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ALL THE BOOKS I READ in 2020

I read 56 books in 2020. I’ll begin with the three I’ve read in 2021:

After Claude, Iris Owens

Bitter and nasty

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, Phyllis Rose

This was wonderful – really sane and wise and made me think a lot about power in relationships. What kind of partnership do I want? Maybe none?

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

I think a cold and rubbish January is a very nice time to be reading Barbara Pym – novels about quiet bat people, plain little nobodies who notice things and do good works. They’re comforting in an abstract way and also quite tragic. I do hate that they give Barbara Pym novels such awful and sexist front covers. Just because a book is written by a woman does not mean it should have a rubbish cover that makes it look like the kind of book people buy at the airport and then leave on holiday.

In 2020

(rereads in italics, best books in bold)

Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, David Sedaris

Convenience Store Woman, Sakaya Murata

Kudos, Rachel Cusk

this was good but I find all of her work so incredibly depressing that I’m not sure I’ll read anymore. Her way of describing life sucks all of the joy from every possible experience.

Motherhood, Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is one of my favourite writers – Women in Clothes is an incredible book. This was so good to read.

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

Gang Leader for A Day, Sudhir Venkatesh

How to argue with a racist, Adam Rutherford

Shiver, Maggie Stiefvater

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

Attention, Joshua Cohen 

Reading Attention was an experience that made me think; isn’t it incredible that really intelligent people write things down and we get to read them and see how they think? What a joy and a privilege.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh

I read a review of Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel in the LRB where the reviewer called her a high-functioning literary troll. I agree.

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

The Topeka School, Ben Lerner

Later, Paul Lisicky

Me and my friend Z love to read memoirs and this is a lovely memoir/book of thoughts by a writer living in Provincetown during the AIDS epidemic.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan (I reread all 5 Percy Jackson books)

Between You & Me, Mary Norris

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

I can’t believe I read all of War and Peace. I loved the Peace bits and skipped a few of the War parts. The Peace bits are like a good episode of Eastenders except where you just get the sense that the writer has the utmost love, care, and affection for their characters. It is as good as people say it is!

The Princess Diaries (Books 1-10) Meg Cabot

The Mediator (Books 1-6) Meg Cabot

Weather, Jenny Offill

I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan

This is one of the best books I’ve read in ages – I wish I could read it again for the first time. I have never found writing about surfing (a sport my brother loves that I don’t know that much about) so incredibly fascinating and beautiful. Astonishingly good.

Heimat, Nora Krug

Bunny, Mona Awad

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

This is probably the most tragic book I have ever read – but not in a Little Life pain-porn suffering kind of way. Very good.

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

I think Margaret Atwood is a genius and this book is an excellent piece of evidence to back up my point of view.

All about love, bell hooks

How to Fail, Elizabeth Day

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Why I’m not longer talking to white people about race, Reni Eddo-Lodge

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How it’s broken

Oryx & Crake, Margaret Atwood

El camino de Ida, Ricardo Piglia

I read this in Spanish for uni but it was great – all about the Unabomber (kind of).

In the Distance, Hernan Diaz

This fits into one of my favourite genres – it is a Western. Wonderful. I was reading it in the sitting room and kept reading out sentences to my flatmates because they were so good.

The Appointment, Katherina Volckmer

This is both good and short.

Index Cards, Moyra Davey

I read this in one afternoon in Ridley Road Social Club. They had an event in the evening and as I sat there reading it some drunk girls came and sat across from me and asked me how I could concentrate and read for so long. I was with a friend who was listening to records at Hidden Sounds. I loved it and it made me feel like I did when I read Joshua Cohen’s Attention – how nice to be able to see into other people’s brains and think more about what they’ve been thinking about.

The Mothers, Brit Bennett

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the name of the rose, umberto eco, trans. william weaver

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Tom Leonard, Scots Poet, August 1944- December 2018

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Gabriela Mistral, from “Prayer”

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Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness /and give it back to the earth’s own weight; / the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus  (via a-witches-brew)

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There are only so many parallel universes that concern us.     In one, he isn’t dead. In another, you drink light with your hands all winter. There is a universe in which no one is lying emptied in the street as the gas station burns, a universe in which our mothers haven’t learned to wrap their bones in each small grief they’ve found.

Franny Choi, “Introduction to Quantum Theory,” published in The Adroit Journal (via a-witches-brew)

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After a small stillness there is a small stir, after a great stillness, a great stir.

Anne Carson, from The Beauty of the Husband; “Sad Severe Tango Dance Of Love And Death…,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

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WHEN I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. No one will believe this of vast import to the nation.

Pastoral, William Carlos Williams (from Al Que Quiere, 1917)

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Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness /and give it back to the earth’s own weight; / the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke; “Sonnets to Orpheus” (via luthienne)

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The tiny space I occupy is so small compared to the rest of space, where I am not and where things have nothing to do with me; and the amount of time in which I get to live is so insignificant compared to eternity, where I’ve never been and won’t ever be…Yet in this atom, this mathematical point blood circulates, a brain functions and desires something as well…How absurd! What nonsense!

Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Translated by Michael Katz  (via a-witches-brew)

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Thus it transpired that even Berlin could be mysterious. Within the linden's bloom the streetlight winks. A dark and honeyed hush envelops us.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Romanticism is all very well and good, but a wall is a wall, and when there are cracks in it they have to be mended.

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing (trans. Anthea Bell)

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Say, maiden; wilt thou go with me In this strange death of life to be, To live in death and be the same, Without this life or home or name, At once to be and not to be - That was and is not -yet to see Things pass like shadows, and the sky Above, below, around us lie?

John Clare, from “An Invite, To Eternity” (via the-final-sentence)

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You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. And anyway it’s the same old story— a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind.

Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems (via mythaelogy)

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"#if i was to compile a list of my favourite and most formative quotes/poems from this year" umm pls pls do!

okay, a special mention has got to go to “during the impossible age of everyone” by ada limon, which just shook me to the core when i read it. it comes from her collection bright dead things, which is all around incredible, but this poem man… i’m such a sucker for the concept of past generations and arriving where we are now,  how humanity has changed and not-changed to get us here, “i want to try and be terrific, even for an hour” a testament to that, and how every little human thing we do matters like “people have done this before but not us” and it makes me hopeful.

second special mention goes to jeremy radin’s “so i locked myself inside a star for twenty years” and when i read an excerpt of the final stanza i was floored, i was overwhelmed. the last line is so, so much, and the lines before that are even more, “i found the rooms between the violence of comets […] even the sky bent around me” like holy! shit! who writes like that! and then back to the opening line, “touch was absolutely / out of the question” it just fucks me up. i think about this poem nearly every day now. 

there’s this excerpt of an alejandra pizarnik poem which is “to fall like a wounded animal into a place that was made for revelations” and i think emma @agooduniverse sent it to me and said ‘this was you, in canada’ and it was, canada was such a bad experience for me but i got to meet some of the most important people in my life there and nothing can take away from that. to follow on with poetry & canada, my chapbook taurogarchy is the most formative thing i’ve produced, ever; i wrote it twelve days into the new year, just landed in london, ontario and it’s the best thing i’ve ever written, there are so many layers to it and it’s so clever and brilliant (and i’m sort of of the belief i’ll never write anything on that level again, but that’s okay, because i have that)

an abbreviated collection of other quotes:

guillame apollinaire “how slow life is. how violent hope is”

ana božičević, “i want to be the kind of monster you don’t want to fuck”

lucas regazzi, ”the universe is twice as big as we think it is and you’re the only one who made that idea less devastating”

mary oliver, “mostly i want to be kind”

franz kafka, “you misinterpret everything, even the silence”

daedalians, “i heard your laugh in real time”

mehrin s, “god knows all of this”

agooduniverse, “unidentified creatures”

“i am from a place where it does not snow”

“the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts”

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