All

L is for Leacock

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Some of the letters of the alphabet, in this ongoing project, are no-brainers. I already know who ‘M’ is going to be, and I suspect you do too if you read this blog. And I knew who would step forward for L – it had to be my boy Stephen Leacock. Look at that towering pile of Canada’s finest.

How many books do I have by Stephen Leacock?

There are TWENTY-SEVEN Leacock books there, though that does include a couple of ‘best ofs’ that I think replicate content found in the others. I’ve no idea how many books Leacock wrote, and I’ve only actively sought out one of these books – My Discovery of England – relying on serendipity to find the others. He is one of those authors who turns up often, almost always (in this country) in 1910s-30s editions that speak to a popularity he once had.

How many of these have I read?

I have almost no idea. Because so many of them are collections of essays/sketches, the titles don’t always clue you in to their contents. According to my LibraryThing, where I mark whether or not I’ve read a book, I have read 14 of them. But the bulk of my Leacock reading was pre-blog, around 2004-6, so I don’t have a firm recollection of how accurate that is. I still read one every year or two, so I can keep going for a bit.

How did I start reading Stephen Leacock?

I think I was lent some by my aunt, but it’s also possible that I discovered him in the same place I discovered E.M. Delafield – a 1940 volume of sketches called Modern Humour. As I say above, I was on a bit of a blitz of reading him 15 or so years ago, and whenever I pick one up I’m reminded why I enjoy him so much.

General impressions…

What a joyful writer Leacock is. His essays and sketches tend to be ironic or dry, or sometimes openly pastiching some well-known writing of the day, and he has a taste for the surreal that almost always lands on the right side of too far. He is an exemplary judge of that – of being careful with the absurdities to make them still enjoyable. Among the books in that pile are some more serious things, I think, but I’ve only dabbled in them.

When I went to Canada in 2017, I was keen to fill some Leacock gaps – and to visit his house, which was a wonderful experience. It was a novelty to see editions of his works that were printed in the past 70 years, and a couple of the paperbacks up the top of the pile came from that trip. I don’t think Leacock is much read anymore, even in Canada, but he should be.

The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull

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The Murder of My Aunt (British Library Crime Classics): 54: Amazon.co.uk: Richard Hull: 9780712352802: BooksI had a little blogging absence because I had a nasty cold – which I presumed might be Covid, given how everyone seems to have it at the moment, but a zillion tests turned out negative. Just a normal cold! Back to normal winter life!

Anyway, if you’re anything like me then feeling under the weather means you turn to very easy reading. I didn’t have the energy for books where fine writing or depth of character were the focus. So I turned to murder mysteries.

That’s probably unfair, because murder mysteries can certainly have great writing and characters, but it felt like a safe bet for an enjoyable, pacy plot. And the first one up was The Murder of My Aunt (1934) by Richard Hull, which I think I got as a review copy from the British Library in 2018. I was picking more or less at random from my piles of yet-to-be-read British Library Crime Classics, though I do also dimly recall someone recommending this one. If that were you, many thanks.

The novel is told by Edward Powell, a grown man who lives with his Aunt Mildred on the outskirts of a tiny town in Wales. It sounds idyllic, to be honest, but Edward is not a man who appreciates the countryside – still less does he appreciate having his freedoms curtailed by his aunt’s watchful eye, and his finances falling far short of his dreams for himself. Towards the beginning of the novel, they are in a battle over whether or not he will drive into town – which involves his aunt cutting off his petrol supply, and Edward concocting a lie about how he successfully got there nonetheless.

There is something of the Ealing Comedy about this – the stakes are high, but it is all affably ridiculous enough that they don’t seem high. Early on, Edward has decided he should kill his aunt – and the reader goes along for the ride. Murder feels like it’s rather playful here.

And does the aunt deserve it? Well, here’s an example of what annoys Edward so much:

My aunt, after studying the ordnance map with great care, tells me that you have to go up just on six hundred feet, and apparently it is a good deal. I can well believe her, but these figures mean little to me. It is, however, typical of my aunt that she not only possesses many maps showing this revolting country-side in the greatest detail for miles round, but that she can apparently find some pleasure in staring at them for hours on end, ‘reading’ them as she is pleased to say, and producing from memory figures as to the height of every hillock near by.

Frankly, as someone who loathes maps and being forced to look at them, I was fully on Edward’s side at this point.

From here on, he develops various ruses for offing his aunt, and shares them in the novel – which is really a diary of his attempts. Keeping a diary of your murder attempts probably isn’t the wisest move, but we’ll forgive it. As you can tell by the plural ‘attempts’, he isn’t very good at achieving his goal. I shan’t spoil whether or not he was successful, but I will say that The Murder of My Aunt was a delight throughout. Edward reminded me a bit of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, in that he considers himself vastly superior to the people around him – and reveals himself, through his own self-portrait, to be rather more ridiculous than he would like.

It’s not the sort of murder mystery where you are desperate to find out whodunnit – indeed, there is no mystery at all. But it’s a great reading experience, and Hull’s dry touch is perfect.

BookTube Spin #5: What Will I Be Reading?

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I made my list, I checked it twice – and Rick has done the spin.

As you’ll have seen in that video, there are two numbers – the second for those who really want to go for it. I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll definitely be picking up The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill (which a couple of you recommended) with the option of The Twisted Tree by Frank Baker. I guess the spin REALLY wanted me to read about trees.

BookTube Spin #5: My List

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You may well know Rick’s BookTube Spin – pick 20 books, he gives us a number and we have a couple of months to read. Think the Classics Spin but not necessarily classics, and with the addition of lovely Rick:

I did quite well in previous ones, and then last time I made a list of Persephone titles… and read three of them, but not the one the spin selected. Oops! Let’s see if I do better this time.

A mini-project I’ve been considering this year is digging out some of the books I bought/received in 2012 and haven’t read yet. A decade on the shelves seems long enough. Luckily my LibraryThing catalogue tells me when I added things there, so I was able to look through the embarrassingly high number of books I got 10 years ago that are still languishing, and came up with this list of 20 candidates. Believe me, there were a lot more than 20 to choose from…

1. Underfoot in Showbusiness by Helene Hanff
2. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
3. The Ha-ha by Jennifer Dawson
4. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
5. Adele and Co by Dornford Yates
6. The Limit by Ada Leverson
7. The Initials in the Heart by Laurence Whistler
8. The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill
9. Winnowed Wisdom by Stephen Leacock
10. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
11. Down and Out in London and Paris by George Orwell
12. The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
13. The Twisted Tree by Frank Baker
14. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
15. New Moon With The Old by Dodie Smith
16. It Ends With Revelations by Dodie Smith
17. Woman in a Lampshade by Elizabeth Jolley
18. Bachelors Anonymous by P.G. Wodehouse
19. Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
20. Merlin Bay by Richmal Crompton

Any you’re hoping the spin will land on? Any I should dread?

The number will be revealed on Friday, so it’s not too late to make your own list if you want to join in…

Some more recent reads

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Just clearing some books from my pile to be reviewed – and while the blog post is called ‘some more recent reads’, let’s be SUPER lax with what we mean by ‘recent’. A few of these have been waiting for a while… I also find it hard to write about audiobooks because I can’t go back and add quotes, so shall pop a couple into this round-up.

A Countryman’s Winter Notebook by Adrian Bell

This was a review copy from the lovely Slightly Foxed, which I couldn’t find after it first arrived and I later discovered under a pile of things in the kitchen. Note to self: don’t unpack parcels in the kitchen. It’s a collection of Bell’s articles from the Eastern Daily Press, where he wrote a countryside common between 1950 and 1980. I think this collection, published last year, is the first time they’ve been brought together.

I’m not sure how they’ve been organised, but it’s a fun meander through all manner of countryside topics from across the decades. I enjoyed guessing which era I thought it would be from when I started, discovering how accurate I’d been when I turned the page. He writes gently about gardens, farming, the home – it all blurs into a contented, cosy whole. I particularly liked this line:

I think every village has a double population: those who live in it, and those who remember it fondly for having been reared in it, or having stayed in it, or even passed through it adn said, “Here is a place […] where I should like to live if ever I had the chance.”

Mr Fox (2011) by Helen Oyeyemi

I got my book group to read Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, which I’ve had on my shelves ever since it came out – well, a little before, as it was a review copy. Oops, sorry! Anyway, it’s set in the 1930s and it’s about a writer (St John Fox) and the character he has created (Mary Foxe) and their tussle. The boundaries of reality and fiction aren’t so much porous as totally non-existent – the pair start telling each other stories, and Mr Fox really resembles a short story collection more than a novel. Along the way, St John’s real wife begins to get jealous of this illusory woman with whom he becomes obsessed. The stories the two tell each other often seem barely to connect to the main narrative, and the whole thing is an ambitious and slightly confusing tour de force.

I don’t want to suggest limits on anybody’s imagination, but I have to say I prefer Oyeyemi when she has one foot on the ground. Though that doesn’t happen very often. Considering I’ve read all her books, I only *really* love one of them – Boy, Snow, Bird – but always get something out of them. Even if that’s just admiration.

The Spectator Bird (1976) by Wallace Stegner

A few Stegner novels are among the free audiobooks available with Audible Plus, so I downloaded The Spectator Bird, having previously only read his most famous (?) novel Crossing To Safety. It is about a retired literary agent, Joe Allston, who is coming to terms with increasing inactivity and ill health. Not that he is extremely ill – just all the aches and restrictions of getting a bit older, and you can tell 60-something Stegner was aware of the loss of his youngest days.

The short novel is half set in the present day, where Joe and his wife are in amiable, squabbly, grumpy normal life – and half in the past, mostly told through a diary kept 20 years earlier. The diary is about their time in Denmark, and the friendship they had with a Danish countess. It is a sensitively told story, even despite moments of high drama and shocking plot. As mentioned recently, I’m not sure fine writing is a good fit for an audio experience, for me. Whenever I stopped listening to The Spectator Bird, I seemed to forget everything that had passed – but, having said that, I still thought the book good.

The Memory Illusion (2016) by Dr Julia Shaw

But this book worked much better as an audiobook – a non-fiction book about memory, and largely about how bad memory is. Shaw writes about how faulty memory can be, how easy it is to plant false memories in people, the dangers of relying on memories solely in legal cases, and so on. It is a fascinating read/listen, covering all sorts of academic material about memory in a very accessible way. I felt a bit smug, because at least I *know* my memory is terrible.

Yes, it’s also a bit alarming to learn about false memories – and sections on false sexual abuse memories are quite confronting. But if that is content you can cope with, then I really recommend getting hold of this. Get ready to have a lot of things you thought you knew about yourself and the world blown out of the water.

The Last Interview (2016) by Oliver Sacks

My friend Malie got me this back in 2018, and it is a series of interviews with the late, great Oliver Sacks – ‘The Last Interview’ seems to be a series of books, and the small text ‘and other conversations’ on the front gives away that this covers a wide period. Sacks doesn’t seem to have given interviews all that often, and these are all transcripts – often of interviews given on radio. And it’s interesting largely for seeing the range of people Sacks spoke to. All the information in the interviews will be welcome but familiar territory to those of us who’ve read Sacks’ books, so it’s fun to sit back and interpret how Sacks felt about the interviewers. There is one who interrupts him constantly and blithely misinterprets everything…

Well, there we go, a handful of recent reads – all of them good in their own way.

Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm

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Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers eBook : Malcolm, Janet: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle StoreWhen I was two essays into this collection, published in 2013 but collecting pieces from across several decades before, I was certain it would be one of my best books of 2021. The first two essays are among the best non-fiction I’ve ever read.

After that, sadly, it became a bit more run-of-the-mill – but let me take you on that journey.

The title of the collection is also the title of the first essay, and it opens like this:

There are places in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets—these express with particular force the city’s penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure.

Malcolm doesn’t go for sparse descriptions, so this might be off-putting to some. I think it is absolutely wonderful, and I was excited to dive in – to a piece about the artist David Salle. I’m afraid I hadn’t even heard of him. He was presumably a bigger name in 1994, when this essay was first published and before I’d reached double digits – something of an enfant terrible, disrupting art with collages and ‘quotes’ from other artwork and (or was it?) misogyny. He is a fascinating character, though I also imagine anybody that Malcolm meets and writes about is a fascinating character. She has a way of giving the details of a person that make them simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary. She will introduce someone with an unexpected comment on their handshake, or a piece of pottery they have, or how they exemplify a broader type – and they are instantly illuminated in a Malcolm-portrait that isn’t uncharitable but also is completely unsparing. She is never nasty or malicious, she is simply completely unhindered.

In ‘Forty-One False Starts’, though, we don’t just get this introduction once. As the title suggests, we get it 41 times. After a few paragraphs, Malcolm tries a different entrance to the essay. And over and over. Some are short, none are more than a page or two. Each looks at Salle and his work from a different angle – and while none paint a full picture, the composite is like the collages that they discuss. It’s such a brilliant idea for an essay and, more importantly, is brilliantly executed. (You don’t have to get a copy of the book to read it, either: it’s still on the New Yorker website.)

The second essay is almost as excellent. In it, Malcolm meets the photographer Thomas Struth and, in her conversation with him about photographing Queen Elizabeth II, gives us a vivid picture of the man. As usual, the way she conveys the conversations is odd, unexpected, and sublime. (My paperback doesn’t include any pictures, so I spent a lot of time on Google for the essays about artists, looking up the examples discussed.)

Sadly, the reason that Forty-One False Starts didn’t make my Top Books of 2021 is that it also includes a lot of essays where Malcolm doesn’t speak with her subjects. In most cases, admittedly, that is because they’re dead. There are essays on Edith Wharton, Vanessa Bell, Diane Arbus etc. She covers a range of artists and writers – the provenance of the essays isn’t always clear, but I think some must be introductions to books or intended to accompany exhibitions. And they are fine. There’s nothing wrong with her writing. But the spark is gone when Malcolm isn’t conveying conversations she has had.

There are still moments of Malcolm individuality. I loved ‘The Reef has been called Wharton’s most Jamesian novel, but it is merely her least cleverly plotted one’ and, from the Diane Arbus essay, ‘It is a measure of the power Doon wields in the Arbus world that no one dared protect her against saying something so breathtakingly silly in print.’ But they are few and far between.

I should add, there are still a couple of other essays where she is present, and those are wonderful. She is at her gossipy best while finding out the scandals and tantrums behind the magazine Artforum, and there is a great essay about meeting Rosalind Krauss that starts with a fantastic description of her apartment, including this:

But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of ‘good taste’ and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.

But the collection feels so diluted by those other pieces. The person Malcolm writes best about is herself – or, rather, she is brilliant at revealing two people in a conversation, where one of them is her. I would love a collection where she is front and centre alongside her subjects. It flies in the face of received wisdom about how to write an essay about an artist or writer, and it would be terrible in the hands of most essayists – but Malcolm was a genius, and she should be allowed to write her own rules.

As a collection, Forty-One False Starts is uneven. But I think it’s worth getting for the third or so of the essays that are truly extraordinary. Skim the rest.

The Small Room by May Sarton

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When I bought The Small Room (1961), it was because I thought it might be about a house. I’m a simple man: I love books about houses, particularly if this would end up being about a hitherto undiscovered small room in a house. If anybody knows any books like that, lemme know. Well, The Small Room isn’t that, but I found an awful lot to like in it anyway.

I bought the novel on my first trip to the United States in 2013 – more specifically, in a lovely bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sadly, since then the little town has become renowned for the appalling far-right rally that ended in a woman’s death. At the time, it was simply a day out from DC.

I don’t think I’d read any May Sarton books at the time, but it is now my third – after The Magnificent Spinster and The Education of Harriet Hatfield. While I enjoyed both of them, I found the former less memorable than I’d hoped, and the latter very patchy. The Small Room takes us to a setting that is very distinct and probably a recommendation to many of us: a women’s college in New England.

Lucy Winter – surely a coy nod to Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette? – has just started there, and it is her first teaching job. She is young, idealistic, and keen to make a good impression. More than that, she is keen to be a good teacher – in every sense of the word ‘good’.

The girls arrived, and settled like flocks of garrulous starlings, perpetual chatter and perpetual motion. Lucy, looking down from her office on the fourth floor of one of the oldest buildings, compared the campus to a stage where a complicated ballet was being rehearsed. Small groups flowed together and parted; a girl in a blue blazer ran from one building to another; five or six others arranged themselves under an elm, in unconsciously romantic attitudes, a chorus of nymphs. The effect was enhanced by the freshmen’s required red Eton caps, and by the unrequired but almost universal uniform of short pleated skirts and blazers. Looking down on all this casual, yet intimate life from above, Lucy felt lonely and a little scared.

At the centre of the novel are the actions of one student. She is exemplary and feted, and widely regarded as having a promising future that would reflect well on the college. But when Lucy is marking one of her essays, she discovers that it is plagiarised. She feels she has to inform other members of the faculty – and sets in motion a series of actions that affect everybody in the college.

Lucy is a well-drawn and interesting character, partly because Sarton uses her to show that there are not simple choices between wrong and right, and that people might do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa. The girl who plagiarises is also written really interestingly, and reacts in a way that is both believable and unexpected. What stopped me wholeheartedly loving The Small Room is that these two, and perhaps one or two others, are the only nuanced characters in the novel. It’s not that the others are stereotypes, it’s just that Sarton doesn’t spend enough time delineating them and they all (particularly the other teachers and board members) blur into one amorphous mass.

Sarton does make up for this with beautiful, unpredictable writing. Here is one bit I noted down:

Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.

At the heart of The Small Room is a fascinating dilemma, done well and interestingly – with only a few flaws in the way the cast is put together. I don’t think I’ve yet found my perfect Sarton novel, but I think this is my favourite of the three I’ve read so far.

2021: Some Reading Stats

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I’ve posted my Top Books of 2021, and now it’s time to turn my attention to some reading stats – the sort of blog post that so many of us love reading. And as I get older, increasingly a test of memory… I also think I’ve referred to 2020 as ‘last year’ quite a lot, but hopefully you can work out what’s going on.

Number of books read
I read 182 books in 2021, which is comfortably the most I have ever read in a year. In the previous year the total was 147, and the total has hovered around the 150 mark ever since I started living on my own.

Why was it bigger this year? Well, I did do A Novella A Day In November, but I also got more into audiobooks – and let’s not forget that three-month lockdown at the beginning of the year, where I didn’t have much to do.

Male/female writers
126 of those books were written by women, 55 by men, and one book was by a husband and wife team. That means 70% of the books I read were written by women, which has been steadily and unintentionally going up every year. Again, it’s partly because of reading for possible British Library Women Writers titles… but mostly just because those are the books I’m drawn to, I suppose.

Fiction/non-fiction
I read 135 works of fiction – 101 by women – and 47 works of non-fiction. That is a much higher percentage of fiction than usual. Over the past few years, about a third of the books I’ve read are non-fiction, but for some reason I really needed to step out of the real world more in 2021…

Books in translation
Partly because of reading some EUPL prizewinners, I matched my all-time high for books in translation – albeit it’s still only 11 books. There were four from Finnish, including three by Tove Jansson, and the others were from Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Russian, Danish, French, and German.

Re-reads
I re-read 13 books in 2021, and I think every single one of them was either for a podcast, book group, or writing British Library afterwords. I still don’t really re-read just because I want to experience the book again.

Number of audiobooks
This is where things really amped up. In 2020 I listened to eight audiobooks and that was my most ever – and I trounced that with 21 in 2021.

New-to-me authors
Counting these was a bit of a revelation. I only read 64 new-to-me authors this year, meaning that only 35% of the books I read were experiments on new names. It used to be about half, and has been getting lower. Apparently there is some need for dependability in the pandemic, but I do want to think outside the box more in 2022.

Most disappointing book
There were a few disappointments with books by authors I love turning out not to be my cuppa tea. I’d saved Sun City by Tove Jansson for years, but it was definitely her worst book. Even my love for Michael Cunningham couldn’t overrule my distaste for sci-fi in Specimen Days. Oh, and Heritage by Vita SackvilleWest was appalling and showed that she got the zeitgeisty rural novel out of her system early in her writing career, thankfully.

Worst book I read this year
I guess it was also a disappointment, but James Acaster’s Perfect Sound Whatever – an audiobook – was bizarrely bad. It’s about getting obsessed with music from 2016, when Acaster went through an extremely difficult year in 2017. When he was writing about his own life it was funny and insightful and honest. But almost the entire book is descriptions of albums that seem to be unquestioningly copied and pasted from earnest press releases.

Happiest discovery
On the other hand, I have been meaning to read Georgette Heyer for many years, and was always a little nervous that I’d dislike her – given how beloved she is. But thankfully my first experience, with April Lady, was a total delight. Phew!

Favourite book-related moment
It’s not a reading stat, but my happiest book moment of the year was being asked to be a guest on the Backlisted podcast, discussing the brilliant Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, which was just as brilliant on a re-read. A close second is, of course, seeing more British Library Women Writers books come back into print, and watching as people discover them.

Persephones
I’ve had a fairly non-rigorous goal to read more of the Persephones on my shelves. In 2020 I only managed one, but in 2021 I read One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby, Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell, and Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley.

Most failed challenge
I decided I’d read all of Angela Thirkell’s novels in order. Not all this year, of course, but I’d make a good start. Maybe one a month?? Well… I read one.

Most expensive book
While I got Infused by Henrietta Lovell as a gift from my friend Lorna, I have a feeling it’ll end up being my most expensive read – because this non-fic book about tea has persuaded me to ditch the teabags and get into loose leaf tea. At least for a bit.

Names in book titles
Ever since doing Project Names, I’ve been intrigued to see how often names turn up in book titles if I’m not deliberately seeking them out. In 2020 it was 20 – in 2021, it was 35. They pop up a lot.

Animals in book titles
I always forget to keep an eye out for this during the year… but they appear whether I’m looking or not. The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender, The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams, Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić, Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins, Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, Bear by Marian Engel, A Wild Swan and other stories by Michael Cunningham, The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden, Particularly Cats by Doris Lessing, and The Elephants in My Backyard by Rajeev Surandra. I think that must be a record – though only a handful of them actually had prominent animals.

Food in book titles
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkley, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai, One Apple Tasted by Josa Young – and, at the other end of the spectrum, Thank Heaven Fasting by E.M. Delafield.

Numbers in book titles
In ascending order, One Apple Tasted by Josa Young, One Year’s Time by Angela Milne, One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L’Engle, Three To See The King by Magnus Mills, I Ordered A Table For Six by Noel Streatfeild, Thirteen Guests by J Jefferson Farjeon, Twenty-Five by Beverley Nichols, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A woman’s life keeps restarting, a door is a portal between countries, a murderous doppelgänger turns up, a boat rolls through a town, a railway runs underneath a country, an iceberg falls from the sky, a man gets struck by lightning multiple times, a man and a boy swap bodies, a collection of Victoriana magically appears in a front garden, butterflies fly from a patterned lampshade, a carpenter is swallowed by a whale, a cult starts in a quarry, lichen promises prolonged youth, an invisible wall entraps a woman, a man moves into a tree, a baby is left in a box, a woman falls in love with a bear, a robot quotes Whitman, a dance hall disappears from a city and reappears on a Scottish island, and the main characters turn out to have been dead the whole time.

Top Books of 2021

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I always wait until New Year’s Eve to compile my best reads of the year, because you never know when something brilliant will sneak in, do you? As it happens, this year has had lots of Very Good Reads, and even some Very, Very Good Reads, but nothing that is likely to enter my all-time favourites pantheon. So I love all twelve of the books on the list, and a good many that didn’t quite make it, but I didn’t have a life-changing book this year.

But, as I say, these 12 books are all wonderful! As usual, I have excluded re-reads and can only include an author once. The links take you back to the original reviews…

12. The Familiar Faces by David Garnett (1962)

I haven’t read the first two volumes of Garnett’s autobiography – I went straight for the one where he becomes an author, because that is the stage of his life I am most interested in. As it happens, and as the title perhaps implies, this is more about portraits of people he knew, often very gossipy, including Dorothy Edwards, T.E. Lawrence, and George Moore.

11. The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman (2021)

When my friends publish books, I try to read them – or at least buy them. But it’s no hardship when they are as brilliant as my friend Monty’s. His previous book was about the skin; this one, on pain, is even better. Which four-letter word ending in ‘in’ will be next?? Vein? Shin?? Anyway, Monty writes about a wide range of issues to do with pain that are fascinating and, above all, compassionate. I don’t read much popular science, but if more of it was like this then I would.

10. Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell (1928)

Rachel and I read a couple of Persephones for an episode of Tea or Books?, and it helped me get Brook Evans off the shelf where it’s been for many years. I love Glaspell’s spare, insightful prose, and the way she shows us a moral dilemma that works it’s way through three generations of a passionate, unhappy family.

9. Ignorance by Milan Kundera (2002)

The first of several Top Books that I read during A Novella A Day in November – I wrote ‘Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time.’ Translated by Linda Asher, this is another Kundera success for me.

8. Murder Included by Joanna Cannan (1950)

It was great fun to race through a murder mystery in a single day. This is on here partly because it was fun and pacy, with an enjoyable irritating detective, but also because it has a beautifully simple and clever twist in its solution.

7. Three To See The King by Magnus Mills (2001)

You never quite know where you are with Mills, and never more so than with this parable(?) about a man living in a tin house in a desert, miles from his nearest neighbour. His life starts to change when a friend of a friend turns up and moves in – and then rumours come of a charismatic man changing lives in the distance. Mills is so brilliant at making something eerie without being at all evident why it feels that way.

6. Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley (1939)

This autobiographical novel tells of a man and his partner who have left Yorkshire for Cornwall, escaping some sort of ignominy. They have almost no money and craft a makeshift life in a rickety house in a cove. Walmsley writes about this corner of Cornwall with such tender love and clarity, and the novel is a slow-paced, winding joy.

5. The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning (1930)

A reprint from Dean Street Press that is getting a lot of love, The Invisible Host is curiously close to the premise of Agatha Christie’s later And Then There Were None. A group of strangers have been beckoned to a penthouse, each believing that a party is being thrown in their honour – whereas, in fact, they are going to be killed off, one-by-one, while a gramophone gives them instructions and warnings. The mechanics can be a little graceless, especially compared to Christie’s book, but it is still a brilliant read.

4. The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson (2021)

I didn’t get around to blogging about this one, which I listened to as an audiobook, but I do encourage people to seek it out. Casey Wilson is one of the funniest people alive, and stars in my favourite ever sitcom, Happy Endings. I’ve followed her work ever since, and was so delighted when she came out with a collection of essays – they are enormously funny, about bizarre moments in her life to date, but also very poignant: the loss of her mother, and Wilson’s grief, are front and centre.

3. Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava (2015)

Ahava’s novel won the EUPL prize a few years ago, and I read a translation by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s about people who experience extraordinary events – whether an ice berg falling from the sky, winning the lottery multiple times, or being struck repeatedly by lightning. I wrote, in my review: ‘the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful.’

2. Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons (1936)

The beginning of my year had a lot of books but not all that many brilliant ones, which is perhaps one of the reasons I was so blown away by Gibbons’ novel, which I read for the 1936 Club. Miss Linsey and her father move to be nearer relations – rather reluctant relations – but the short novel encompasses enormous amounts more, with my favourite bit being a satire on Bloomsbury parents. There’s also a lot of heart, particularly in one character’s memories of a wartime romance.

1. The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson (2006)

Finally, here is an ode to keeping books on the shelf for years – and then discovering how wonderful they are. I bought this well over a decade ago, and its moment came in 2021. This novel of a farming community in Ontario in the 1930s and 1950s is beautifully immersive, and deserves comparison to Marilynne Robinson’s work. Lucky me, there are still a couple of her books I haven’t read – and I predict at least one of them will be a contender for next year’s best books list.

Enbury Heath by Stella Gibbons

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I usually get at least a few books for Christmas, and I like to start one of them immediately – there is something lovely about starting a brand new book on Christmas Day. Particularly if it is as good as Enbury Heath (1935) by Stella Gibbons, which my parents got for me.

Yes, there are quite a few Gibbons novels waiting on my shelves, but a few Gibbons aficionados had said that this one was particularly good – so I was, of course, keen to read it. This is the seventh of her novels that I’ve read, and follows the pattern of her earliest books being the ones I most like – because this is wonderful. Just as wonderful as that cover illustration, by Kerry Hyndman, would have you hoping.

Siblings Sophia, Harry and Francis Garden aren’t much upset when their father dies. He has been angry, unpredictable, alcoholic, and unkind. Only six months earlier, their much-loved and much-suffering mother had died, and Sophia had chosen not to see her father in that time. But there is a wide cast of aunts and uncles who want to see the right thing done. The Garden trio aren’t fond of many of these relatives, and openly loathe some of them, but get bustled through decorum and keeping up appearances – while secreting away anecdotes and quotes to share and laugh at together later. They have the casual unkindness of people in their late teens and early 20s when considering nuisance relatives, though it isn’t really cruel because the relatives are completely unmoved by it.

While there isn’t much money left, the inheritance that the three get is enough to rent a tiny cottage on ‘Enbury Heath’ – a stand in for Hampstead Heath. The descriptions seem to vary a little – at one point it seems to be a two-up-two-down squeezed in between larger buildings, but it also has a dining table big enough for a dozen or so, and seating for large parties, so perhaps Gibbons’ definition of tiny isn’t the same as mine (I have to limit dinner parties to three guests, especially since I put in another bookcase that means I can no longer use the leaf to extend my dining room table.)

Gibbons’ pacing is often a little erratic, and nearly a third of the book is over before the three move into the cottage. This was my favourite part of Enbury Heath – as they set up home together, and deal with arranging domestic help, embryonic careers, visiting dogs etc. Gibbons is particularly funny about dogs, actually, and I only wish she’d turned her attention to cats at similar length. It’s almost ninety years old, but some things about running a home haven’t changed. We might not get coal and laundry deliveries, but these sorts of messages are not uncommon…

The coal, for example. The firm which sold the coal simply could not be brought to believe that there existed a cottage in the Vale where no one was at home from a quarter to nine in the morning to half past six at night. It was nonsense; it was a try-on; whoever it was doing it on purpose, and the coal firm knew better than to give way to such caprices.

So they sent coal (it was only two hundredweight, to add insult to injury, for this was all that the cottage’s cellar would hold), for three days running at eleven in the morning, disregarding Sophia’s frantic telephone messages, and the would send it no more.

The same difficulty occurred with the laundry, which, like some puckish sprite, some coy elf of the dells, could never say exactly at what time it would call, but preferred to pop in winsomely whenever ‘the boy was down that way,’ which might be at any time during the day.

In the final third of the novel, Gibbons throws in a host of other characters – a girl called Mae who catches Francis’s eye, and an old school rival called Juan who gets involved with the family. It breaks all sorts of novelistic rules to have the cast disrupted at this late stage, and I don’t think they were particularly needed – but somehow it works. I was nervous when Mae arrived on the scene, because I recall Bassett and how brilliantly funny the first half of that novel was, and how tedious once it became about a love triangle. It’s certainly not that bad in Enbury Heath, though I confess I would have loved the novel more if Gibbons had stuck to the siblings in their cottage.

Apparently Enbury Heath is semi-autobiographical. For the sake of Gibbons’ actual aunts and uncles, I hope that it is very semi, but knowing that there is some basis in fact explains why the novel never feels like a fairy tale, even with a fairy tale opening. There is a grounding of reality throughout that tethers the narrative. It’s a wonderful novel, and another perfect Christmassy read.