What did you read in 2020?

+ Michelle Paver - Wakenhyrst

terrible year for reading, in what i thought would be a good year. factors:

• I thought covid lockdowns would be a positive space for productive thinking, reading and writing, and it started out that way but i got into bad habits, and it was like previous years but worse
• binge reading, comfort re-reading, unfinished books, relatively poor engagement with the books i did read
• shying away from emotional engagement with books because i found it too hard to unlock that area of myself. this meant i read a load of garbage basically

XX - Angela Chadwick (won an award, useful in that it made me realise I *really* don't like this sort of fiction)
All the Agatha Christie Poirots
All the Agatha Christie Miss Marples
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - JLC (reread)
A Perfect Spy - JLC (reread)
The Honourable Schoolboy - JLC (bad not good)
Mordew - Alex Pheby (a complicated indifference and mild dislike, also combined with the fact that the last book i really disliked was also galley beggar press made me wonder whether they've got a house style that i don't like. of this sort of book, reading Gormenghast for the world building and Mason and Dixon for the style. Oddly like reading a computer game at times. Not entirely without interest).
Reinhardt's Garden - Mark Haber (did not like)
Infinite Detail - Tim Maughan (liked mildly)
An Indifference of Birds - Richard Smyth (sort of liked i guess)
Theory of Bastards - Audrey Schulman (enjoyed but then ran out of interest)
The Four Books - Yan Lianke (struggled with but it's an interesting perspective on chinese history, and an interesting set of aesthetic and storytelling choices)
We Are Made of Diamond Stuff - Isabel Waidner (enjoyed, it was better than better books, fluid, interested in the scutty side of UK, sexually mutable)
The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassim Taleb (a weird brittle, bombastic man, this book provides a lot of sensible thinking around downside risk and not being stupidly scientistic about stuff. Taleb insistent, not without a certain amount of charm for an essentially charmless man, on 'Levantine Philosophy' as a thing.
The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi (after a reading a load of business type books this organic science fiction was like taking acid, and though that initial feeling wore off, and i got a bit bored, it remains an interesting portrayal of a city under siege and no characters really being able to fulfil their aims - agency is an interesting question in it. interesting that Bacigalupi regularly struggled writing this. It shows.)
Dune 1-3 - Frank Herbert (re-read)
The War of the Poor - Eric Vuillard (epistemically weird in the same vein, but much less good imo than Order of the Day. annoyingly thought provoking though with some good sentences and thoughts).
Anthony Price Stuff from Our Man in Camelot up to War Game. (all re-reads, didn't quite get to the '44 Vintage, a very weird somewhat pointless book. price's characters are all terrifically Tory, and like agatha christie's all go on about fucking tax the whole time).
Hag's Nook - John Dickson Carr (reread for about the 1000th time, total comfort reading)
Continued reading Jen Calleja, I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For (really enjoyed these short stories and looking forward to seeing more - believe there's a novel out this year)
The Liar's Dictionary - Eley Williams (oddly disappointing. lightweight, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. clearly a love letter to her partner, also nnabt. didn't enjoy it half as much as her short stories, but wondered if this is because i approached with the wrong expectations. still fun enough if you're looking for a light bagatelle. also wonder - see engagement point above - whether i missed some depths).
Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything (really good book on creating syllabuses, and how to learn and teach from them)
Exhalation - Ted Chiang (enjoyed these. right up my wheelhouse, so to speak. initially thought they might be a bit techbro, but have genuine emotional content and insight. very good).
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee (also enjoyed these essays - still interested to know why the table is not the table doesn't like him).
Because Internet: Understanding How Language Is Changing - Gretchen McCulloch (a relatively vanilla but interesting analysis of language usage on the internet and over the history of the internet. could have been terrible but is a good, clear set of thoughts about how our communications adapt to digital platforms and capabilities).
The Art and Craft of Feature Writing - William Blundell (almost as enjoyable reading the excerpts from pieces that are examples here as Blundell's thinking)
Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
Covering McKellen: An Understudy's Tale - David Weston (an entertaining enough luvvie account of a disastrous world tour under Trevor Nunn of Lear, with Ian McKellen. Written by his understudy.)
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Tuchman (terrible theory behind it, but the general accounts of history are ok enough).
Like - AE Stallings (Curates egg of a poetry collection. some stuff very good indeed, some stuff seemed facile, but i'm terribly unpracticed at reading poetry and i may be approaching it a bit clumsily)
Against the Gods: The remarkable story of risk - Peter Bernstein (good)
The Story of the Stone vol 1 - Cao Xueqin (introduction, plus first book, currently a dnf but will be picking up later this year i hope)
Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain - Robert Protherough (dnf, part of my 'faster u fuckaz' obsession. this guy is v anti management bullshit and bullshit jobs, and tbh i'm not sure i agree and some of the tone these days is quite tedious imo, may write up further in thread)
The Accursed Share vol 1 - Georges Bataille (dnf, but keen to pick this up again, very enjoyable slightly ludicrous introduction, French theory at its finest - wild and boundary shifting assertions totally free of evidence. pure music to my ears)
How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking About Numbers - Tim Harford (a boring boring bastard imo, but sometimes right, and it's just about worth reading these things for #epistemic_health reasons)
Doctor Who: Day of the Doctor - Steven Moffat (almost unreadable in points of style, almost hysterical, immensely jarring, and totally incomprehensible to the extent that it replicated the experience of reading when seriously drunk. explained a lot about the tone of the TV programmes - tho i think moffat and indeed this episode is good not bad. dnf)
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (terrible awful garbage, maybe useful tips)
Clean: A Story of Addiction, Recovery and the Removal of Stubborn Stains - Michele Kirsch (really very good - funny and moving)
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet Malcolm (really excellent, nuanced approach of biography, death, testimony and memory)

sure there was more bits, stray fragments etc, but this covers it more or less i think

oh, the introduction and general content of Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food is wonderful.

oh and

Small Lives - Pierre Michon electrified me after a period of very tedious reading, reminding me the extraordinary perception and depths imaginative writing can have, really one of the most masterly writers there is at the moment. but i was so overcome with the intensity and richness of it, liking fotheringham-thomas, i had to put it down. it was like i was on acid, i was just going 'wow, this is just wow, man, you can see *everything*, and each word and sentence was mind-blowing with the consequence i just had to put it down because it was so full. last had this experience with Leskov. will definitely return this year for a less precious reading.

ledge! love that you liked lud-in-the-mist. what did you think of mrs palfrey at the Claremont? maybe you have already covered these things in the what are you reading thread. i've only been an intermittent visitor this year.

similarly if you posted on jocelyn brooke, no lime tangier, be interested to see what you thought.

Fizzles, tbh, it's just not my thing, but I also tend to have an issue with most mainstream queer stuff. It's just too middle class and polite for me.

(I also think he's a grifter).

on that subject, bit surprised to see no mention of real life by brandon taylor on anyone's list. i read it and thought it was very good on lab-based graduate school, with which i am tragically familiar, but was less sure about the relationship stuff.

Mrs Palfrey was fine, I have nothing to say against it and it had its moments but I couldn't really get on the same wavelength - I wonder if I have something of a blind spot for mid/mid-late female british lit fic given similar experiences with Pym, Lessing, Murdoch, even (gasp) Spark.

I bumped the 1926 poll thread hoping for your thoughts on lud-in-the-mist: Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1926

ah, so you did. will respond - agree on the 'fairy fruit as hard drug' bit though.

Similar to other weird preferences, I tend to shy away from "blistering coming of age story" hyperbole and stuff that's approved by the NY Times, at least as regards fiction. I find what passes for "mainstream" literary fiction these days to just bore me.

Non-fiction and memoirs? Different story, for some reason. I love and teach Kiese Laymon's "Heavy" all the time, for example.

Fizzles, tbh, it's just not my thing, but I also tend to have an issue with most mainstream queer stuff. It's just too middle class and polite for me.

(I also think he's a grifter).

for some reason i wanted to use the phrase “performative touchstones” wrt the grifter point - something about v neatly doing things that will earn gold stars. not fully formed.

I mean, Glück is nowhere near as well-known as he should be. Chee provides a blurb here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/margery-kempe?variant=29087445024820

That's the kind of thing I really love, Bob is an all-time hero and lovely person.

I think one of the things I dislike about Chee is that he basically learned everything from New Narrative and packaged it in a more marketable way, and there are some New Narrative people who should be much better known.