Another year, another round up of my reading. Every year I don’t think I will be able to read as much as the year before because I’m so busy and yet the books are quite probably the thing that keeps me sane and give me some needed down time.
I’ve read 104 books so far this year! I will confess that there were a few of these (three or four I think) that I did not finish, but I read enough pages of them to feel I’d invested enough of my time so they count, as far as I’m concerned. A breakdown of the books goes as follows:
78 written by women, 26 by men. Five of them were books I read with my daughter at bedtime (I didn’t count the books I’d already read – I only count the ones that were new to me.) 23 were non-fiction and 16 were by Virginia Woolf.
For 2019 was the year of Woolf for me. My reading group chose to read The Waves in March and it’s an incredibly difficult book to read, but perhaps a little easier if you have immersed yourself in her so that you get accustomed to her style. At least that was my hypothesis so I tried it for a month. I read my way through her diaries and, as she wrote a book or an essay or a short story, I read that too. I supplemented it with biographies and critical readings of Woolf. It didn’t make The Waves a lot easier to read, if I’m honest, but I was so glad that I did it. I continued the experiment for longer than a month to get through it all, and I still have her letters to read, as well as five short biographical essays. However when I finished her final diary, knowing she had put it down and walked off to drown, I did miss her so very much. She is such a complicated creature, with some views that are abhorrent and wrong, and yet she writes with passion and anger and such piercing insight into the human condition that you cannot help but like her. She became so real to me this year.
What else this year? I read very little crime – only three crime books. I read poetry – and discovered Mary Oliver, three books by her which I enjoyed very much. I may also be one of the only people I know who didn’t enjoy Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
What are my books of the year then? In no particular order, here are my top 5:
- Home by Amanda Berriman. This is not the kind of book I would have normally have picked up at all, if I hadn’t heard such rave reviews. This may sound like a cliche but I COULDN’T PUT IT DOWN. It’s excellent. Read it, if you haven’t already.
- You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr. A heartbreaking story of empire, intolerance, and violence, brilliantly told by Barr who doesn’t dwell on sentiment or the violent aspects but allows the story to touch you. A book that makes you think twice – about legacy and how we tell stories to ourselves.
- The Overstory by Richard Powers. Yes, it’s long, yes, it’s overwritten in parts but I don’t care. It’s a 600-page Pulitzer winning novel about trees and it made me quite simply want to down all tools, hug trees and devote myself to the overthrow of the capitalist system that is destroying the planet. A big, complicated, beautiful, ambitious glory of a book.
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I had to have at least one of hers in here. Mrs Dalloway is still my favourite but I’d read that before. This was new to me this year and I loved it. I loved how simply she dealt with the gender fluidity, the quirk of having a character live for centuries, and I loved the humour in the book. It was so easy to see that it was a book written in love and out of love and for love, and as a gift to her love.
- Mad Blood Stirring by Simon Mayo. It takes a while to get going but it’s worth it for a slow build up of pace, character and an ultimately satisfying ending. Shakespeare in an all male prison on Dartmoor during the 1812 war between the British and America? Who’d have thought it. But it’s based on a true story and Mayo tells the story well.
I’m going to throw two honourable mentions in here: one for An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn, where a classics professor tries to teach The Odyssey with his elderly irascible father in the class. It’s a true story, very entertaining and with some lovely insight into father-son relationships, as well as teaching me a lot about the Greeks. The other honourable mention was for An American Marriage, the winner of the Women’s Prize, which I thought was EXCELLENT – very real and heartbreaking.
What’s up for next year’s reading? I want to get through a more diverse line up of books, including more non-fiction, as well as books by a wider range of authors. And I’ve vowed to tackle some of the books that have sat unread on my shelf for years – these include The English Patient, A Suitable Boy, Wolf Hall and The Balkan Trilogy.
Susan E Barsby 