2020: My Year of Reading
Much of 2020 was about recuperative walks & reading.
Last year, in that weirdest of years, I didn’t quite make it to 100 books, despite binge reading over Christmas and generally lying supine for most of the year – I was 5 short. C’est la vie.
My proportions changes slightly compared to other years - 42% Australian women writers (up from 36% in 2019, 39% in 2018); 13% Australian Male writers (pretty much the same at 14% in 2019 and 13% in 2018); 37% international women writers (up from 33% in 2019) and 8% international male writers (down from 20% in 2019 and 15% in 2018).
I finally made good on my intention to read more poetry (I read 7 titles which, while not huge, is an improvement on zero), and I got back into the habit of reading work by First Nations Writers (6 titles from Australia, and one from Canada). Of these I really liked Muninjali writer Ellen van Neerven’s Throat and Metis Nation writer Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves.
The highlight of my year was reading Madeline Miller’s work. I gave my brother The Song of Achilles for Christmas a few years back, but only read it this year, burning through it at the hairdresser’s in Munich. Then I picked up Circe and fell in love with the language and Circe’s character and desires. Another favourite was Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog, about two brothers on a ranch whose relationship changes when one of them marries. The book was both subtle and masterful in its use of structure, voice and character – a very clever piece of work. My other great love was Emmanuelle Pagano’s One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, about a trans school bus driver in the mountains of France. I adored the descriptions of the dangerous, freezing environment and the protagonist Adèle’s relationships with the children whom she drove to and from school, and how her changing gender inflected her responses to her family and people around her. I loved too the localism of the book, that Adèle was drawn back to her home town despite having left it a different person.
I discovered this book through the High Noon Bookclub at Avid Reader, which also introduced me to a slew of other interesting titles, including Japanese author Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs and US author Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, which uses the motif of a family’s house to explore racism in New Orleans, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I also enjoyed a number of other books by non-Australian authors – Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Bernadine Evaristo’s Woman, Girl, Other, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love (at least until she killed off her protagonist, which was stupid decision – authors should know better these days than to indulge in the cliché of dispensing with a marginalised character) and Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary. All of these books articulate women’s lives and desires in realistic and interesting ways, although to buck the trend I also really enjoyed Daniel Mason’s collection of stories, A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth, because they canvassed nineteenth century science with a very interesting style. And, because I am desperate for a dog, I loved Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, and chortled much over its sly digs at egocentric writers (the majority of us, I would say).
Of Australian authors, I laughed all the way through Gabrielle Carey’s droll Only Happiness Here and was completely sucked into Rick Morton’s account of the latent violence of rural Australian in 100 Years of Dirt, while Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron was just gorgeous. Fiona Murphy’s memoir about deafness, The Shape of Sound, is a beautifully crafted book coming out at the end of March. Reading it was like holding a mirror up to myself and seeing things that I hadn’t seen before. I’m writing a review of this for the Sydney Review of Books, so you can read my thoughts on the book in a few months. And after listening to an interview by Brigitta Olubus, who is writing a biography of Shirley Hazzard, I picked up Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon and loved the sparse, evocative writing and setting, though that also has much to do with my enduring love affair with Italy.
I found that many works that critics fawned over didn’t do much for me at all – Where the Crawdads Sing (cheesy), Overstory (Powers didn’t have control over his material), Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (anthropocentric and inconsistent) and Trent Dalton’s All Our Shimmering Skies (shallow characters and a ludicrous plot, although I did enjoy his descriptions of the natural world).
This year I will pootle on as usual, although I do need to read more writing about the environment to get a sense of how to place my next book, my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. While I know how I will write it (with an emphasis on plants and their agency), I need to get a stronger sense of what is happening in the field, and how it is changing. And I am still planning (for the Xth year in a row) to get to a book of 19th C fiction!
Australian Women Writers
1. The Shape of Sound, Fiona Murphy
2. Fiona Wood: Inventor of Spray-On Skin, Christy Burne
3. Georgia Ward-Fear: Reptile Biologist and Explorer, Claire Saxby
4. Munjed Al Muderis: From Refugee to Surgical Inventor, Dianne Wolfer
5. In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World, Danielle Clode
6. Nobody, Nowhere, Donna Williams
7. Only Happiness Here, Gabrielle Carey
8. Vida, Jacqueline Kent
9. Tell Me Where it Hurts, Kylie Maslen
10. Hysteria, Katerina Bryant
11. Night Fishing, Vicki Hastrich
12. Darkfall, Indigo Perry
13. Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin
14. The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, Cathy Perkins
15. Accidental Feminists, Jane Caro
16. None Shall Sleep, Ellie Marney
17. Bloody Blockies, Rosie Abbott
18. Flyaway, Kathleen Jennings
19. The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard
20. Where the Fruit Falls, Karen Wyld
21. Dreams They Forgot, Emma Ashmere
22. Ghost Bird, Lisa Fuller
23. Future Girl, Asphyxia
24. Our Shadows, Gail Jones
25. Dark Harvest, Cat Sparks
26. Ordinary Matter, Laura Elvery
27. The Yield, Tara June Winch
28. The Salt Madonna, Catherine Noske
29. There Was Still Love, Favel Parrett
30. The Animals in that Country, Laura Jean McKay
31. Stone Sky Gold Mountain, Mirandi Riwoe
32. Almost a Mirror, Kirsten Krauth
33. Fauna, Donna Mazza
34. Ask Me About the Future, Rebecca Jessen
35. Breathing Plural, Em König
36. Lake, Claire Nashar
37. Throat, Ellen van Neerven
38. Ruby Moonlight, Ali Cobby Eckermann
39. Autobiochemistry, Tricia Dearborn
40. Nganajungu Yagu, Charmaine Papertalk Green
Australian Male Writers
41. All Our Shimmering Skies, Trent Dalton
42. Flames, Robbie Arnott
43. Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, Benjamin Dodds
44. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan
45. The Burning Island, Jock Serong
46. One Hundred Years of Dirt, Rick Morton
47. Our Inside Voices, Matthew Wengert (ed.)
48. Mammoth, Chris Flynn
49. The Rain Heron, Robbie Arnott
50. Pig City, Andrew Stafford
51. Ghost Species, James Bradley
52. The Windy Season, Sam Carmody
Non-Australian Women Writers
53. The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel
54. A Tall History of Sugar, Curdella Forbes
55. Always Coming Home, Ursula le Guin
56. Three Women, Lisa Taddeo
57. Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
58. One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, Emmanuelle Pagano
59. Love After Love, Ingrid Persaud
60. Woman, Girl, Other, Bernadine Evaristo
61. Inferno, Catherine Cho
62. Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss
63. The Braided River, Diane Comer
64. The Illness Lesson, Claire Beams
65. The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
66. The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline
67. Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala
68. Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami
69. Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh
70. Flash Count Diary, Darcey Steinke
71. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
72. The Yellow House, Sarah Broom
73. Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica Lee
74. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
75. Circe, Madeline Miller
76. The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
77. Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff
78. Just Kids, Patti Smith
79. Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia Butler
80. A God in Every Stone, Kamila Shamsie
81. Stay with Me, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
82. Sudden Traveller, Sarah Hall
83. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Otessa Mossfegh
84. Dreamquake, Elizabeth Knox
85. Dreamhunter, Elizabeth Knox
86. Tanglewreck, Jeanette Winterson
87. War, So Much War, Merce Rodoreda
Non-Australian Male Writers
88. A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth, Daniel Mason
89. Overstorey, Richard Powers
90. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
91. The Power of the Dog, Thomas Savage
92. Pauliska, or, Modern Perversity, Jacques-Antoine Révéroni
93. Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman
94. Blindsight, Peter Watts
95. The Plague, Albert Camus