2020 - Best of the Books

 

A year in books

Well what a year 2020 ended up being. It started so well with some great plays (and accompanying days out in London) and then we just managed to have our whole holiday before flights were cancelled and travel banned. Our holiday seems such a distant thing now that I have to pinch myself hard to remember that it was only 10 months ago...

We came back from holiday and instantly started working from home, due to having returned from (at that time) a higher risk area. I'm not sure I'd have believed you if you'd said that this would continue for the rest of the year, and then well into 2021. It has been 44 weeks since I was 'in the office' but as I am lucky enough to still have a job, and one that I can do from home I am not complaining about this.

Not being furloughed (and indeed working my hours over 5 days not 3), plus spending more time outside means that I didn't really increase the amount of time I spent reading. Oh and like a lot of people my concentration span has been as variable as the tiering system!

Not many books stuck out for me this year as being ones I had to shout about to all and sundry (except Leonard and Hungry Paul) and I did have to go through my reading journal a couple of times to get this list, but for what it is worth...

Top Fiction (in no specific order)

• The Cat and The City by Nick Bradley (Atlantic Books)
• The Autumn of the Ace by Louis de Bernieres (Vintage)
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (Penguin)
• The Umbrella Mouse to the Rescue by Anna Fargher (Macmillan Children's Books)
• Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hessian (Bluemoose Books)
• The Readers' Room by Anotoine Laurain, trans. Aitkins, Boyce & Mackintosh (Gallic Books)
• A Burning by Megha Majumdar (Scribner Books)
• After the War by Tom Palmer (Barrington Stoke)
• The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, trans. Philip Gabriel (Transworld)
• The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina, trans. Lucy Rand (Manilla Press)

Fracture by Andres Neuman, trans. Caistor & Garcia (Granta) just missed the cut too.

From this list I can see that fiction set in Japan was a common thread to my reading with 4 of these 11 set wholly or partially there. I'm also pleased to see that translated fiction features so much (4) along with independently published titles (5) and that two children's books made the list.

Non fiction (in no specific order)

• Rewild Yourself by Simon Barnes (Simon and Schuster)
• One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake (Harper Collins)
• Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem (Bloomsbury)
• Limitless by Tim Peake (Cornerstone)
• Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Pan Macmillan)

The Biscuit by Lizzie Collingwood just missed out on the top 5 here.

My best re-read of the year was Victoria Hislop's The Island and the novella One August Night was  in my top 20 fiction reads.

The book that I read that I can't wait to talk about more is Winter in Tabriz by Sheila Llewellyn and I think that the book I am most eagerly awaiting is The Swallows' Flight by Hilary McKay.

Overall not a bad year for books, and here's hoping that 2021 is a good reading year - it has started well as I've begun the highly acclaimed The Missing Half  and have Where the Crawdads Sing up after that.

I haven't really set myself any specific reading goals as I so rarely manage to reach them but I will continue to name the translator and the publisher in reviews as well as looking to continue reading more independently published books as these two targets really do expand my reading incredibly.