Books of the Year 2020

 

Some of the books of the year - I tend to give away the books I enjoyed most, so this is an incomplete selection of all the chosen titles. The best ones always get away!

Not much to celebrate about 2020, which went downhill from March onwards with coronavirus and final stages of Brexit, but despite everything, there were some books I encountered during the year that were truly inspiring (and some of them I even finished). Here is a quick list of eight books (and one art exhibition) that impressed, entertained, or challenged, and all took my mind off other things. 

Norman Scarfe (ed), A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk, 1784

This book only arrived in December, but already it has proved fascinating. Norman Scarfe is no doubt a monarchist, a reactionary, and against everything the French Revolution stood for, but I forgive him everything for bringing to life the diaries of the La Rochefoucault brothers during the year they spent in East Anglia. Their accounts of the everyday life of the English upper classes – their drinking, their hunting, and their impoliteness – is a wonderful corrective to the accounts of insiders such as the dreadful Parson James Woodforde, writing at a similar time, but utterly complacent and self-serving. Scarfe’s edition is a model of good scholarship: everything explained at the foot of each page, with illustrations of people and places, and a scene-setting introduction. It’s lovely to see this book has been reprinted four times since its first publication in 1987. 

Grace Paley, Collected Stories

What a discovery! She wrote only three collections of short stories, in 1959, 1974, and 1985, no novels, and yet managed to write pioneering experimental fiction, as well as being a political activist and campaigner. Her stories draw on her lower-class Jewish background in the tenements of New York, with many of the characters reappearing in several stories. She is never afraid to experiment (which means that some of the stories go nowhere, or simply fall over) but you forgive her for the success of some of the other stories. These stories have an immediacy, a vividness, that grips the reader, in great contrast to the more leisured, cossetted atmosphere of Updike. You suspect that for every Updike there is a Grace Paley somewhere looking after the kids and writing on the kitchen table. Best of all, Paley has no axe to grind; she writes believable fiction, not to prove a thesis. And her dialogue rivals Damon Runyon’s!   

Calvino, Italian Folktales

This vast collection of hundreds of tales constantly defeats my expectations. I’ve written about it at length elsewhere; suffice it to say here that I find it is consistently entertaining, while ploughing through collections of Grimm or Afaneseyev’s Russian folktales becomes heavy going.  However (two weeks later), just a minor update, after having read 155 of the 200 tales: I wish Calvino had exercised a little more rigour in his selection. Several of the tales repeat elements found elsewhere, and are not great tales in their own right. I think the selection could have been further reduced by around 20%. It would still remain the definitive selection of Italian folk tales. 

Susan Woodford, Greek and Roman Art (2020)

A real achievement, this one, in a series by Thames and Hudson, entitled Art Essentials, along the lines of Gallimard Decouvertes. There are plenty of introductory guides on the subject, several of them by Susan Woodford herself, so this one should have been unmemorable. What made it stand out was that is in full colour, with an integrated layout, with the excellent choice of illustrations, captions that read as if she has actually looked at the work in question (“the elegant pose of the statue folds into unintelligibility”), a good glossary and further reading section. All in all, a highly successful use of the concise format to focus on the essential artworks and artists. Very easy to read, and very inspiring to make me want to go and see some of these things in museums. 

Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)

It may be thought cheeky to select a book that I’ve only read a few hundred pages of. Given the size of the novel, however, these few hundred pages are as long as some novels. And you can already see some themes emerging. You notice the omniscient narrator, who tells us what to think, for example, that we should be fond of Pierre, and that we should see the social life of the rich in Moscow and St Petersburg as shallow: “Here in Moscow we are more occupied with dinner-parties and scandal than with politics.” It’s a clever trick, to give the appearance of neutrality, but to lead the reader by a hundred signs into agreeing with Tolstoy’s often peculiar ideas. 

Tim Parks, Medici Money (2006)

Medici Money is my nomination for book of the year. Discovered in the Amnesty Bookshop, Cambridge (remember second-hand bookshops?), at a price of £3, Tim Parks’ Medici Money turned out to be a real page-turner – pretty impressive when you think it is a book about banking and economics! But the combination of Parks’ accessible but informed writing style, and the astonishing subject matter, made this book a winner. I will never again look at the word “Medici” without suspicion, and the book has changed the way I see the Renaissance in Florence. 

Machiavelli, Florentine Histories

Inspired by Tim Parks (above), we read the first two hundred pages or so of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. The pattern seems to be clear: the city of Florence places its hopes in an individual or group to free them from a tyrant, only to discover that the resulting political situation is worse than ever. Unfortunately, the edition was a rather stodgy and unhelpful one. You need some assistance to make a contemporary historian accessible.  

Van Eyck exhibition, Ghent

This was certainly the exhibition of the year, even if the show was rather distorted into comparison of Flemish versus Italian art, with the winner being, of course, Van Eyck, the local; I wrote about it here.

Defoe, Captain Singleton (1720)

Defoe is remarkable for writing fiction that seems amazingly realistic, despite his not having any experience of the situation describe. Here, Captain Singleton is a pirate who crosses Africa from east to west with his band of followers. 

A Much-maligned town: Opinions of Reading 1126-2008 (2008)

I chose this book as a tribute to the small publishers across the UK who produce books about a place, for a local readership. Reading, not a city that you would immediately associate with publishing, has one of the best local publishers, The Two Rivers Press. I don’t see any truly local publishers like this in Oxford or Cambridge, which is a shame. Plenty of publishing about the universities - but that's not the same thing.