Thursday 31 December 2020

Chilly Innit? (A New Year Post)

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


It hasn't been a great or a terrible reading year - 62 books, half fiction and half non fiction, 27 by men and 35 by women. 

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.  

Paddington by the Canal





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