2020: My Year of 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