It’s been quite a year! Shut in at home for the most part, I should have been devouring books. Instead, I found myself endlessly scrolling social feeds, Facebook and WhatsApp groups that had proliferated. The scrolling mostly had purpose – keeping me updated on the pandemic, feeding me kitchen hacks and recipes for a ‘help-less’ world, motivating me to work out, even providing some voyeuristic fun. Reading was somewhat of a casualty.
I did manage to finish 56 books, a book-a-week number that is my normal in most years. But I went through bouts of reading block that were quite upsetting – and a lot of the reading felt quite forced. It didn’t help that I felt Kindle had decided to up their e-book prices, causing me to question the value of buying every book I read.
And so, 56 it was, even if I felt it should have been so many more. Here are the ones I was truly engaged with - my best of.
1. Svetlana Alexievich continues to enthral with her reporter-style writing. Her Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories narrates World War II in Belarus (which lost almost a quarter of its population to the war) through the eyes of people who were children during the war. War is horrifying in itself, but is especially terrible when children bear witness to it. A great read.
2. Kantor and Twohey’s She Said is another great piece of journalistic reportage. This one is about breaking the Weinstein sexual harassment story and igniting the Me-Too movement. It reads like a thriller – and the courage on display, of the journalists and the women who spoke up, is inspiring.
3. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an old classic I just got to in 2020. ‘60s America comes alive in this set of essays where Didion’s writing is sharp, evocative and masterful.
4. Stephen Fry’s Mythos and Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology were totally entertaining reads – the old gods are so human and so much fun!
5. Lisa Brennan-Jobs memoir Small Fry was a captivating read on a complex man and a complex relationship. Steve Jobs does not emerge smelling of roses in this one.
6. My favourite discovery this year was Hope Jahren. Her Lab Girl is a memoir, describing what it takes to be a woman in science. But it is also an ode to plants – making us see a tree as a unique being. And her The Story of More builds a case for less consumption – as man’s excesses are slowly but surely endangering our world. A science writer with a love for language!
7. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet was a truly touching fiction read. I loved her gorgeous prose imagining the origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and describing the utter agony of grief.
8. Two delightful fiction reads were Guareschi’s The Little World of Don Camillo and Jane Borges’ Bombay Balchao. The former brings together a hot-headed Catholic priest, a Communist Mayor and a talking Christ on the Cross in a small Italian village in post-war Italy. The latter is a through-the-years exploration of a Goan community in South Mumbai. Both are funny and poignant with a great set of characters. Both were perfect for an anxiety-ridden time.
9. Two long reads, that took me some time to get through, yet were completely fulfilling were Maria Popova’s Figuring and Dalrymple’s Anarchy. Popova tells us of inspiring people – women and men who were geniuses in their own ways, who left an impact on the world. My personal favourites were Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson. And Dalrymple made history come alive as he described a corporate takeover by the East India Company of some of the wealthiest kingdoms in the world.
There were other good reads. Ann Patchett and Alice Munro, Bill Bryson and Madeleine Miller, Elizabeth Strout and Tina Brown, Tove Jansson and Vivian Gornick. So in a very strange year, they were the ones I retreated to, for familiarity, comfort, refuge. They have rarely disappointed.
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