I read a nice and tidy 50 books this year. I usually rely on my commute to get a lot of reading done, so given that I was last in the office in mid March, I’m pretty pleased with getting to that figure. After the first couple of months of working from home I set myself some better routines, and got into the habit of reading a bit over breakfast and whenever I could take a lunch break. The summer months also helped and I spent a lot of time sat in my garden with books (not much else to do). They weren’t even short books – the page count comes in at about 18,000 with an average of just over 50 pages a day. So somehow I’ve actually managed to read slightly more than last year (46 books, 41pages per day) even without having 2 hours to kill each day on the tube.
The state of ‘all this’ has influenced the books I’ve read. I’ve deliberately sought out escapist books, avoiding anything that’s “heartfelt” or “moving”. Thrillers have to be fairly disposable, and I avoided anything apocalyptic like the plague (pardon the pun). I actually thought I’d end up re-reading books I knew would be ‘safe’, but in fact only re-read 2 books.
I really missed bookshops and the library this year though. I just don’t enjoy browsing for books online as much as in person. I would probably have read more on kindle, but it took me a long time to replace the one that had been stolen at the end of last year, so I only read 13 books on it. Eight of those were through the Kindle Unlimited, which continues to be worth a month long subscription every now and then, but lacking enough quality stuff to make it permanently worth while.
I seem to have read a lot more ‘new’ books than usual. Last year I only read 4 books (9%) from the same year, and a further 9 books (20%) from the previous year. But this year I’ve had 18 books (36%) from 2020 and 14 (28%) from last year, and in fact 86% of the books I read were from the 2010s.
The 50 books were spread over 41 authors (including 2 sets of pairs writing together), and I’m pleased that 23 (59%) of them were female. Also 21 (54%) of them were new authors which I’m quite pleased with. Less impressively though only 3 of the authors were from somewhere other than UK or USA.
Non-fiction
Of the fifty books in total, only eight of them (16%) were non-fiction, that’s higher in number and percentage than last year (6 books, 13%) but still seems weirdly low to me as I usually try to have a non-fiction and a fiction on the go at the same time and I was sure I’d read more. Given the small sample set there’s not a huge amount of range, and looking at them now five of them have a feminist theme running through them. That wasn’t a deliberate choice, and in fact I usually gently avoid outright feminist works. But most of these books comes at the topics of discrimination and bias obliquely through history, psychology, business management or statistics.
My favourite non-fiction book was Agrippina by Emma Southon. I studied classical history and literature to A-Level and even elements of it through a masters in History of Science and Medicine, but Emma Southon came at the subject I slightly knew from such a completely fresh point of view that it blew me away. She shows how one sided the history telling has been, how biased from a modern and male point of view. And she’s also hilarious, the writing is so natural as if she’s just chatting over the dinner table. Her second book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, isn’t quite as revelatory, but is still fascinating and entertaining.
The other standout for the year was Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, an impeccably researched, challenging and slightly heart breaking book that shows the inherent bias and discrimination in the world of numbers. I also recommend Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed as a great book talking about diversity in an entirely practical and logical way, it’s not about the unfairness or emotional heartbreak, but the practicalities of why businesses, countries and societies do better with greater diversity of all sorts.
The others:
New Fiction:
I read 16 fiction books published this year, including seven hardbacks which is probably a record for me. Most of them were from authors that I’ve read before, and indeed all three of the new reads which I rated outstanding this year were new works from two of my very favourite authors. I not only pre-ordered A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik in hardback, but cleared my weekend to read it immediately and was not disappointed. It’s a really fun read but also has an incredible depth to it, playing with classic tropes and turning them on their head. T Kingfisher somehow managed to produce two absolutely wonderful books that had me utterly charmed from start to finish – Paladin’s Grace and the amazingly named A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (Minor Mage from last year was also very good).
Other favoured authors who didn’t disappoint me with their 2020 publications were Ben Aaronovitch with a slightly more standalone Rivers of London book (False Value), Philip Gwynne Jones with another satisfying crime novel Venetian Gothic and Robert Galbraith’s fifth Cormoron Strike novel Troubled Blood, which is still entertaining, but is too long and therefore just not as good as the previous novels in the series (I reread Lethal White and it’s still outstanding). Richard Osman is a new author, but one of my favourite people, so it’s relieving to be able to say that his debut novel The Thursday Murder Club is a lot of fun, and an absolute hit on the sales charts.
Sadly however I was let down by some authors I’d been eagerly awaiting new books from, weirdly while Kingfisher and Novik can pump out exceptional books every year, some of the authors I’d been waiting longest for were the most disappointing. Ernest Cline (Ready Player 1) and Erin Morgenstern (Night Circus) have both had a lot of years to work, but both Ready Player 2 and
The Starless Sea were underwhelming and at times annoying. Susanna Clarke finally wrote another novel after Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and although Piranesi wasn’t bad, it was still rather underwhelming.
Older books:
None of the older books I described as ‘outstanding’. If I was forced to chose, the standout would probably be The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. At nearly 1000 pages long this is the kind of commitment that I normally avoid, but at least this is a standalone fantasy book rather than the traditional trilogy, so it’s probably shorter than most and it’s a really satisfying page turner that I found flying by and was grateful that I’d bought it online without noticing the thickness.
Other recommendations:
Books to avoid
The worst book I read this year is A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson which is slightly tricky, because it’s certainly not badly written it’s just unpleasant. It spends the whole time focussing on the small sadnesses and disappointments of life and stepping quickly past any joy. And then the ending of it is so brutal and MEAN that it made me absolutely furious and wishing I had never ever opened the book.
In comparison the other books I’d advise avoiding are just not very good and not really worth the time when there are other much better things out there. Neil Gaiman wasted his talent doing a re-telling of Norse Mythology but rather than using his creativity to make it interesting, he just told it absolutely flat as if he were doing an intellectual exercise in merging other people’s versions and wikipedia pages, he should have taken some creative liberties and actually made a proper novel.
Do You Dream of Terra-Two by Temi Oh has a fundamentally interesting idea, good pace and diverse characters, but the details of it are utterly ridiculous and I couldn’t suspend disbelief. Pine by Francine Toon was billed as a chilling thriller and it was stunningly boring. I gave Hilary Matnel another try with the blissfully short The Giant, O’Brien which was hard to read and lacking in a decent story, so I won’t be giving her a third chance no matter how many prizes she wins.
The full list:
Outstanding:
Good:
Middling:
Poor:
Narrative Devices 
Really enjoying reading your content! I have some books to add to my TBR list and after reading your 2020 movies post I have some movies too! Looking forward to checking out this content and more of yours! :)