Oh hello.
How many books read in 2020?
122. Probably a bit above average, but not as many as I might have expected given I was effectively under house arrest for much of the year. That said, the total does include the two longest books I’ve ever read, A Suitable Boy and War and Peace.
Fiction/non-fiction?
94 to 28. The fiction definitely gaining ground in 2020, reversing the trend of previous years. No complaints from me.
Male/female authors?
83 M, 33 F, 2 NB, 4 mixed. My reading more phallocentric than ever.
Favourite book read?
I did love John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, as mentioned in my previous post, but considered as a whole I can’t see beyond Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which will become part of my personal canon. I can imagine boring people about it for years to come.
Least favourite?
Not that I loathed it exactly, but I can’t imagine wanting to read Live and Let Die again in a hurry. Or ever.
Oldest book read?
Shakespeare as usual, this time his King John, my reading of which was motivated by Penelope Fitzgerald’s lovely theatrical novel At Freddie’s. ‘When I strike my foot / Upon the bosom of the ground, rush forth, / And bind the boy which you shall find with me.’ (John Mortimer’s father: ‘Rush forth and bind the boy? Sounds like the name of a rather undesirable firm of solicitors.’)
Newest book read?
I don’t seem to have read any books published in 2020, but there were several from 2019: Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson, Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe, The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming, Lanny by Max Porter, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, Operation Rattlesnake by Count Arthur Strong, My Last Supper by Jay Rayner, Heartstopper: Volume 1 by Alice Oseman, The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories edited by Jessica Harrison, and The Peanuts Papers edited by Andrew Blauner.
Longest book title?
The above-mentioned Library of America volume called, to use its full title, The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life.
Shortest book title?
Coda by Simon Gray.
How many rereads?
Fourteen, namely Pride and Prejudice, Barchester Towers, Our Mutual Friend, The Diary of a Nobody, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Psmith in the City, The Go-Between, The Flying Classroom, Goodbye, Columbus (Roth), Flannelled Fool (Worsley), Ravel (Echenoz) and the first three Tales of the City books.
Most books read by a single author?
Anthony Powell leads with 13, followed by Olivia Manning (6), Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Gray and Charles M. Schulz (5 each), David Nobbs (4), and Patrick Hamilton and Armistead Maupin (3 each).
How many books were borrowed from the library?
I didn’t have access to libraries for quite a bit of the year, so this year the total was only 40. Add to that 40 print books of my own, and 42 Kindle books. Weirdly even figures.
I had no clue what was going on.
The toughest book to get a handle on was probably Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It’s slippery. Worth it, though.
Any in translation?
Only a handful this time. Jean Echenoz’s Ravel, Erich Kästner’s The Flying Classroom, Tove Jansson’s The Invisible Child and The Fir Tree, Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Favourite character encountered this year?
Oh, tons. I suppose Widmerpool takes the laurels, but I’d could name any number of Powell characters, plus Prince Yakimov from Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War (a curious connection between the books being that Manning’s Yaki and Powell’s X. Trapnel were both based on Julian Maclaren-Ross). Also Tarquin Winot from The Debt to Pleasure, Mildred Lathbury from Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, and the likes of Septimus Crisparkle, Hiram Grewgious and Mrs Billickin from The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And Charlie Brown, as usual.
What next?
A lot of dick-swinging, which is to say I resolved at the start of October to read Philip Roth from beginning to end. Only one novel read so far, and I won’t get through the rest of them by 2022, but I hope to make some headway. The good almost always outweighs the bad with Roth, and I’m cautiously optimistic.
Also, given the success I had with Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning, I’ve been thinking about other series of books. Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, that sort of thing. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Mervyn Peake, A.S. Byatt, etc. etc. May try.
Looking over my bookshelves before Christmas I decided to reread a few old favourites, some of which I haven’t touched since my teens. Life’s too short not to reread great books. Here’s the tentative ten:
Jane Austen – Sense and Sensibility (last read 2007)
Charles Dickens – Bleak House (2016)
George Eliot – Middlemarch (2014)
William Golding – Lord of the Flies (c. 1999)
Thomas Mann – Buddenbrooks (2011)
Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (2011)
Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire (2014)
Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited (2008)
Jeanette Winterson – Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (c. 2000)
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse (2009)
Lots to do.