![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseaux2020 reading stats
I read a whopping 140 books this year (or 143, if counting the first four Betsy-Tacy books as collected in The Betsy-Tacy Treasury individually rather than as one volume), only 25 (or 28) of which were re-reads?? Now, I'm not saying that's too many books, but like. How did I read that many books.
Unexpected niches were short story/essay collections, either by individual authors or anthologies (6), biographies of 20th century female authors (3), and nonfiction about codes and the people that created/used/broke them in WWII (3). Most-read author was Agatha Christie (17); I have not completely exhausted her bibliography, but I think I've Agatha Christie'd myself out for a while. Luckily, I've just gotten into Ngaio Marsh!
Susanna Clarke's Piranesi was probably my favorite new book of 2020.
Recently read
- Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, which I originally read - and thoroughly enjoyed - back in high school and, after re-reading it, I can say is probably my favorite of his novels (although I'll always have a special place in my heart for A Tale of Two Cities). Pip is an unheroic hero, but his humor makes him lovable even as I spent much of the book wanting to smack him upside the head and he gets some satisfying character growth. I'd remembered being deeply fond of Herbert Pocket the first time I read it, but I'd forgotten about the delightful double life of Mr. Wemmick.
Side note: are there any good mother-figures in Dickens' work? In this one, we have Mrs. Joe and her aggressive interpretation of "raising by hand", the comigrotesquely checked-out Mrs. Pocket, and Miss Havisham, whose parenting goals were to raise Estella to revenge herself upon men's hearts. Oh, and Estella's birth mom, but she's... not really in the picture? And also maybe murdered someone. The only other Dickensian mothers I can think of off the top of my head are Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby... Dickens' father figures are more of a mixed bag, but mothers? Hoo boy.
- Barack Obama's A Promised Land, the recently-published first of two planned volumes chronicling his time in office. It was very much a Political Memoir™, but interesting.
- Real Life by Brandon Taylor; it's muted and observant, a heartache of a novel, following its protagonist, Wallace - a gay, Black doctoral student in an overwhelmingly white biochemistry program at an unnamed Midwestern university (it's clearly the University of Wisconsin-Madison) - over the course of one very complicated weekend.
- Fair Play by Tove Jansson, a delicately lovely novel in vignettes about a relationship between two older women, both artists, that has to be inspired by, if not based off of in an outright file-the-serial-numbers-off way, Jansson's relationship with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä...? (Mari, like Jansson, is a writer and illustrator; Jonna, like Tuulikki, is an artist and filmmaker; Mari and Jonna live in neighboring apartments connected by an attic passageway - which honestly sounds like absolute ideal living arrangements - and share a cottage off the coast of Finland, like Jansson and Tuulikki did.) It's hard to say which story was my favorite— maybe the one about the film camera, or the storm and their fathers.
At the end of the novel, Jonna and Mari discuss whether Jonna should accept an offer of a year's lease of a studio in Paris, which stipulated that she go alone, and—
A daring thought was taking shape in [Mari's] mind. She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.
I'm not sure if I "naturally" prefer solitude or if I've simply embraced it, but may life grant me a relationship that allows me both, to be blessed with love and happy with solitude.
- A Man Lay Dead (1934) and Vintage Murder (1937) by Ngaio Marsh, who I have somehow never read until now???? Both were fun, clever mysteries - the former a good old country-house murder, the latter set amongst a traveling theater troupe in New Zealand - and I really vibe with her writing style.
- Division Bells by Iona Datt Sharma, a m/m workplace romance set against a delightfully specific backdrop of British legislative procedure. My only complaint is that it's an 80-page novella and not a 300-page novel.
I read a whopping 140 books this year (or 143, if counting the first four Betsy-Tacy books as collected in The Betsy-Tacy Treasury individually rather than as one volume), only 25 (or 28) of which were re-reads?? Now, I'm not saying that's too many books, but like. How did I read that many books.
Unexpected niches were short story/essay collections, either by individual authors or anthologies (6), biographies of 20th century female authors (3), and nonfiction about codes and the people that created/used/broke them in WWII (3). Most-read author was Agatha Christie (17); I have not completely exhausted her bibliography, but I think I've Agatha Christie'd myself out for a while. Luckily, I've just gotten into Ngaio Marsh!
Susanna Clarke's Piranesi was probably my favorite new book of 2020.
Recently read
- Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, which I originally read - and thoroughly enjoyed - back in high school and, after re-reading it, I can say is probably my favorite of his novels (although I'll always have a special place in my heart for A Tale of Two Cities). Pip is an unheroic hero, but his humor makes him lovable even as I spent much of the book wanting to smack him upside the head and he gets some satisfying character growth. I'd remembered being deeply fond of Herbert Pocket the first time I read it, but I'd forgotten about the delightful double life of Mr. Wemmick.
Side note: are there any good mother-figures in Dickens' work? In this one, we have Mrs. Joe and her aggressive interpretation of "raising by hand", the comigrotesquely checked-out Mrs. Pocket, and Miss Havisham, whose parenting goals were to raise Estella to revenge herself upon men's hearts. Oh, and Estella's birth mom, but she's... not really in the picture? And also maybe murdered someone. The only other Dickensian mothers I can think of off the top of my head are Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby... Dickens' father figures are more of a mixed bag, but mothers? Hoo boy.
- Barack Obama's A Promised Land, the recently-published first of two planned volumes chronicling his time in office. It was very much a Political Memoir™, but interesting.
- Real Life by Brandon Taylor; it's muted and observant, a heartache of a novel, following its protagonist, Wallace - a gay, Black doctoral student in an overwhelmingly white biochemistry program at an unnamed Midwestern university (it's clearly the University of Wisconsin-Madison) - over the course of one very complicated weekend.
- Fair Play by Tove Jansson, a delicately lovely novel in vignettes about a relationship between two older women, both artists, that has to be inspired by, if not based off of in an outright file-the-serial-numbers-off way, Jansson's relationship with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä...? (Mari, like Jansson, is a writer and illustrator; Jonna, like Tuulikki, is an artist and filmmaker; Mari and Jonna live in neighboring apartments connected by an attic passageway - which honestly sounds like absolute ideal living arrangements - and share a cottage off the coast of Finland, like Jansson and Tuulikki did.) It's hard to say which story was my favorite— maybe the one about the film camera, or the storm and their fathers.
At the end of the novel, Jonna and Mari discuss whether Jonna should accept an offer of a year's lease of a studio in Paris, which stipulated that she go alone, and—
A daring thought was taking shape in [Mari's] mind. She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.
I'm not sure if I "naturally" prefer solitude or if I've simply embraced it, but may life grant me a relationship that allows me both, to be blessed with love and happy with solitude.
- A Man Lay Dead (1934) and Vintage Murder (1937) by Ngaio Marsh, who I have somehow never read until now???? Both were fun, clever mysteries - the former a good old country-house murder, the latter set amongst a traveling theater troupe in New Zealand - and I really vibe with her writing style.
- Division Bells by Iona Datt Sharma, a m/m workplace romance set against a delightfully specific backdrop of British legislative procedure. My only complaint is that it's an 80-page novella and not a 300-page novel.
