I have never been one for saying, “I have a good feeling about this year.” My feelings and Time don’t seem to have any kind of causal relationship, and global pandemics have not historically demonstrated any consideration for calendars either. I think 2021 will be last year’s encore, and marking the new year is a way to formally recognise the desperate need for better days. Such days will come along in due course: US politics show signs of improvement, vaccines are on their way, we have found and will continue to find ways to adapt; I just don’t think 2021 is going to bring the cathartic relief whose hope to which we’ve so desperately clung. Maybe in the latter half we’ll have reasons for optimism that are based on scientific progress, good leadership, improved relations all round, and each of us doing the right thing. I think it wildly premature to start celebrating any of that now.
Small victories are still important though, and I’ll continue to take them where I can. Although my overseas trip was cancelled, and numerous domestic sojourns too, I did manage to make it interstate. I celebrated my niece’s first birthday in Brisbane with her in January with no idea of what was ahead, or that I would be unable to see her again until she’s at least 2. My nephew’s twice-postponed baptism in South Australia was an occasion I became resigned never to attend, and it was a joyous surprise to be able to slide in between outbreaks and border closures. Christmas in Tasmania with my parents seemed like a sure thing until two days before departure, though we made it there with just hours before the border slammed shut behind us.
Things could have been worse. Things can always be worse.
With the extra time on my hands this year, I read more books than ever before (161 in total including one in another language) and when reading wasn’t doing it for me, I baked like a madwoman. How glad am I to have branched out with a new hobby that not only maintains my sanity but also tastes delicious AND increases my popularity!
My top book of the year is one I read early on – #25, Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne. I knew within pages that I was onto something special, and called it then as my favourite for 2020 unless something even more spectacular came along. Notable contenders attempted competition but never pipped it. It was as though Sarah Winman and Sally Rooney conspired to write a book just for me, which is about as high a compliment I can think to pay.
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li is right up there, and if you need to feel sad with a book as your witness, this is a good one to accompany you. Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar completes my trio, and if I were on the judging panel for the Booker, I’d have gunned hard for its victory.
At the bottom of the pile we have How to Have a Beautiful Mind by Edward de Bono. I listened to this on audiobook while waiting for the book I actually wanted to listen to to become available. It was featured as one of the most popular downloads, and was quite short, and I was unimpressed by the whole thing other than its brevity. A more apt title would be How to Try and Trick People into Thinking you are Slightly Less Boring than you Actually Are. Read or listen to any other book and your mind stands a better chance of improving its substance and appearance. The Bat by Jo Nesbo also bottomed out for me, and I would not have finished it had I not picked it up to complete a work reading challenge in the first place.
I remember being asked a year ago if I’d try and beat my 133 total for 2019, and saying, “no, I didn’t really get anything else done.” Turns out I can read even more and also get a lot of baking done! Nevertheless, no attempts will be made on my part to outdo my-reading-self, and if this year we all have to stay home as much as we did in 2020, who knows what new hobbies I may incorporate? (I expect it will just be more reading and baking and jigsaw puzzles. In many ways I’d been preparing for lockdown my entire life and it wasn’t so bad after all.)
Here it is: Big Fat List of the Year 2020.
- Any Human Heart by William Boyd
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
- Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Home Work: A Memoir of my Hollywood Years by Julie Andrews
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
- The Smell of Fresh Rain: The Unexpected Pleasures of our Most Elusive Scent by Barney Shaw
- Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
- Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho
- One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
- Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television by Louis Theroux
- And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
- Transit by Rachel Cusk
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead
- Thirty Thousand Bottle of Wine and a Pig called Helga by Todd Alexander
- Vacuum in the Dark by Jen Beagin
- Dream Angus: The Celtic God of Dreams by Alexander McCall Smith
- Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharti
- The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto
- Couchsurfing in Russia: Friendships and Misadventures Behind Putin’s Iron Curtain by Stephan Orth
- Hit So Hard by Patty Schemel
- Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne
- Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
- The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham
- Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson
- The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen
- Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
- What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges
- Me by Elton John
- Outside Looking In by T. C. Boyle
- Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
- Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat who Touched the World by Vicky Myron with Bret Witter
- Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee
- The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
- Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (reread)
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
- I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
- My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
- American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
- Thinking About it Only Makes it Worse by David Mitchell
- 488 Rules for Life by Kitty Flanagan
- Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris
- False Impression by Jeffrey Archer
- It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario
- The Gap: An Australian Paramedic’s Summer on the Edge by Benjamin Gilmour
- Normal People by Sally Rooney (reread)
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (reread)
- Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen by J. K. Rowling
- In Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
- The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
- After Dark by Haruki Murakami
- Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder & Things that Sustain You when the World goes Dark by Julia Baird
- The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory by Corey White
- Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change and Courage by Tori Amos
- Being Light by Helen Smith
- Talking to Strangers: What we should Know about the People we Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
- Even Cowgirls get the Blues by Tom Robbins
- Liberty by Garrison Keillor
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
- The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
- Writers & Lovers by Lily King
- Between the Stops: The View of my Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus by Sandi Toksvig
- Rats: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
- The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (reread)
- Coraline: The Graphic Novel by Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell
- The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith
- Come Again by Robert Webb
- A Time of Love and Tartan by Alexander McCall Smith
- Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy: and Other Rules to Live By by David Mitchell
- Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
- The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
- How to Have a Beautiful Mind by Edward de Bono
- Your Own Kind of Girl by Clare Bowditch
- The Bat by Jo Nesbo
- The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather
- Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
- Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
- Miss-Adventures: A Tale of Ignoring Life Advice While Backpacking Around South America by Amy Baker
- Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman
- Mouthful of Birds by Samantha Schweblin
- Encounter: Essays by Milan Kundera
- Kudos by Rachel Cusk
- The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
- Ayoade on Top by Richard Ayoade
- Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler
- Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce
- In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsey Hilsum
- Real Life by Brandon Taylor
- Here We Are by Graham Swift
- The Spy by Paulo Coelho (reread)
- Boys will be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship by Clementine Ford
- A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (reread)
- Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
- Gods and Demons: Behind the Tourist Veneer of Bali and Greater Indonesia: a Foreign Correspondent’s Memoir by Deborah Cassrells
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
- The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
- One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainana
- Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
- Hurricane Season by Fernando Melchor
- Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore
- The Folk of the Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton (reread)
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
- Apeirogon by Colum McCann
- Angel in the Mirror by Lumi Winterson
- Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
- Couchsurfing in China: Encounters and Escapades Beyond the Wall by Stephan Orth
- Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker
- Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith
- Perseus in the Wind: A life of Travel by Freya Stark
- Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
- All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton
- The Vegetarian by Han Kang (reread)
- Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler
- The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
- Just Ignore Him by Alan Davies
- Court Out (A Netball Girls’ Drama) by Deb McEwan
- The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
- The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague by Richard Fidler
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- Honeybee by Craig Silvey
- What Westerners have for Breakfast: Five Years in Goa by John McBeath
- Kokomo by Victoria Hannan
- A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson
- A Thousand Ships: This is the Woman’s War by Natalie Haynes
- A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
- This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
- The Sick Bag Song by Nick Cave
- Our Sunshine by Robert Drewe
- A Life on our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future by David Attenborough
- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
- Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
- Things I Learned from Falling by Claire Nelson
- The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie
- Around the World in 80 Trains: a 45,000 Mile Adventure by Monisha Rajesh
- The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray
- The Best Kind of Beautiful by Frances Whiting
- Heather, the Totality by Matthew Weiner
- Stories of Hope: Finding Inspirations in Everyday Lives by Heather Morris
- Amnesty by Aravind Adiga
- The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk
- A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu
- Other People’s Houses by Hilary McPhee
- Quidditch Through the Ages by Kennilworthy Whisp (J. K. Rowling, illustrated by Emily Gravett)
- Almost Midnight by Rainbow Rowell
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- ‘Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay
- More Than A Woman by Caitlin Moran
- The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (reread)
- The Ickabog by J. K. Rowling
- The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson
