I began writing these small ‘review of the year’ posts partly because I have always enjoyed summing up and thinking over things that have happened and how they might have changed me, and partly because I found that reading lots of other people’s similar posts - on social media, in newspapers and newsletters - was a brilliant way of finding recommendations. This is the 2021 version, a year in which reading has been my solace and my escape and my brain-rest while the world has been … well, we all know.
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
In May this year I stayed in a renovated medieval inn in Suffolk with my family. It had one of those bookshelves filled with the usual bestselling pulp for you to read in case of rain and finishing everything else and because it did rain and I did indeed finish the other things I’d brought to read, I picked this up. I am gradually becoming the kind of reader who can appreciate Sebald. I am coming to think he is like fine wine or a decent pair of shoes; melancholies which become pleasures with age.
I visited Dunwich with my family, threw stones into the sea with my daughter and we played peekaboo with a passing seal, then put her in her cot for a nap and curled up with Sebald’s thoughts on this once-vital trading port, now sunken beneath the water a mile or more out to sea. To read those characteristic meanders about a part of the world which I have only just begun to call my home, a place I have so far had little ability to walk and wander in, was a gift.
Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan
I just loved this book. The writing was beautiful, but what really felt important to me was the way she pulled together an ensemble cast all tied by something in common; a place, a tenement building in Edinburgh. The novel was like a quilt, different patches that echo and rhyme stitched together to make something beautifully cohesive. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we structure stories and how that forms the way we see the world, how including the more-than-human, objects generally considered inanimate and a sense of collective voices telling a story can crack everything open for us. An honorary mention has to go here to another text published on XR Writers Rebel How to Tell a Story to Save the World by Toby Litt, which talks a lot about screenwriting but is applicable to all stories everywhere in all forms.
Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones)
Tokarczuk is another writer who is spurring me to think about narrative structures and storytelling in deeper, more intricate and possibly nourishing ways. I reviewed her magnificent The Books of Jacob, translated by Jennifer Croft here and in some ways I find these two books to be companions in theme and structures. It’s also of a kind with Luckenbooth in that the writers arrange their characters around a place, which is both specific in its culture and archetypal, a place that sings throughout the ages and you feel is still singing.
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
I read a lot of fantasy this year (which was a complete joy, it always is) and this was the one I’m still thinking about most, months after I finished. It’s the first in an epic fantasy trilogy set in a world inspired by pre-Colombian Mesoamerica which immediately hooked me. I think I’ll always be a sucker for the pseudo-medieval-Europe fantasy world but reading things set in imaginings of other cultures gives me this delicious feeling that they’re all talking to each other in some other world; that the characters of Black Sun could sail to the Mughal-inspired world of Tasha Suri, or battle the djinn of SA Chakraborty’s Daevabad. Now there’s something for me to dream about in 2022!
The first Penelope Fitzgerald novel I read was The Gate of Angels during my MA. I enjoyed it, but didn’t quite know where to place it in my own categories of this-book-is-like-that-one. Perhaps a little like my growing relationship with Sebald, this year I finally understood that Fitzgerald was seeking to write an entirely different book each time, each slim novel standing alone but not lonely. I read The Bookshop, the Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower in the summer and was bewitched by a sense of wit and whimsy that dances on top of and the sharpness of observation in her historical novels which wear their historical world-building details so lightly. Her novels have a spiral feel to them - obsessed as I am becoming with structures - in that they circle around something that is hidden at the core of the book, something its characters might never find and as a reader, you will only find when you are ready.