2020: A Year’s Reading

Taking part in communal reads on Twitter turned out to be one antidote to the isolation of lockdown. The first was Robert Musil’s hefty modernist novel The Man Without Qualities, which is incomplete, and totally loses balance when a new character is introduced after 725 pages. I loved it, from start to abrupt halt on page 1130. I went on to communal read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, The Tunnel by William Gass, Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (already one of my favourite books), and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The Tunnel was a battle made easier by having others to share it with. I didn’t get on with The Turn of the Screw at all. 

In January, I listened to the audiobook of John le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field, affectingly narrated by the author.  In March I read Jan Morris short but poignant A Writer’s House in Wales. And as I write, I’m midway through Barry Lopez’s Horizon, which I’d been intending to read for months.  We lost all three of these great writers at the end of 2020, just when we needed them most. 

We also lost Alison Lurie in December. Although American, her novels seem to fit more comfortably into the British tradition, with echoes of David Lodge’s campus comedies. But that’s to sell her short – her voice is strong and distinctive. Similarly, Ivy Compton-Burnett ploughed her own furrow. In later photographs she looks terrifyingly severe, yet her work is laced with humour, and is utterly unmistakeable. 

I’d read plenty of Philip Roth before and after his death in 2018. With Blake Bailey’s anticipated biography due in 2021, I set myself the task of filling in the gaps. Many of the gaps turned out to be Essential Roth. I was particularly blown away by The Counterlife and Nemesis. 

As in previous years, I tried to tick off a classic or two every month. Moby-Dick was one of the highlights; far from the fusty tome I expected. I was already so familiar with the book, I’d wondered if it was worth devoting the time to. Of course it was. Similarly, I thought I already had Kafka pretty much covered, despite never having read him. Kafkaesque turned out to be much a more nuanced concept than I’d presumed. I went on to read Benjamin Balint’s engaging account of the prolonged battle over Kafka’s legacy. Truly Kafkaesque. 

Of the 2020 publications I read, I especially enjoyed Maggie O’Farrell’s immersive Hamnet, and Cary Davies’s The Mission House. Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies, which begins with a group of friends travelling  to Manchester in the 1980s for a gig, especially connected with me – I did exactly that in 1985. I even went to one of the venues featured, and like O’Hagan’s characters I made no provision for accommodation.

It’s difficult to single out one book from the 161 I read this year. Many are still settling, and it’s too soon to arrange them in any kind of order. However, the book that surprised me the most was probably Jan Mooallem’s This is Chance! I’ve been to Alaska several times (below, on the Mendenhall Glacier in 1995), and so I was already well aware of the devastating 1964 Anchorage earthquake –  at 9.2, the second largest ever recorded. Mooallem’s inspired choice was to frame the story in structural elements borrowed from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (which was being staged at an Anchorage theatre at the time), and to focus on one person in particular, Genie Chance, a local radio reporter.  In doing so, he pushes the bounds of non-fiction. It’s my book of the year.

 

AB – Audiobook

R – Reread

JAN

1. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
2. Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Jozef Czapski
3. Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette
4. Think, Write, Speak by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
6. Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré (AB)
7. Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg
8. John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds by Eileen Warburton
9. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles (AB)
10. Lies of Silence by Brian Moore
11. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (AB)
12. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
13. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (AB)
14. The Military Orchid by Jocelyn Brooke
15. My Struggle 4: Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard (AB)
16. Detective Story by Imre Kertesz

FEB

17. Elephantoms by Lyall Watson
18. My Struggle 3: Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard (AB)
19. Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton (R)
20. The Peregrine by JA Baker (AB)
21. Weather by Jenny Offill
22. Middle England by Jonathan Coe (AB)
23. The Flag by Robert Shaw
24. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (AB)
25. The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing (R)
26. A Certain Curve of Horn by John Frederick Walker
27. Independence Square by AD Miller
28. The Snow was Dirty by Georges Simenon (AB)

MARCH

29. Ahab’s Rolling Sea by Richard J King
30. Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd (AB)
31. The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes
32. Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (AB)
33. You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr
34. Homo Faber by Max Frisch
35. My Struggle 6: The End by Karl Ove Knausgaard (AB)
36. Scenes from a Childhood by Jon Fosse
37. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
38. A Writer’s House in Wales by Jan Morris
39. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
40. The Last Resort by Alison Lurie

APRIL

41. The Inheritors by William Golding (AB)
42. The Bass Saxophone by Josef Skvorecky
43. Who was Changed and Who was Dead by Barbara Comyns
44. Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig (AB)
45. A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry
46. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (AB)
47. The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
48. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (AB)
49. Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov (R) (AB)
50. Journal of a Disappointed Man by WNP Barbellion
51. Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Maxim Leo
52. The World According to Garp by John Irving (R) (AB)
53. Yesterday Came Suddenly: An Autobiography by Francis King
54. The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol (R) (AB)
55. A Heritage and its History by Ivy Compton-Burnett
56. The Counterlife by Philip Roth (AB)

MAY

57. Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov
58. The Needle by Francis King
59. Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler (AB)
60. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (AB)
61. The Doll by Ismail Kadare
62. Avalanche by Julia Leigh
63. The Edge of Darkness by John Prebble
64. The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth (AB)
65. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (R) (AB)
66. Disquiet by Julia Leigh
67. Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth (AB)
68. Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido
69. Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth (AB)
70. Roth Unbound: A Writer and his Books by Claudia Roth Pierpont
71. The Prague Orgy by Philip Roth (AB)
72. The Trial (Restored Text) by Franz Kafka (AB)
73. The Natural by Bernard Malamud (AB)
74. The Castle (Restored Text) by Franz Kafka (AB)
75. Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen

JUNE

76. Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor
77. The Humbling by Philip Roth (AB)
78. Kafka’s Last Trial by Benjamin Balint
79. They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (AB)
80. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
81. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (AB)
82. Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith (AB)
83. Nemesis by Philip Roth (AB)
84. Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen
85. The Great American Novel by Philip Roth (AB)
86. Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
87. The Tunnel by William Gass
88. Indignation by Philip Roth (AB)
89. Actress by Anne Enright (AB)

JULY

90. True Grit by Charles Portis
91. The Mating Season by PG Wodehouse (AB)
92. The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
93. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (R)
94. A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson
95. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
96. Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (AB)
97. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (AB)
98. The Glory Game by Hunter Davies
99. Operation Shylock by Philip Roth
100. The Smell of Football by Mick ‘Baz’ Rathbone
101. Trilobites & Other Stories by Breece D’J Pancake

AUGUST

102. Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson
103. A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
104. Apeirogon by Colum McCann (AB)
105. A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea
106. Apartment by Teddy Wayne
107. Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith (AB)
108. Silence by Shusaku Endo
109. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (AB)
110. Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino
111. Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson
112. The Mission House by Carys Davies
113. Summer by Ali Smith

SEPTEMBER

114. Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones
115. Echo on the Bay by Masatsugu Ono
116. Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard (AB)
117. Sudden Traveller by Sarah Hall
118. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (AB)
119. Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan
120. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (AB)
121. Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell (AB)
122. The Plotters by Un-Su Kim
123. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (AB)

OCTOBER

124. The Facts by Philip Roth (AB)
125. Kim JiYoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo (AB)
126. New York Stories by John O’Hara (AB)
127. Elders and Betters by Ivy Compton-Burnett
128. Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara (AB)
129. Interior, Chinatown by Charles Yu (AB)
130. BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara (AB)
131. The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (AB)
132. The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy
133. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (AB)
134. Ex Libris by Michiko Kakutani
135. Love by Roddy Doyle (AB)
136. Snow by John Banville (AB)

NOVEMBER

137. How’s the Pain? By Pascal Garnier
138. The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies (AB)
139. At Night the Blood is Black by David Diop
140. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies (AB)
141. Prefecture D by Hideo Yokoyama
142. Friend by Paek Nam-Nyong
143. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (AB)
144. The Manticore by Robertson Davies (AB)
145. World of Wonders by Robertson Davies (AB)
146. Stillicide by Cynan Jones
147. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (AB)
148. A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

DECEMBER

149. A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma (AB)
150. Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son by Adam Hochschild
151. The Dying Animal by Philip Roth (AB)
152. Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
153. Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley (AB)
154. This is Chance! By Jon Mooallem
155. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (R) (AB)
156. The End of the Moment We Had by Toshiki Okada
157. My Life as a Man by Philip Roth (AB)
158. Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck
159. A Perfect Spy by John le Carré (AB)
160. Horizon by Barry Lopez (AB)
161. Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene by Richard Greene