I don't really have much to say about 2020. The long list of things I took for granted and now really miss would take much too long to reel off and not achieve anything - I'm sure anyone reading this has their own list and can relate. I'm lucky enough not to know anyone who has died or even been dangerously ill (a few work colleagues out in the community have caught covid, but although they've found it really nasty all are relatively young and seem to be recovering). I still have a job and my health and a roof over my head, and this year I'm counting that as a plus and drawing a line under it.
So on to the books. As usual here is a list of all the books I read this year in alphabetical order:
A Narrow Street - Elliot Paul
A Pocketful of Rye - Agatha Christie
Akenfield - Ronald Blythe
Anybody Can do Anything - Betty MacDonald
Black as He's Painted - Ngaio Marsh
Black Sheep - Susan Hill
Blitz Writing - Inez Holden
Bodies from the Library - Tony Medawar
Business as Usual - Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford
Carbonel - Barbara Sleigh
Clutch of Constables - Ngaio Marsh
Dancers in Mourning - Margery Allingham
Dead Water - Ngaio Marsh
Death at the Dolphin - Ngaio Marsh
Death in High Heels - Christianna Brand
Detection Unlimited - Georgette Heyer
Digging up the Past - Leonard Woolley
Duplicate Death - Georgette Heyer
False Value -Ben Aaronovitch
Few Eggs and No Oranges - Vere Hodgson
Final Curtain - Ngaio Marsh
Fire in the Thatch - E C R Lorac
First Bite - How We Learn to Eat - Bee Wilson
Five Moral Pieces -Umberto Eco
Goodbye Christopher Robin - Ann Thwaite
Hallucinations - Oliver Sacks
Hand in Glove - Ngaio Marsh
How We Eat Now - Bee Wilson
I Spend Therefore I am - Philip Roscoe
In Search of London -
H V Morton
Jaguars and Electric Eels - Alexander Von Humboldt
Journey into Fear - Eric Ambler
Last Ditch - Ngaio Marsh
London - H V Morton
Lulu in Hollywood - Louise Brooks
Maps of Utopia - Paul J James
Mr Campion's Farewell - Mike Ripley
My American - Stella Gibbons
Off With His Head - Ngaio Marsh
On Chapel Sands - Laura Cumming
Onions in the Stew - Betty MacDonald
Opening Night - Ngaio Marsh
Shakespeare's London on Five Groats a Day - Richard Tames
Square Haunting - Francesca Wade
Swing, Brother, Swing - Ngaio Marsh
Tell Me Who I Am Again? - Linda Grant
The Bastille Falls - Simon Schama
The Body - A Guide for Occupants -Bill Bryson
The Case of the Demented Spiv - George Bellairs
The Cherry Tree - Adrian Bell
The Five - Haille Rubenhold
The Language of Cities - Dejan Sudjic
The Magic Apple Tree - Susan Hill
The October Man - Ben Aaronovitch
The Rules of Contagion - Adam Kucharski
The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
The Snow Geese - William Fiennes
The Spirit of London - Paul Cohen-Portheim
The Wealth of Humans - Ryan Avent
Triple Fugue - Osbert Sitwell
When in Rome - Ngaio Marsh
Why Didn't they Ask Evans? - Agatha Christie
Picking the best is more difficult. I'm experiencing a strange doppler effect with the books I read at the beginning of the year before lockdown. As if they were longer ago, further away, or at a different frequency, to the books I've read since mid-March. It's making it very hard to compare them.
Favourites: I remember loving The Language of Cities by Dejan Sudjic and Akenfield by Ronald Blythe, although because of this odd 'before and after' I'm not feeling it now. The latest Ben Aaronovitch, False Value, was also very solid and entertaining. The best since Broken Homes I think, and I've liked them all.
The Five by Haille Rubenhold is one of those books you want to press on people, not only for the way it challenges the myths that have built up around Jack the Ripper and the way his victims have been sidelined and dismissed, but also as an antidote to some of the wider myths about that era - we see so many happy pictures of the jubilee year, for example, and there's a narrative of a golden age that should come with a health warning.
Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler ratcheted up the tension around a very ordinary man whose expertise just happens to be inconvenient to some very nasty people in a great way, and A Narrow Street (also known as The Last Time I Saw Paris) was desperately sad as we see France swallowed up by politics and war through the microcosm of the street Elliot Paul was living on in the 30s.
Best book of the year for me? Probably A Narrow Street. In another mood it might be The Five.
I also almost managed to complete my Ngaio Marsh reread (three books to go) and successfully blogged them, so I'm pleased about that. Next year I intend to do my 'reading the 80s' project again, starting mid-January to mid-February with 1980 - and of course if anyone reading this post would like to join in please do.
and..
Happy New Year.
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