With a day to go, and having just started a couple of new titles, it looks like I will have read 61 books over the course of the year. And while I say read, just under half of this total, I listened to on Audible. Happily, I can report I enjoyed the vast majority of it - I'm at an age where I know what I like and tend not to deviate from that too often, and so I'm usually confident in the choices I make.
A few themes emerged from the reading. While crime fiction made up a much lower proportion than it would have done a few years ago, it is still a mainstay of my reading with a huge variety and a high quality across many different writers, most of them female. This was not a conscious choice but only halfway through the year did I notice the trend.
It was a year of discovery and rediscovery. After many years, I found my way back to Graham Greene, and read my first ever Le Carré novel. My patience for the classics is growing and I continued my Dickens journey with five of his books in the mix.
In November, I went to the COP26 climate meetings in Glasgow, which rekindled my interest in dystopian fiction - and four such novels feature in the top list.
Once again, despite good intentions, I read fewer non-fiction books than I would have liked - just two. My new year's resolution (alongside weight loss and more exercise etc...) is to read 10 next year. Recommendations welcome.
Here, in no particular order, is this year's top list.
Middlemarch by George Eliot - There's not a lot that hasn't been written about this novel, which is often labelled the greatest written in English. It's going to be difficult to come to a definitive conclusion on that claim reading 60 books a year, but Middlemarch is quite magnificent, and I was blown away by the brilliance of the writing and the drama and tension Eliot generates through the quiet lives of her characters. I've always slightly resisted the books I felt I should read. But this was one of them and I'm so pleased I got around to it. Middlemarch and the spell-binding power of unhistoric acts.
A Single Source by Peter Hanington - We are currently spoiled for choice in the spy genre with Hanington, a former BBC Radio 4 Today producer, one of a number with a claim to the crown of the late great John Le Carré. This second of three novels (so far) featuring cantakerous reporter William Carver takes place during the Arab spring and showcases Hanington's talent for taut, thrilling narratives that explore important contemporary political themes. It also serves as a powerful riposte to the populist narrative about migrants crossing the Mediterranean and the English Channel. This is my favourite of the three novels, but I recommend them all. Hanington was generous enough to speak to me about his books in an interview published here in September.
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy - I read Migrations in more or less one sitting en route for the COP in Glasgow from Madrid. And I challenge anyone to put it down, such is the incredible power and emotion in this brilliant novel. Migrations takes place in a world in which the climate change caused by human activity has pushed the entire non-domestic animal population of the earth to the brink of extinction. It tells the story of Franny Stone, an Irish-Australian naturalist who risks everything to follow what she believes will be the last migration of the last Arctic terns from the Arctic to the Antarctic. It is phenomenal and I wish everyone at the COP had been made to read it.
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera - There is no excuse for reading so little non-fiction, when it can be as good as this. With the country in the grip of an era of English exceptionalism emboldened by Brexit, Sanghera provides us all with the Imperial history lesson the formal curriculum didn't give us. It provides us with the unpalatable detail of what Empire meant both to Britain and its former colonies and the way it continues to poison our political and social discourse. "Empireland is detailed where it needs to be, rigorous in its approach to the history and exhaustively researched (the bibliography is a book in itself), it is also written with a wry wit and a light touch." Review.
Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene - I really need to read Monsignor Quixote again, as there's far too much going on in this marvelous book for one reading. It is, by turns, funny, dramatic, touching, thought-provoking and clever. It tells the story of an impromptu road trip taken in post-Franco Spain by a rural priest, who is a descendant of (the fictional) Don Quixote and his town's Communist ex-Mayor, Sancho. While not fleeing the Guardia Civil or drinking wine, they talk and argue: about politics and religion and everything in between.
The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird - I've long been of the view that the world would be a far better place if run by women, and The End of Men provides a vision of one such world, after a global pandemic (something of a busman's holiday, this one) wipes out most of the world's male population. The story is superbly put together as Sweeney-Baird draws together a "panel of narrators (who) come together to deliver a comprehensive, frightening and emotionally charged story that never loses its grip". Review.
The Stranding by Kate Sawyer - If a pandemic is not enough to frighten you, here's Kate Sawyer with the nucliear apocalypse, told from the perspective of a couple who survive the initial blast by taking cover inside a dead whale on a beach in New Zealand. "The story is often spell-binding, full of warmth and wisdom, and alternately terrifying and uplifting. An incredible, unforgettable debut novel."
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - This was a three way toss up with Our Mutual Friend and The Old Curiosity Shop and a difficult choice given how quite exceptional each of these novels is. But there is just something magnificent about the end of this story, a completely breathtaking climax that lives in the memory. One of the things I love most about Dickens is the kindness of so many of his characters. For every bad deed, and there are many, there is an act of incredible generosity and here at the conclusion of ATOTC, there is a moment of unsurpassed selflessness. An Ending to Remember
Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn - It shouldn't be possible to buy any novel for 99p, still less those by writers as wonderful as Frayn. Nonetheless, never look a gift horse in the mouth, and I snapped this one up after seeing it on Twitter. A gentle satire about newsrooms and news people, written in 1967, it nevertheless has a lot to say about the same themes in this era of social media and truthlessness. Funny, wry and pointed, it's terrific.
The Cutting Place by Jane Casey - I read all ten of Casey's novels in 2021, nine of which featured her effervescent Met detective Maeve Kerrigan. This, the ninth in the series, was my favourite. As with many series there is a progession in confidence and strength as the series progresses, but unlike many, there is no mid-series dip in quality (and I hope we are still mid series here, as I am sure there is much more to come from Kerrigan and Casey. For the first time on this blog, I reviewed an entire series rather than a novel, and you can read it here.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson - This one I started on the way back from COP, and perhaps the potency of its message was strengthened by the view that the Glasgow meetings had not delivered the outcome that we need to avert catastrophic climate change. This novel, by SciFi legend Kim Stanley Robinson, is predicated on the failure of the world to deliver the promises of COP21 and the Paris agreement and as a result the world lurches towards disaster. The book starts with a devastating heatwave that kills more than 20m uprisings and explores the result: a popular uprising that sees eco-activism reach new and dramatic levels and the establishment of a UN agency, nicknamed the Ministry for the Future, that seeks to promote urgent solutions to an issue that has assumed extinction-level momentum. It's a fascinating mix of science and fiction narrative and another must read for the COP crew.
The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson - I try not to be too resentful of authors who call a halt to series I love, but I have to admit it was a major blow reading that Hodgson had decided to bring her wonderful Thomas Hawkins series to a close after its fourth installment. I will likely only decide to forgive Hodgson when I've read whatever comes next. Because I LOVED this series, set in Georgian London, which has all the atmosphere, period detail, colourful characterisation and drama that great historical fiction needs. This is the first in the series in which ne´er do well "hero" Hawkins finds himself in the notorious London debtors prison and at the mercy of events and villains that do not bode well for a long and happy life. Review.