawling on hands and knees through a low passage in the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa, utterly freaked out by the lack of light and the sense of the weight of rock poised above my skull – this book brought that sensation back to me. But if you want an erudite guide who will show you places you never imagined and take you on a journey of historical and ecological resonance, he’s your man. (Lofoten, Norway, oh wow – echoes of Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter.)

Clare Josa’s Ditching Imposter Syndrome helps you to do just that. It’s inspiring, direct and encouraging, waking you up to how imposter syndrome manifests itself in your life and career. Like her earlier Dare to Dream Bigger, it is one of those books you devour fast, knowing you’ll go back for a slower, thoughtful read after.

I read Robert Poyton’s Do/Pause during my research for my book The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset (coming out next year - sign up for the wait list here!) It’s a small book but a really wise one, highlighting that in our fast-paced hyper-productive lifestyles we become our to-do lists and lose sight of what truly matters or how to manage our lives. He is ‘not so interested in how you cram more in to your life but in how you get more out.’ At this time of the year, at the solstice, at the season of festivals, this would be a good book to read and remind yourself that sometimes it is important to step off the treadmill.

Good reads yet to come:

Of course, like you, I have a vast to-be-read pile. Here are some I own but didn’t get to this year: Marion Turner’s Chaucer – A European Life; Peter Moore’s Endeavour (another ship book!); Maria Popova’s Figuring – I have followed her amazing Brain Pickings blog for several years and highly recommend it. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and C.J. Sansom’s Tombland (I was given it last Christmas and cannot believe I haven’t read it yet!) Plus many novels by my writer friends, a whole range of clever, enchanting and gripping fiction queuing up on my Kindle or my bookshelves!

Which were your favourite books of 2019 – I’d love to know! Do please comment below and share your recommendations! I have no single book of the year this year but you can read about my choice last year - the amazing and powerful Smash all the Windows by Jane Davis here.