It’s been a perfect year to ignore the real world and dive into the pages of a book. The first half of the year was a bumper reading one for me. When she was tiny, my daughter loved to sleep on my lap and I would spend hours sitting in semi darkness, pinned to the bed by the weight of my snoring little girl. I should have minded, I should have done the sleep training people recommended, but instead I happily turned on my ereader and let my mind soar into the pages of whatever other world I found.
In the second half of the year my baby learnt how to sleep on her own in her cot and I started - reluctantly - to use her nap times to do other things. Now I read in snatches when I’ve finished all my housework and the never ending parade of admin tasks and in the evening after I’ve put her to bed and I miss my long, languid hours of reading. I knew at the time they’d never come back.
That said, here are a few books that have stayed with me this year - ones I read in 2020, not necessarily published this year.
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
I’ve been entranced recently by stories that meld folklore and myth with our modern reality, books that acknowledge the uncanny in the everyday and the mythic structures behind our lives. This book, which works on multiple levels (like all fairytales) and is such a compulsive read, really felt like a new and exciting way of working with tropes of the fantastic.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
For some years now I’ve been engaged in a quiet, long term project to learn more about the flora around me, to greet trees and garden plants and wild things when I know their names and habits; and to ask to be introduced to the green creatures I’m not yet acquainted with and this book was a fierce and loving nudge towards making that process an even more important part of my days. The author is so eloquent on something I’ve been thinking a lot about; the interplay of scientific thinking and intuitive feeling being more powerful that either paradigm alone.
This was the year I discovered Sylvia Townsend Warner, reading three of her books; The Corner that Held Them, Lolly Willowes and Kingdoms of Elfin. I was utterly intrigued by her writing about the supernatural, the sinuous structure of her books that felt utterly fresh to me, the complex morality in her work.
A Ghost in the Throat- Doireann Ní Ghríofa
This book just spoke to me on the deepest level as a new mother, as a writer trying to scribble in the margins of caring for a tiny person, as a woman looking back in history to try to trace the trails of our foremothers’ stories. It’s also beautifully written, researched not just with the writer’s whole intellect but also her heart and soul too, and has a quality of light and empathy that is hard to parallel. One I’ll go back to.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
This was given to my husband as a gift and before he could read it I stole it away to chomp through it myself. The black humour and the unique voice of the narrator felt so thrilling to me. One of my reading goals of 2021 is to read more of her work to appreciate all the different flavours and modes she works in.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
It was a deep pleasure to get lost in this story. There have been a few historical fiction books that have simply swept me away this year, but this one stands out to be for the simple lushness of the writing, the depiction of grief, the beautiful chapter on the arrival of the plague in Stratford upon Avon (a kind of bottle episode at the core of the whole book) and the sense of realigning what we think we think about someone so universal in our culture.
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
This is multi-generational saga done better than I’ve read in ages, the characters wind around each other in encounters both fleeting and fixed and the language is exuberant and beautiful. Recommended to anyone and everyone!