Well, my friends, it’s been another… um… interesting year in real life (which due to mostly remote working has felt like virtual life anyway). When I look back at this year personally I see some massive positives (I got married; we even managed to venture abroad on holiday; I got promoted, twice) but it’s had more than its fair share of grim-ness too (possibly less so than the vast majority of others, given the reasons listed above) and as we limp towards the line at the end of the year I find myself thinking, just like last year ‘let’s put this one behind us and go again in the new year’.
I hope. Spoiler alert, that’s the last line of a certain novel by Stephen King… but more on that later.
Another thing which has been positive this year has been the sheer volume of books I’ve been able to consume. One of the few plus points of remote working is the time you get back from not having to commute. With that, and the fact we pretty much ‘completed’ Netflix and for the vast majority of the year I haven’t been able to travel to football… well, it’s all added up to a big amount of reading time to fill the void.
And how. This year the quantity of books I’ve devoured scares even me. Scares me enough to put in a disclaimer here: no, I did not spend all day when I was supposed to be working reading books. And to be fair the number of screen hours I’ve racked up on Teams meetings, socials, the like practically forced me to pick up a paperback after work hours anyway.
The grand total
Last year I read a total of 77 books, during various lockdowns, national crises, and the like. Frankly I thought it was an unbeatable number. (Incidentally, in 2017 I read 75; in 2018, 61; and in 2019, 57.)
But this year I’ve topped it. I’ve read 93 books. (Incidentally II, The Guardian also tells me I’ve read close to 6000 articles on their website this year and I also subscribe to the excellent football magazines FourFourTwo and United we Stand.)
The above graph shows my most avid reading months. Relatively fallow periods tend to correspond with busy times at work or in my personal life (a wedding). March was my most active reading month. I can scarcely credit it now, but back then I was averaging an unbelievable three books a week, or near as dammit. The reasons why? I suppose home-schooling had ended (fingers-crossed forever) and spring was springing and I suppose there was positivity in the air.
Quality and quantity
But it’s not been all about the quantity, it’s also featured a great deal of quality. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed most of the stuff I’ve read this year. Mainly, I think, because of the sheer diversity of it. This is thanks to my regular use of the Little Free Libraries (four of which are within walking distance of my house), my subscription to the (free with Prime) Amazon First Reads programme, but also loads and loads of recommendations from friends, family, and colleagues. Every year I run The Andy’s I get more. Keep ‘em coming.
Resolutions
But as I do every new year I will resolve to read better, and more widely. My promise to myself this year was that I would read at least as many women writers as men, having spotted an imbalance in previous years’ charts. I haven’t managed this in 2021, but I will again make a concerted effort in 2022.
One thing I did manage was to read more non-fiction (my charts are completely dominated by novels). This year I’ve read completely random stuff over and above my usual sports-dominated agenda. There were of course a couple of footy books which sneaked their way in, but in fairness they weren’t all about Manchester United. I also read Ray Parlour’s autobiography, for example. I loathed him as a player as he played for Arsenal, our biggest rivals (on the pitch) at the time. I liked him in the book. You know what they say about reading opening the mind…
Beyond soccerball I also read autobiographies (John Cooper-Clarke), true life tales of a junior officer in Afghanistan, a Michael Palin travel book on North Korea, a book on the existential threat of big tech, a book on utopias, and a book on the malevolence of big corporations. I read books on the art and science of leadership. I read books I quoted in (successful) interviews: The Chimp Paradox (no, I wasn’t going for a role as a zoo keeper).
I also read No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop which just so happened to have been penned by my boss! I enjoyed it and I’m not just brown-nosing: it made me watch Labyrinth again and The Storyteller series. Which was handy after completing Netflix…
Another piece of non-fiction which stands out is The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. This was recommended by my father-in-law, and I would in turn recommend it to anyone else. It’s about reclaiming the lives of the women so brutally murdered by Jack. Making them more than victims. But also about exposing how society at the time was at times as cruel as he was.
Patterns
Some weird patterns I noticed during my reading year:
In April, bizarrely I read two novels with cats amongst the main protagonists: the excellent The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward and French Exit by Patrick ‘Sisters Brothers’ de Witt. And in October, two books on the trot which featured snakes (as an instrument of torture and as a part of a religious ceremony) in CJ Lyons’ Snake Skin, and The Nowhere Child by Christian White
But you don’t want to read any more of this build-up, do you? You want to know WHO’S WON!
So here are my top twenty:
- Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
- Billy Summers by Stephen King
- The Dirty South by John Connolly
- The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
- The Thrill of it All by Joseph O’Connor
- The Children Act by Ian McEwan
- The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
- The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
- A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
- Fair Warning by Michael Connelly
- Summer by Ali Smith
- NW by Zadie Smith
- Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh
- The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
- The Naturalist by Andrew Mayne
- Beneath Devil’s Bridge by Loreth Anne White
- Mystery Man by Bateman
- The Dying Detective by Leif G.W. Persson
- Cunning Folk by Adam L.G. Nevill
King’s coronation:
So finally my favourite writer lands a top spot in my chart. As well as the gold medal, he carries off the bronze medal, too. I mean, he had a podium finish last year (with his short story collection If It Bleeds) but this is something else…
I think the reason King so dominates my chart this year is – as well as being an obsessive, I’m also a completist. I realised that although I devour all of his new stuff on an annual basis, there are some gaps in my Kingly knowledge. So I’ve been back and revisited some classics from his back catalogue which I haven’t read. Which explains my number one choice. I mean The Shawshank Redemption has always been one of my favourite films and the images in my head of Red and Andy Dufresne will always – indelibly – be Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. But I don’t think that explained my resistance to reading the book. I think I was maybe just scared I’d be disappointed. That the hope would blink out.
It didn’t. Remarkably I’ve read seven novels by King this year but Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is the ultimate. And I did start thinking of Red in a slightly different way and I did see Andy differently (he’s diminutive in the book: Robbins is massive). And now I have two massive favourites in two different media. So all round, a big win.
And the best of the rest (no particular order):
Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King; The Punishment She Deserves by Elizabeth George; The Nowhere Child by Christian White; The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold; Later by Stephen King; Jpod by Douglas Coupland; Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz; The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly; The Cove by Ron Rash; ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King; Lazarus by Lars Kepler; The Quarry by Iain Banks; Swimming Home by Deborah Levy; Nightingale Point by Luan Goldie; The Soul of Discretion by Susan Hill; Damnation Falls by Edward Wright; 1922 by Stephen King; The Castaways by Lucy Clarke; Gallows View by Peter Robinson; Love all the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by Bill Hicks Foreword by John Lahr; The Lost Village by Camilla Sten; The Second Sleep by Robert Harris; Pine by Francine Toon; Utopia for Realists (and How we can Get There) by Rutger Bregman; The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan; Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens; The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey; Twelve Days of Winter by Stuart Macbride; The Good People by Hannah Kent; Good Bait by John Harvey; Borzois and Bevuardos or Kiss That Steak Slice Goodbye by Alan Devey; A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin; Death in Summer by William Trevor; Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd; The Noble Path by Peter May; The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz; Snake Skin by CJ Lyons; These Toxic Things by Rachel Howzell Hall; The Heatwave by Kate Riordan; Dead Pretty by David Mark; Vox by Christina Dalcher; Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King; The Resurrectionist by James Bradley; The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman; The Burning Girl by Mark Billingham; World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer; Girl A by Abigail Dean; The Girl Beneath the Sea by Andrew Mayne; Darksoul by Anna Stephens; The History of Bees by Maja Lunde; The Red Apprentice: Ole Gunnar Solksjaer: the Making of Manchester United’s Great Hope by Jamie Jackson; I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke; The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman; French Exit by Patrick de Witt; My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl; Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera; The Romford Pele: It’s Only Ray Parlour’s Autobiography by Ray Parlour with Amy Lawrence; The Broker by John Grisham; The Things You Didn’t See by Ruth Dugdall; No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop by Matt Bacon; Denial by Peter James; North Korea Journal by Michael Palin; Stranded by Stuart James; Still Water by John Harvey; Grantchester Grind by Tom Sharpe; Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell; The Reluctant Leader: Coming out of the Shadows by Peter Shaw and Hilary Douglas; Someone we Know by Shari Lapena; The Catch by T.M. Logan; Touch by Claire North; The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters; Death on the Rive Nord by Adrian Magson
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