The last two months of 2023 have been so frantic (about which more, perhaps, some other time) that not only did I get very little reading done that wasn’t absolutely necessary for work, but the chaotic atmosphere drove almost all recollection of what I’d read or written earlier in the year clear out of my mind. It’s a good thing I keep records! Looking them over, it was nice to be reminded of what was actually a pretty good year for both reading and writing. I’ll run through the highlights (and also some lowlights) here, as has been my year-end ritual since I started Novel Readings in 2007.

My Year in Reading

When I was asked by Trevor and Paul at the wonderful Mookse & Gripes podcast to contribute to their “best of the year” round-up episode, the book that immediately came to mind for me was John Cotter’s memoir Losing Music. It deserved but didn’t get a blog post of its own, but you can read a bit about it here. It moved me deeply: it deals with some hard things (hardest, of course, for John himself) and although it arrives at what I described as “peace born of hard-won compassion,” John does not serve up any simplistic feel-good messages about resilience or recovery. What would you listen to, if you thought it might be your last chance to hear music?

A stretch of uninspiring reading early in the year was broken by Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, which softened its spare, somewhat evasive prose with moments of delicate tenderness. I discovered everyone was right about Elena Knows and went on to read two more of Piñeiro’s strange, intense, immensely satisfying novels. I loved Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture (which somehow got no mention on this blog at all, though it is the book I most look forward to rereading!). I found Valerie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers immersive in all the best ways, if perhaps a bit too miscellaneous; I enjoyed Fellowship Point but not to the extent that the effusive praise and comparisons to George Eliot it got made me expect. Concita De Gregorio’s The Missing Word is a small book that made a big impression: it is about a mother trying to come to terms with the loss of her children, but it holds her devastation gently so we can come close to it (even those of us whose losses are similar), giving us “a place to listen, a story of love and loss to make up for the word we don’t have to give our grief a place.”

Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead was not actually Dickensian, except in its conspicuously derivative plot; YMMV, as they say, but for me it was, overall, kind of a dud. Based on my experience with Drifts, Kate Zambreno (beloved of many in my bookish circles) is not really for me; even more off-putting, and disappointing because I have liked her earlier books, was Hannah Kent’s Devotion. (Supernatural plot twists turned out to be my pet peeve this year: that was the aspect of Daniel Mason’s North Woods that I could have done without too, and thought the novel would have been better off without as well, and a similar fault line runs through Elizabeth Ruth’s Semi-Detached.)

Olivia Manning, on the other hand, did not let me down: I finally got around to School for Love and The Doves of Venus, both of which are superb in that uneasy, gimlet-eyed way Manning is always superb at. Anita Brookner, too, really delivered with Look At Me, although I may be haunted forever by this passage, which I first heard read aloud by Trevor on his podcast, an experience that prompted me to go immediately to the library to get my hands on the novel:

[Writing] is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state ‘I hurt’ or ‘I hate’ or ‘I want.’ Or, indeed, ‘Look at me.’

I can’t say reading Martin Amis’s Money was a highlight of my year, but our book club discussion of it certainly was, so I guess I have to give Amis some credit; and I am glad to have ended my reading year with Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, which was a tonic, with its feminist energy, but also thought-provoking in ways I didn’t expect but really appreciated.

My book blogging wasn’t very consistent this year: there was once a time when somehow I managed to write up literally every book I read! I do still really enjoy settling in to write about a book that really got me thinking (or feeling!), and blogging in general is still the writing I find most intellectually liberating and stimulating, so we’ll see what happens in 2024. People seem to be predicting a blogging renaissance, as social media communities are fragmenting and “the discourse” (which, when it’s genuinely bookish, is to be cherished) is suffering. I’m here for it if you are!

My Year in Writing

It wasn’t my most productive writing year ever, measured by output anyway, but I got a few things done and out!

I wrote three reviews for the TLS in 2023, Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, Jo Baker’s The Midnight News, and Daniel Mason’s North Woods. (Although I encourage folks to subscribe, so that this estimable publication can keep going, I am also always happy to send PDFs of my own reviews to anyone who asks but can’t get past the paywall.) Working on Litt’s book was particularly thought-provoking because its central conceit is that it is a literal (real-time) diary; it was in fact published (but not written) that way, on Substack a day at a time, so it mimics a blog. I admit I was disappointed when I realized it wasn’t actually a blog, and also I was sorry that the end result was a perfectly conventional published book—why not take the premise all the way and keep it available only online? But I would think that, as a blogger myself who often ponders whether the ephemerality of blog posts is a strength or a weakness of the form. If I had to rank the novels, I would probably put Mason’s at the top, but I was most pleased to review Baker’s because I am a big admirer of her fiction and successfully advocated for her new book to get a review in the TLS, her first notice there. (Does that make me some kind of influencer?!)

I wrote two reviews for Quill & Quire this year, both of books I really liked: Christine Higdon’s Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, and Elizabeth Ruth’s Semi-Detached. I continue to appreciate the way reviewing for Canadian publications prompts me to pick up novels by authors I might not otherwise have heard of or tried. I would mostly likely have heard of David Bergen’s Away from the Dead even if I hadn’t been asked to review it by the Literary Review of Canada, as it has been nominated for some high profile awards: this was an interesting experience, as I was unimpressed with the novel on first reading but grew to admire and appreciate it more and more as I spent more time with it. Bergen’s prose is very understated and I have a taste, just personally, for writing with more zest or even melodrama (hello, have I mentioned that Dorothy Dunnett is my favorite novelist?). I ended up thinking he let his quiet sentences carry a lot of heavy weight. This was my first time writing for the LRC; I’d like to do it again some day.

I wrote two other somewhat more academic pieces, though neither of them was, strictly speaking, a “research” publication. One was a review for Women’s Studies of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby’s correspondence in an excellent new edition by Elaine and English Showalter; the other was an essay for a forum organized by my friend and (nearby) colleague Tom Ue on ‘teaching the Victorians’ today, which is coming out eventually in the Victorian Review. I have written literally thousands of words about how I teach the Victorians today: this was a task for which almost two decades of blogging was exactly the right preparation!

Finally, I did a lot of writing over the summer months for what I intended as a submission to a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on ‘women writing in public.’ Unfortunately life got in the way in November and there was just no way I could spare the time and attention that would have been required to meet the early December deadline. I will regroup and reconsider; hopefully there is some other use to which I can put the research and conceptualizing and draft material I have. I feel certain it wasn’t wasted time.

My Year Otherwise

Yesterday marked two years since Owen’s death; inevitably, my mind and heart have been especially full of memories and sorrows over the past few days. I found it helpful and also, for whatever reason, so essential to write about my grief over the early days and weeks and months after he died. I have not stopped talking about it—how could I, why would I, when grief continues to be my constant companion? His death affects everything for me, every day, and it would not be right or true not to acknowledge that. But as other grievers know, though at first the idea of integration or acceptance seems not just impossible but offensive, over time the loss becomes a part of your everyday life instead of a cataclysm that makes the whole idea of an everyday life inconceivable. I would like to write more about what this gradual change feels like and means to me, but for now I’ll just quote again from Denise Riley, whose words about her own grief I have returned to over and over:

If there is ever to be any movement again, that moving will not be “on.” It will be “with.” With the carried-again child.

The first year after death
is full of stretching, where things
pull so hard your bones
break, because they were never
bones, were always solitude.

Victoria Chang, from “The Trees Witness Everything”

This has been an unusual year for Novel Readings, one in which my reading life was overtaken by my real life—or, since I firmly believe that “the world of books is still the world,” a better way to put it would be that my reading life changed because so did the rest of my life. I read a lot in 2022 about grief, and about suicide; I read a lot of poetry, or at least a lot more than I usually do; and I failed to finish a lot of novels that I started, or at least a lot more than is typical for me.

Mourning

Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow was the most resonant book I read about grief. I didn’t find it so at first, but as the days after Owen’s death turned into weeks and then months, parts of it returned to me over and over, especially her observation about how “the dead slip away, as we realize that we have unwillingly left them behind us in their timelessness.” (I feel this very acutely this week, as the calendar turns to the new year, the second year of his absence.) The poems in Say Something Back, in the same slim volume, have also stayed with me. “How should I take in such a bad idea?” Riley demands in “Part Song.” How indeed. William Styron’s Darkness Visible brought me greater understanding of the intensity and suffering of depression; and Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast was difficult but valuable reading about the painful truths and also the mysteries of suicide. I also found new meaning in Margaret Oliphant’s lamentations for her “dear bright child”; and in Virginia Woolf’s mourning for her nephew Julian.

Other Reading

It seemed for a while that this would be my year of Ali Smith, the way last year I went all in on Jo Baker. I read straight through her seasonal quartet at a time when otherwise I could hardly concentrate; I became interested enough to add her to my ongoing book project on women writers and social reform. I went on to read and enjoy Companion Piece—but then I tried How to Be Both and lost my grip.

Some standout experiences from those early months, when to read at all was a success and to read something and love it seemed almost too good to be true: Sarah Winman’s Still Life and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, neither of which got the attentive post it deserved; and Andrew Miller’s The Slowworm’s Song, which was one of the first books I blogged about ‘properly’ (meaning, as I used to do) in 2022. Quite a few other books I read with interest, appreciation, or pleasure ended up mentioned here only in round-up posts, if at all: Monica Ali’s Love Marriage; Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years; Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility; Graham Macrea Burnet’s Case Study; and Damian Lanigan’s The Ghost Variations, my last book of the year and a very good one.* I did manage to write up my experience rereading Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Both reading and writing about my reading did get gradually easier as time passed, and I had a run of good luck, or good choices, too, towards the end of the year: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Ian McEwan’s Lessons, and Richard Powers’ Bewilderment—which I have since learned got quite a critical drubbing, but which for me stands out as perhaps the best novel I read in 2022.

I managed some formal reviews this year, notably Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which I thought was smart and powerful and elegant, Emma Donoghue’s taut and graphic Haven (my review at CNQ should be available eventually!), and Sina Queyras’s Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf which gave me a lot to think about, in a good way.

All year I struggled with the possibility that books I disliked or DNF’ed were victims of my circumstances—although why I should consider my grieving brain any more unreliable in its criticism than in its praise I don’t know. In any case, with that caveat in mind, the book I liked least this year was Tessa Hadley’s Free Love, which was generally admired both by reviewers and by astute readers in my Twitter circle but which I just could not come to terms with.

On the other hand, a book I stalled out in but fully intend to try again in 2023, because even in the moment I could tell it deserved a better reading than it was getting from me, is Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. I also already have a tempting stack of new (to me) books I’m looking forward to reading and blogging about in 2023, including Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast, Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, Niall Williams’s This Is Happiness and The History of Rain, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms. I’ve started the year, though, with Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend, lent to me by a dear friend with a note pointing out that it is a novel about female friendship. At about 100 pages in, I’m rather hoping she doesn’t see much of us or our friendship in it—but I’ll have to see how things unfold.

Writing at Novel Readings turned out to be really important to me in 2022. At times I felt self-conscious or uncomfortable about how personal, and how mournful, my posts often were, but the simple fact was that writing them—finding the words to give shape to the ideas and feelings I otherwise found overwhelming—helped me when little else did. So I reassured myself by thinking of how many other writers have put their grief into words, often much more publicly than this, and by remembering that nobody ever has to read anything here that they don’t want to. And some of my happiest times in 2022 were actually those I spent writing here about books: to be immersed in that work always proved both intellectually invigorating and emotionally restorative—a reminder, which I sometimes really needed, of why it is I do this in the first place. I am truly grateful to everyone who kept reading and especially to those of you who have showed so much sympathy and kindness in your comments over this long, hard year.

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*Lanigan’s pianist protagonist is preoccupied with the slow movement of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, which I have since been listening to over and over, appreciating its melancholy drifting. Here it is, in case that sounds appealing to you too.

I have done a year-end round-up of my reading on Novel Readings since I started blogging in 2007. Since Owen died, a lot of people have suggested to me that routines and rituals have value, and I am also trying to make myself act according to the principle I mentioned before, that “if something was worth doing before a crisis, it remains worth doing”—which is not to say that a post like this, or any individual post, is in itself especially worthwhile, but that perhaps Novel Readings itself is worth sustaining, and might be sustaining for me in some way as well. So in that spirit, here is a look back at the highs and the one big low of my reading in 2021.

Author of the Year

This doesn’t happen often for me, but it’s so much fun when it does: I read one book by an author that’s so good I promptly work my way through their other books and those are all really good too. Sarah Moss was an author like this for me a few years ago. In 2021 it was Jo Baker‘s turn. The first book of hers I read was actually The Body Lies, for my book club in February. I didn’t love it, but I found it really interesting, especially as a potential candidate for my seminar on women and detective fiction, because it is as much about the problem of how violence against women is represented in crime fiction as it is its own example of the genre. Our discussion piqued my interest in A Country Road, A Tree, which I loved, and that in turn convinced me to finally try Longbourn, which, against the odds, I also loved. Since then I have also read The Telling and The Undertow, and if her other two novels were more readily available in Canada I would have read them by now too.

Novel of the Year

The standout single book of the year for me was unequivocally Lonesome Dove. It gave me the kind of reading experience I am always looking for: immersive, affecting, thought-provoking. Close seconds were Whereabouts and Piranesi (neither of which, it’s worth observing, could be less like Lonesome Dove!) and maybe also Great Circle.

Non-Fiction of the Year

The best non-fiction I read in 2021 was Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five; a close second here was my colleague Dean Jobb’s The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream. Both writers impressed me by their ability to tell a sensational story without themselves sensationalizing it. Rubenhold especially is committed to freeing her subjects from the pernicious and voyeuristic glamor that too often surrounds their killer, restoring them to us in the clearer light of their own humanity.

Most Fun Reading Something Together

A great summer project was reading Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale along with Dorian and many others. An unexpected perk has been the lasting connections made with members of the Arnold Bennett Society.

Late to the Party

After giving up on Conversations with Friends back in 2019, I had something of a conversion to Sally Rooney in 2021, starting with Normal People (for me, the difference was ‘hearing’ it in my head in a lilting Irish accent) and then extending to Beautiful World, Where Are You, which I appreciated very much as a novel about people trying to think seriously about serious things.

Gentlest Novel

If I were going to recommend just one book I read in 2021 to as many people as possible, Leonard and Hungry Paul would be the one. What a lovely novel, sweet but not saccharine, funny but soft. I didn’t write much about it myself, but my post links to Dorian’s much better one.

Most Unlikely Success

A Trollope novel but with dragons? It shouldn’t work, but somehow Tooth & Claw does—it was lots of fun.

Best Re-Read

Affinity: it remains my least favorite Sarah Waters novel—but because she’s so brilliant, that still means it’s better than most other novels.

Absolutely, hands down, the worst book I read in 2021

Lucy Ellmann’s Things Are Against Us.

I read plenty of other books too; another year-end ritual is updating the Novel Readings index, something I’ll probably get around to before too much longer, as it’s just the kind of relatively mechanical task that appeals to me right now.

If December had ended differently and I had completed this post ‘on schedule,’ I would have concluded it, as I usually do, with a look ahead at some of my most anticipated reads of 2022. For the first time in my life, however, I am not really feeling like a reader. It’s not just that I’ve been having trouble concentrating since Owen’s death: it’s that, for now, the lure of books is, not gone, quite, but very faint. A couple of days ago I decided to practice reading again with a book I’ve loved for decades, Dorothy Dunnett’s Pawn in Frankincense. I think it’s working, sort of: at any rate, looking at its familiar pages reminds me of loving to read, which is a start. Beyond that, I’ll just have to see how things go.

“2020 will begin on a high note,” I wrote at the end of 2019’s “Year in Reading” post. As far as reading goes, at least, I wasn’t wrong: the books I was so looking forward to were Kate Clayborn’s Love Lettering and Tana French’s The Witch Elm, and I enjoyed them both thoroughly.

It hardly needs saying that 2020 turned out to be anything but a good year overall. Was it a good reading year? I wish I could say that I turned the relentless isolation of the pandemic into an opportunity to read deeply and voraciously. I feel perhaps unduly ashamed of how difficult I often found it to concentrate, of how often I gathered promising stacks of unread books from my shelves determined to make my way through them only to reject them one by one — usually for no good reason except that in the moment, they just didn’t appeal — and put them back where they came from. Maybe it was the long hours I put into learning about and then laboring over online teaching; maybe it was the suppressed but constant struggle to keep at bay the worst fears and feelings about the pandemic; maybe, also, it’s not embarrassing but understandable to be uneasy and distracted in the midst of a global crisis, and so to fall back more often than you’d like into the passive forgetfulness offered by television. 

And yet, looking back over my posts for 2020, though they are far fewer than usual (blogging, not just about books but about anything, also became harder this year, from screen fatigue and because of the way time kept seeming to pass without actually passing, if that makes sense), I find that I did read a lot of good books, ones that held my attention, that delighted or moved or provoked me in all the best ways. I also read — or at any rate finished — fewer books that really disappointed me, probably because I was less likely this year to press on with something I wasn’t engaged by. Of course, a number of books that I read were in the middle, in that largest zone that stretches from “not really my thing” to “good but not great.”

In a tradition that stretches back to 2007, the year I began Novel Readings, here’s my look back at the best, the worst, and some of the rest of my 2020 reading.

The Best Books I Read In 2020 

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Remains of the Dead  was the last book my book club read before our meetings went virtual; I think our dinner out to discuss it was also my last pre-lockdown social event! When will we six (sometimes seven) meet again?! This fall was our 10th anniversary, so it seems particularly sad that we haven’t been able to get together in person: Zoom just isn’t the same. We all loved Drive Your Plow — rare unanimity. The novel is extraordinary: strange, intense, compelling, and morally serious without ever being didactic:

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is about someone who reacts to the perception of universal suffering by seeking justice, not sympathy. The surprise of the novel is that someone so odd, crusty, and uncompromising turns out to be so appealing. I enjoyed her abrasiveness, her frankness about her aches and pains, her determination to live on her own terms … the punishment fits the crime in a morally and philosophically satisfying way.

I was mesmerized by Miriam Toews’s Women Talking — I’m glad I overcame my initial skepticism to give it a try. I found it “at once ruthlessly specific (what should these women, who have been abused, tortured, raped, silenced, rendered extraneous to the meaning of ther own community, do?) and almost shockingly expansive: what should (or can) we all do, once we recognize how deep and entangling the world’s systemic injustices are?”

It seems inevitable in retrospect, but that shouldn’t diminish the extraordinary fact that Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light is as brilliant as the first two novels in the trilogy. I thought it was not quite as good as Bring Up the Bodies, but that’s such a high bar that the comparison doesn’t really reflect badly on it. The last 100 pages or so of The Mirror and the Light are particularly remarkable, not least because I read them knowing exactly what was going to happen and yet was utterly gripped. “It is hard to mourn a man like Cromwell,” even Mantel’s version of him, but the series is so good that “she has made it impossible not to miss him now that he’s gone.” What will Mantel do next? I would love to read her novel about Elizabeth I, if she would ever write one.

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Maggie O’Farrell, but Hamnet and Judith exceeded my expectations:

In her author’s note, O’Farrell explains just how little we know about the real Hamnet, and also tells us that the central event of her novel, Hamnet’s sudden death from the bubonic plague, is a fiction: “it is not known why Hamnet Shakespeare died.” From this slight material O’Farrell develops a novel that is a delicate combination of historical recreation and literary excavation, of intimately portrayed human lives and undercurrents of meaning that flow almost unnoticed towards Shakespeare’s tragic drama.

One thin silver lining of our locked-down world is the movement of many interesting cultural events online: I really enjoyed “attending” O’Farrell’s Hay Festival interview.

Kathleen Rooney’s Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey was a delight, though by that I don’t mean to imply that it is a slight or easy nbook. Out of a very unlikely premise (and the risk factor is actually one of the things I appreciated most about the novel), Rooney created something that is at once grim, tender, and morally consequential.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune’s Maggot was one of the long-unread books I plucked from my shelves and actually read, and I’m so glad I did: I absolutely loved it. I can’t think of another book I’ve read that is quite like it:

It is sad and strange and funny and touching; it is about faith, and the loss of faith, and about love and the loss of love, or sacrifice in the name of love. It is wryly satirical about missionary zeal and imperialism and cultural arrogance; it takes a small man and uses him to tell a much larger story about freeing ourselves from the things we believe in and the harm they can do. 

Steven Price’s Lampedusa also exceeded my expectations, joining “Colm Toibin’s The Master on my very short list of books about other authors that really succeed in conveying what it might have been like to be that other consciousness, to write that other novel.”

Turning to non-fiction, Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life  is “a marvelous, inspiring, touching, and extremely wide-ranging account of the myriad ways needle crafts of all kinds have mattered and made meaning throughout history.” I enjoyed it both for the story she tells and for the connections between it and my own work on needlework in the context of Victorian historiography.

Like Mr Fortune’s Maggot, Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet had malingered on my shelves for some time; the meditative comfort I have found in jigsaw puzzles since our stay-at-home protocols began inspired me to take another look, and it turned out to have found its moment:

It is a wonderfully digressive book that manages, by the end, to say some profound things about how we pass our time. It began, she explains, as what she intended as a gift book about jigsaws, the kind of thing you’d buy in a museum gift shop. In the end it is part memoir; part history of a wide range of puzzles and games and arts and crafts; part  reflection on (and this will sound pompous, but in the book it really isn’t) the human condition, including especially aging and death.

Last but not least, I was both gripped and impressed by Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing:

Say Nothing is not just a gripping work of historical reconstruction and exploration, it is also a morally weighty book. Like good fiction, it insists over and over on the complexity of its topics and its people. It has no heroes and, surprisingly, not really any villains either, because those categories rely on absolute perspectives that are simply not sustainable.

Other Books I Liked A Lot

I expected to like Sarah Moss’s new novel Summerwater, which I reviewed for the Dublin Review of Books (one of a sadly small number of writing projects I accomplished in 2020). I did like it, though I did not love it: it is a lot like Ghost Wall in scope and subject, and equally terse and intelligent, but I would like to see Moss do something more expansive, and also less emotionally reticent. Still, a “lesser” novel by Moss is still better than a lot of other books, and as with Ghost Wall, I also think this is one that gets bigger and better the more you think about it: 

The novel has the tense atmosphere of a thriller and clues to its eventual crisis are deftly deployed throughout, but its multiple layers mean that the most important revelations are less about what ultimately happens then about how the novel asks us to interpret it. How can we live together in a world being reshaped by the weather? What expectations should we bring to communities no longer defined by the artificial borders of nationalism? What really makes a good neighbour?

William Trevor’s Love and Summer was very good – not as good as The Story of Lucy Gault, for me anyway, but good enough (and so beautifully written) that it solidified Trevor’s place on my list of writers to read more of. 

Elizabeth von Armin’s sharply funny Father was a real treat and deserved a post of its own, which it didn’t get. I highly recommend it for fans of Barbara Pym, Angela Thirkell, or the Mapp and Lucia books.

 I thoroughly enjoyed Amy Jones’s comic family novel We’re All In This Together, which I thought had “the intimacy and precision of an Anne Tyler novel but is done in bolder colours, with stronger contrasts and, especially, deeper shadows.”

I also enjoyed Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, though in the end I couldn’t escape the feeling that its premise was less an urgent reason to group its subjects together than an ingenious device for doing so and then marketing the results. Still, 

it’s an elegantly constructed and well-written introduction to five remarkable women–the imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); classicist Jane Harrison; historian Eileen Power; Dorothy L. Sayers; and Virginia Woolf. Starting from the very literal connection that all of them at one time … lived in Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square, Wade explores other commonalities between them, especially their conviction that “real freedom entails the ability to live on one’s own terms, not to allow one’s identity to be proscribed or limited by anyone else.”

Square Haunting made me long to be back in Bloomsbury, where for some reason I have always felt strangely exhilarated and also very at home, as if I can be more myself there than elsewhere.

I found Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel engrossing: it is interesting and highly readable. Yet somehow I couldn’t quite make sense of it all: “I wasn’t 100% sure why all of its specific ingredients belonged together in this particular novel: I couldn’t quite discern the underlying thematic unity, the meaning of it all.” That left me dissatisfied, though it also raised questions for me about what I look for when I’m reading, and why.

Books I Expected to Be Better 

My book club really enjoyed Helene Tursten’s An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, so we chose Detective Inspector Huss to read next. I didn’t like it, though she’s a good character and the novel had a lot of interesting aspects. Maybe it was a poor translation?

Sandra Newman’s The Heavens had been on my reading radar for a long time: I proposed it to the TLS for a review, in fact, and they turned it down. Now that I’ve read it, I’m relieved, as “I just couldn’t sort out my thematic and conceptual confusions well enough to feel satisfied with the novel as a whole” — though, I concluded, “it is quite possible that the fault lies not with The Heavens but with me.”

My Least-Liked Book of 2020

I know how much Dorian likes the Bernie Gunther books, and he writes so convincingly about them that I decided to try the first one, March Violets. Bernie and I (or Kerr and I) did not get along:

While I find Philip Marlowe’s misogyny disturbing, I give Chandler credit for showing the price Marlowe pays for it, in his embittered isolation, while Bernie Gunther’s sexism (“Her breasts were like the rear ends of a pair of dray horses at the end of a long hard day”) serves only to show off Kerr’s own hard-boiled credentials. (“There’s only one thing that unnerves me more than the company of an ugly woman in the evening, and that’s the company of the same ugly woman the following morning.”)

Maybe the later books improve, and there’s no doubt that it’s a great concept for a series and that this one is well executed in other ways. With so many other books to choose from, though, I’m unlikely to try Kerr again any time soon.

My Biggest 2020 Reading Project

My one larger writing project for 2020 was a feature article for the TLS in honor of P. D. James’s centenary. I thought rereading all of her Adam Dalgliesh novels, which took up a lot of my summer, would be more fun than it was. They are all very good, but they are good in particular and strikingly similar ways — ways I ultimately found limited, or limiting, as I explain in the essay.

Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New

Overall, that’s really not a bad year’s reading, especially for an otherwise pretty bad year! It proves that — gloomy, difficult, and uncertain as other things might be — a good book is still a good book and worth celebrating. As for 2021, well, it feels foolhardy to express much optimism about it in other respects, but I’m excited about the first book I have lined up, Rónán Hession’s Leonard and Hungry Paul. I got Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart and Anne Enright’s The Gathering as Christmas gifts (thank you!), and I’ve got Edna O’Brien’s Girl and Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom on their way thanks to Boxing Day sales. The next book lined up for my book club, also, is Elsa Morante’s enticing Arturo’s Island. We aren’t able to ring in the new year with much confidence or enthusiasm, but it is both comforting and cheering to have these books to look forward to.

For some reason I had it in mind that 2019 had not been a very good reading year for me. Then I went back through my blog posts and discovered that, while there isn’t really one stand-out “best of the year” the way there sometimes is, there have been plenty of reading highlights, and hardly any outright duds. (That in itself is a good enough reason to keep blogging, if you ask me.) According to my book math, that means that overall 2019 has actually been a better than average reading year! Here’s a look back at some of its greatest hits, some also-rans, a few minor disappointments, and some failures (maybe mine, maybe the books’).

The Best Books I Read in 2019

Sarah Perry’s Melmoth was definitely one of my favorite reads of the year, a perfect balance of propulsive suspense and philosophical gravitas. I found it “a thoroughly entertaining novel of ideas.”

John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People was less fun, I suppose, but it was a moving and thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the saga of Smiley and his longtime adversary Karla. At once triumphant and mournful, it leaves us with the lingering dissatisfaction of knowing that “some wars can only be won by losing, by giving up your allegiance to the very thing you are fighting for.”

Anna Burns’s brilliant Milkman  may be a historical novel about the Troubles but–in part through its idiosyncratic narration, which gives the story an allegorical cast–Burns ensures that that “we aren’t left with any comfortable sense that the kind of trouble they were about, or that the novel is about, is safely in the past, or only in Ireland.”

Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free was a slow burn but (like Melmoth, but in a much quieter register) it effectively combines taut suspense with deeper reflections about “the kinds of choices we all have to make in our lives about where to go and why, and … what we hope to find if we ever get there.”

William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault quietly but powerfully “settles us into the day-to-day possibilities of grace without insisting that a life without more than that is a failure”; both Trevor’s beautiful prose and Lucy’s usettling story convinced me that this is an author I want to read much more of.

Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border was another book that made me want to read more of the author’s back catalog. It has the same “cerebral energy” that appeals to me in Sarah Moss’s fiction; “it’s a novel that is clearly motivated by ideas but it isn’t overwhelmed by them.”

Vera Caspary’s Laura turned out to be that unexpected thing for me–a noir novel I thoroughly enjoyed: “it has as much literary flair as anything I’ve read by Hammett or Chandler, and it pulls off its tricks without glamorizing violence (as Hammett especially often seems to) and with a woman at its center who is herself, not just an object for male fantasy.”

Other Books That Were Also Very Good

Reading John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, I missed Smiley–not just the man but what he brought to his books–for all their melancholy, “there’s something lovable as well as admirable about Smiley, something comforting, even, in what he stands for (and fights for).” Still, Charlie turned out to be, if not admirable, at least interesting and sympathetic–“torn to pieces,” as Le Carré said, “by the battle between two peoples who both have justice on their side.”

I really liked Rachel Malik’s Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, a “reticent and unassuming” novel about two equally unassuming women who want only “to live quietly and honestly, and together.”

I found Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing immediately gripping and ultimately very poignant. In different hands Maud’s voice or story could have felt contrived or manipulative, but while Elizabeth Is Missing “is certainly a clever book, … it is never clever at Maud’s expense.”

Lissa Evans was a happy discovery for me in 2019, largely thanks to Dorian‘s recommendations. I enjoyed all three of her novels that I read, but especially Crooked Heart, which for some reason I did not write up here!

Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise was an unexpectedly delightful treat–it looks twee, but it turns out to be a comic novel suffused with tenderness (and, as a slightly disdainful review by Lucy Ellmann indicates, the anti-Ducks, Newburyport, about my experience of which see below). I can imagine rereading Come, Thou Tortoise regularly, just for the fun of it–and also because I know I didn’t pick up on all the novel’s twists and tricks the first time through.

I loved George Saunders’s “Tenth of December.” No, I didn’t format that incorrectly: I mean the story, not the collection, because it was the only one in the book “that seemed to me clearly written by the author of Lincoln in the Bardo.”

I really admired–and was ultimately quite moved by–the careful self-effacement of Bart Van Es’s The Cut Out Girl. His family history project has broader significance as “part of the larger responsibility we all have not to look away, and then to reflect on the meaning of what we have seen.”

Some Books That Were Perfectly Fine

I had fun reading Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders and The Word Is Murder (which, I agree with Dorian, is better than Magpie), but I think that might be enough Horowitz for me (except for rewatching Foyle’s War, which I am very keen to do). I admire his ingenuity and envy his brio and productivity, but I missed the sense of heft–of moral depth and complexity–that I get from the crime writers I like best.

Tessa Hadley’s Late In the Day was one of several highly polished, conspicuously competent novels I’ve read in the last few years that left me wanting more–more risk-taking? more energy? Or maybe wanting less–I find it hard to get excited about novels so well-crafted that I’m aware at every moment of the author crafting it. That’s why Melmoth (for one) was a favorite of mine this year and Late In the Day (good as it is) wasn’t. Ditto Joan Silber’s Improvement–also smart, well written, and (as I read it, anyway) a bit soulless.

My review of Emma Donoghue’s Akin will be in Canadian Notes and Queries in the new year. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit: even though I found it somewhat contrived, Donoghue is a good enough storyteller to carry me along. It made me think, though, about why The Wonder was (I thought) so much better–not just fine but genuinely good. Maybe Donoghue (like Ann Patchett?) should write fewer novels, so that her ideas for each one have longer to deepen?

Some Books I Expected To Be Better

I absolutely love the idea of Persephone Books, and it is thrilling in principle to see so many publishers devoting themselves now to bringing back “lost classics.” Dorothy Whipple’s Someone At A Distance did not, however, convince me that she has been unduly neglected. It was OK–but it rather reinforced than subverted Carmen Callil’s insistence that Virago’s books not dip below “the Whipple line.” That said, while Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare (published by Virago) is (in my opinion, of course) a better novel, is it a much better novel? I called it a “small gem,” so I guess I think the answer is yes.

I had high hopes for Tea Obreht’s Inland–I’m not sure why, in retrospect, as I did not really love The Tiger’s Wife. Obreht does a lot of things really well in Inland, but I didn’t think they added up to as much as they could have, especially as an intervention into the Western as a novel.

I also had high expectations for Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, which has been very widely and effusively praised. I found it “a very readable novel, perfectly pitched and crafted to provoke discussion about Celestial’s choice,” but for me “the whole was, somehow, less than the sum of its parts.”

Some Books I Found Especially Challenging (In A Good Way)

I am not a very good reader of Virginia Woolf’s fiction, and The Years was actually harder for me to make sense of than To the Lighthouse. On the other hand, I found my struggle with it very productive intellectually: for once I felt that I understood something of what Woolf was trying to do, which I read quite a bit about in her diaries and in the original version of The Pargiters, and I was fascinated by thinking about it in the contexts that Woolf’s comments made relevant. My reading of The Years so far has confirmed for me that Woolf was right to call it a failure–but I think it is an interesting, even a revealing, failure, which is a point I plan to come back to in 2020.

2019 was the year I finally read The Odyssey. I read it in Emily Wilson’s lauded translation–and in retrospect I’m not sure if that was the best or the worst choice for me. It was very crisp, fast-moving, and graphic–“nothing, in her version, really gets in the way of the story-telling”–but was it epic?

Some Books I Found Especially Challenging (In A Bad Way)

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport may be as brilliant as everyone says it is: I won’t know until or unless I finish it! I waded through the first 100 pages and hated it–not every minute of it, but that unevenness was part of the problem for me. Every time I started to fall into the propulsive rhythm of its stream-of-consciousness narration, the narrator would trip into random word associations that completely broke up any developing logic or momentum for me. More than the novel’s (nominally) unbroken single sentence–which, as others have commented, simply substitutes the narrative tic “the fact that” for conventional punctuation–the unbroken single paragraph also proved an obstacle because it offers no visual cues to one’s reading at all. If I dared to look up from the page, I had a hopeless time finding my place on it again, which meant a lot of frustrated rereading.

Both of these complaints of course say as much or more about me as a reader as about Ducks, Newburyport as a book. Still, I find it both funny and frustrating to hear people suggest any negative reactions are somehow about a woman “daring” to write a long or difficult book–or a long book about domestic details. You can be (as I am) all for those things and still find a particular book inaccessible or unappealing. I think for me the stumbling block is that I don’t go to fiction to find the chaos of everyday life reproduced: I go to fiction to find it shaped into something artful. Maybe Ellmann does that–as I said, I can’t be sure unless I read the whole thing. Will I finish it in 2020? Maybe.

I also did not finish Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. Boring!

I did manage to finish rereading Wuthering Heights. I still don’t like it.

A Few New or Renewed 19th-Century Friends

Dombey and Son has long been at the top of my list of “Dickens novels I should probably read instead of just rereading Bleak House.” It is good–but not as good as Bleak House.

I found Rudyard Kipling’s Kim was a strange, entertaining, and baffling novel. I’m glad I finally read it, but I can’t imagine teaching it.

Rereading New Grub Street confirmed that it is at once a very good novel with lots of relevant themes, especially about literary value and the literary marketplace–and that if I’m going to assign anything by Gissing, I’ll stick with The Odd Women. Everything about New Grub Street just seemed too obvious, somehow: what would we interpret about it?

The End!

And that’s it–not everything I read in 2019, of course, but the books that, for better and for worse, seem most worthy of note. I feel as if I learned a lot from my reading this year and also, more often than I’d remembered until I did this review, had a lot of fun. I’m not sure what accounts for the misimpression that 2019 was a bit of a reading slump. Maybe it’s because often, by whatever chance, I read the very best book of the year at the very end of the year, and that creates a retrospective glow that was missing this time.

That said, I’m about to read two very different books I’ve been really looking forward to: Kate Clayborn’s Love Lettering and Tana French’s The Witch Elm. Unless my hopes are thoroughly dashed (which I really don’t expect they will be), this means 2020 will begin on a high note!

 

 

 

It’s hard to know when to write these year-end posts: there’s always a chance that a book I read in the very final days of the year will be a real game changer! It’s a quiet snowy day today, though, perfect for a little blogging, so I’ll go ahead and write up my regular overview of highs and lows of my reading year and give any late entries their own posts.

Best of the Year

This year it’s a tie: I thought both Lincoln in the Bardo and Every Man Dies Alone were extraordinary, though in very different ways. Lincoln in the Bardo is “a bravura display of narrative ingenuity” that somehow also ends up being moving and profound–about love, loss, life, death, and history. Every Man Dies Alone is much more conventionally told, but it too focuses on intensely personal stories to raise deep questions about how we can live a moral life, especially in the midst of injustice and suffering.

Other Highlights

I read more books by Sarah Moss this year; the best of them were The Tidal  Zone and Ghost Wall. I so admire the intelligence of her novels, which all start from intellectually ambitious concepts and embody them in credible and dramatic personal scenarios. I continued my belated reading of John Le Carré with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. Only the former was really a highlight, but even a second-tier Le Carré novel is still pretty great. Smiley’s People is high up on my list of books to read in 2019. Kathy Page’s Dear Evelyn took a familiar concept–the story of a marriage interwoven with the story of an era  of great change and drama–and made something fresh, intimate, and quietly devastating out of it. Finally, though I thought Amor Towles “flirted with disaster” in A Gentleman of Moscow, for me “two things kept it from becoming irritating and allowed it instead to be both lovely and sad.”

Also Noteworthy

I read quite a few books this year that I thought were near misses: good, even very good, but slightly dissatisfying, for one reason or another. Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs was harrowing but “a bit miscellaneous.” I was “interested … but not really captivated” by Irene Némirovsky’s Suite Française. Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am was a book I found hard to put down, gripped as I was by her near-death experiences, and I loved the way she writes, but at the same time I finished the book thinking “that she, and we, ought to learn more from all those near misses, or that she should have done more to earn our attention to them than just surviving or enduring.” I liked Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach a lot, though I didn’t think it really lived up to the hype around it. I enjoyed Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, in spite of its ‘spots of commonness.’ Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire was an intriguing premise and mostly well executed, but ended, I thought, “in melodrama, not moral revelation.” I wished Hannah Kent’s The Good People had come with “a side of exposition” to deal with the clash of worldviews it depicts but does not analyze.

Disappointments and Outright Duds

I read a couple of critical darlings that did not quite work for me, though both Ali Smith’s Autumn and Rachel Cusk’s Outline gave me a lot to think about–Cusk especially, whose next book, Transit, I do still want to read. (I am not particularly interested in Smith’s Winter.) For different and admittedly idiosyncratic reasons I did not much enjoy Alistair MacLeod’s acclaimed No Great Mischief . Kate Atkinson’s Transcription was a good read but not much else, and N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season did not win me over to SFF–though I learned a lot about the genre from the attempt, and from the discussions that followed. Though it kept my attention with its harrowing storyline, Octavia Butler’s Kindred ultimately seemed formally uninteresting and heavy-handed; some members of my reading group commented during our discussion that it read to them like young adult fiction, and I don’t altogether disagree.

Speaking of my book club, we were unanimous in our dislike of  Joanna Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age, a novel which for me (ironically) was tedious especially because of its excessive exposition, “dense paragraphs of stuff that just didn’t seem worth taking more time over.” The books I liked least this year, though, were Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, which has the unhappy distinction of being my Worst Read of 2018.

Trollope Cluster

2018 was a good year for reading and writing about Trollope. In February I reread Doctor Thorne and found it a wonderful time out from the depression and chaos of the news. In April I reread P. D. James’s Death in Holy Orders; her intertextual allusions to Barchester Towers prompted some comparisons between James and Trollope as moralists that did not exactly redound to her credit. Then over the summer I reread He Knew He Was Right for an essay I published in the TLS on ‘Reading Trollope in the Age of Trump’:

Louis is ultimately the scapegoat for a systemic problem, one that Trollope suggests cannot be adequately dealt with through individual sympathy or decency – one that cannot be fixed, though it may be better understood, by reading. Like the conclusion of Hard Times, which calls Dickens’s readers to account for whether “such things shall be” in the future, the ending of He Knew He Was Right demands a political reckoning from us. “One does not become angry with a madman”, Trollope acknowledges, “but while a man has power in his hands over others, and when he misuses that power grossly and cruelly, who is there that will not be angry?” Who indeed.

Drawing Cluster

I took a drawing class in the spring. A book that gave me some of the courage I needed to try it was Lynda Barry’s remarkable treatise on creativity / pedagogical self-help book, Syllabus; a book that prompted me to think more about art and what it means to be “An Artist” (or, in my case, “A Writer”) was Nell Painter’s Old in Art School.

These are not all the books I read in 2018, but anyone reading this post is likely to have read about the others over the year anyway!

As for my reading in 2019, I have (as always) high hopes and many plans. In addition to the books I’ve already named here as ones I will surely get to, I received some treats from my wish list for Christmas, including Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea and Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I have started Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, and after that I may try the Iliad.

I also intend to catch up on or reread a number of Victorian novels, with an eye to refreshing my standard repertoire for the 19th-century fiction classes I teach every year. Maybe 2019 will be the year I finally read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, which has been ripening on my shelves for a few years now–or maybe I will be emboldened enough by having finally read the Odyssey to give Ulysses a try. I have learned, though, not to make too many definite plans or promises about my future reading, not just because it can leave you feeling guilty when you shouldn’t but because the best reading is often unexpected and serendipitous!