Memorable Reads of 2020
Fiction
J.L. Carr, A Month In the Country. People have been telling me for almost 40 years that I need to read this gorgeous, spare, emotionally rich novel, about an art restorer working in a country church in England one summer after World War I. Turns out all those people were right.
Emma Donoghue, Akin. Emma Donoghue is one of a handful of writers who I follow faithfully. I’m very much looking forward to reading her latest, The Pull of the Stars, set in Ireland during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Donoghue handles historical and contemporary fiction with equal aplomb and Akin is a fine example of how she brings a keen observer’s eye to the latter.
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend. I’ll admit that it took the TV series to get me to finally try this, after so many people had recommended it to me.
Jane Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter. This is one I picked up at a used book sale and was awfully glad I did.
James McBride, Deacon King Kong. James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird was one of my best reads of a few years ago. This one’s even better.
Colum McCann, Apeirogon. Deeply moving and vitally important.
Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light. The third and final volume of Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy takes a more leisurely pace, yet still kept me turning pages. It will be interesting to see if she wins a third Booker Prize for this. It’s certainly one of the great literary achievements of our time.
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet. I was blown away by Maggie O’Farrell’s previous book of essays, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death. This new novel also deals with issues of mortality and how one man, William Shakespeare, channeled his grief to create something immortal. But the standout character here is Shakespeare’s wife, who O’Farrell brings to such vivid life that her grief becomes ours, too. Winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize For Fiction and deservedly so.
Stewart O’Nan, Last Night At the Lobster. You can read this in one sitting, and that may, in fact, be the best way to read it, as all the action takes place in a single evening. But the characters and the situation linger in the mind for days.
Gary Romain, The Kites. This was a present from a good friend and fellow ardent bibliophile. One of those instances of trusting the giver. A World War II coming of age story, mostly set in rural France.
Anne Tyler, Vinegar Girl. I haven’t loved everything I’ve read of these Hogarth Shakespeare retellings of the plays. Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time, her take on The Winter’s Tale was quite good, but I struggled with some of the others. This one may be the best of the bunch and it came as a surprise to me because The Taming of the Shrew, on which this is based, is probably my least favorite play by the Bard. But unlike the play this book is actually very funny and humane.
Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers. I’ve been on a bit of a Jane Urquhart kick these last few years, ever since reading The Night Stages and I’m feeling a bit wistful now because I’m all caught up with no more novels to read. This was one of my faves.
Jess Walter, The Cold Millions. An essay by Nick Hornby made me curious enough about Jess Walter to try his novel, Citizen Vince, and I’m certainly glad I did. It remains a favorite of mine. The Cold Millions is his first new novel since the bestselling Beautiful Ruins.
P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters and The Inimitable Jeeves. A hundred years on, Bertie and Jeeves can still make me laugh out loud.
C. Pam Zhang, How Much Of These Hills Is Gold. A hallucinatory Western, full of imagery that will stay with me for a very long time.
Non Fiction.
Pierre Berton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885. C’mon, it’s Pierre Berton, of course it’s going to be good.
Richard Fortey, Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum.
Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu. Loved the book almost as much as I dislike the title.
Dan Jones, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors. Finally answers that age old question, Did the Two-doors come to power in a coupe? Were they ultimately ousted because someone decided they needed a more family friendly vehicle?
John Lahr, Honky Tonk Parade and Show And Tell. Two collections of his New Yorker profiles.
David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree. A family memoir, a war story and a good chunk of Newfoundland history, told by a writer who certainly knows how to tell a tale. Just read it. It’s sooooo good!
Charles G. Mann, 1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created. Like it’s predecessor, 1491, this might just as easily have been subtitled Why Pretty Much Everything You Thought You Knew About the Discovery and Settlement of the Americas by Non-Natives Is Wrong. Mann is a wonderful writer and, in addition to all the fascinating, shocking and appalling information presented here, it’s full of factoids such as this one: there were no earthworms in the Americas prior to the Columbian exchange, as Mann terms the beginnings of Globalization in the late 15th century. You probably knew the Europeans introduced horses to the Americas but who knew earthworms?
Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist. This beautifully illustrated book starts out as an appreciation of a particularly dedicated scientist but the more Miller reveals about him and his work the more we see that what he believed came to outweigh what he knew and lead to shocking and deadly consequences.
Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism. I was inspired by a visit to Lilly Dale last year and by Pierre Berton’s brilliant book, The Arctic Grail, to learn more about the American Spiritualism movement and the two girls who gave birth to it. Berton devotes a large chunk of his book to the story of Elisha Kent Kane, an Arctic explorer who fell in love with Maggie Fox, even though he disapproved of her work as a Medium. The two may have married, just before his last Arctic voyage, though his family vehemently denied it. It’s a complicated story with a sad ending and a beginning still wrapped in a bit of mystery. What it seems to come down to is one of the earliest versions of a very American tale: a pursuit of of celebrity that leads to exploitation and unhappiness,
James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life. All you ever wanted to know about the life of a Lake District shepherd but also some very wise words about life in general.