I’m a slow reader. I say yes to more proofs than I should because of magical thinking about my ability to get things done. It’s true I do ‘pick up speed at the last minute’ – an answer I selected once on a psychometric test – but the sustained concentration reading requires falls out of the set things I can power through. I’m also not great at quickly arriving at a fully synthesised response to what I read. I read, I have feelings about what I read, but the feelings take a while to attach themselves to words. But if I leave it too long, I forget the book, I forget what I loved about it, and I’m only left with the impression of having loved it. So, while I loved lots of books this year, I’m only focusing here on the ones that have really stuck in my brain, the ones I seem to have continued a relationship with after the act of reading.
Some of these are by people I either know and/or love so I’ve included disclaimers for transparency.
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
The best reading experience for me is one that makes me want to write. Of all the books I’ve read over the past year it is Kick the Latch that made me most excited about writing. I read it slowly, treating each short chapter like a poem I wanted to memorise.
On Trampolining by Rebecca Perry
Max Porter describes this book as ‘a masterpiece of poetic memoir’ and I don’t think I can better that. The starting point is Perry’s childhood as a world-class competitive trampolinist, but this isn’t a story about sport. It’s about memory, about failure, expectation, and pain; it’s about the anticipation and reality of loss. And these strands are woven together with such artfulness, such beautiful pacing and surprising details, you’d think you’re watching an incredible performer in the flow of their routine. Rebecca might be my closest friend but she’s also one of my favourite writers. On Trampolining is the book I want to give to everyone I love in the way I did with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and it’s hard to think of higher praise than that.
I think this is the sexiest book I’ve ever read and Patrick’s writing on the body, how the body makes itself felt in the text is incredibly beautiful. I don’t think a single word is out of place in this novel and I cannot wait to read Patrick’s poetry collection Three Births, out with Granta this coming year.
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
This book has gone immediately into my personal canon of non-fiction. It is a formally inventive and rich collection of 248 ‘notes’ on Black life – memoir, photography, art, testimony, quotation, definitions, essay. Each note stands perfectly alone, but cumulatively they are – as John Keene puts it in his blurb – ‘an extraordinary gift’.
A Misalliance by Anita Brookner
I am horrified by how lazy I’ve become as a reader in that I tend to pick up what is sent to me, this year I was determined to change that, and I am now a Brookner head after getting stuck into her vast back catalogue. Her sentences are so crisp I had to contain writerly envy as I read, but it’s her shrewd observations on how her characters feel and behave that make me feel like a disciple at her feet, determined to learn everything I can.
This beautiful, sad and dignified novella about a woman living with and dying from cancer left me reeling with my emotional responses. It may seem strange to pick this example of an image for a book about how to live with dying but I love the writing so much: ‘her hair slicked away from her face like a seal or a woman who knows she’s beautiful.’ I’d never thought that before, and I read and thought: exactly that.
Blakemore is a close a friend, but I cannot pretend to always love the writing of people I know. It does not break confidences to say in a group chat with other people she knows – but which she is not a member of – the praise for The Glutton has been universal. It isn’t an overstatement to say she is an astonishing writer. No image is wasted. Her style is ornate, baroque but not gratuitously so. And it is refreshing to read in contrast to the vogue for ‘spare’ writing. Most poets would kill for even one of the dozen or more images she crams into a single paragraph.
Other loves
Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings impressed me so much and some lines and images from it have stuck in my head, like when journalist Tom is in a lift and in his head, he wails ‘I’m the loneliest person in the world!’. Michael Magee’s Close to Home, with a working-class male narrative voice that is so brilliantly clean and true it made me feel a strange kind of grief. I loved Orbital by Samantha Harvey – a woozy dream of a book about astronauts circling the Earth. Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually made me laugh and squirm with recognition. The storytelling in The Trees by Percival Everett had me gripped. I loved Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings, a memoir about coming of age in Sheffield, Octavia Bright’s This Ragged Grace, a tender book on the grief and loss of a parent to Alzheimer’s in step with the loss and recovery of her identity. I know I read and enjoyed a bunch of other stuff but I’m not a good record keeper and there are likely embarrassing omissions here which will have me updating the post once I’ve sent it. I just took a photo of my book shelves and can see some already!
Poetry
I barely read any poetry this year which I feel shitty about, but four books have stuck with me: Susannah Dickey’s Isdal, Joey Connolly’s The Recycling, Emily Hasler’s Local Interest and Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora Poems. Poetry is a small place so I know Susannah, Emily and Joey well and have long admired Momtaza.
I also spent time with the incredible talent of my friend Gboyega Odubanjo who died in September. His first full collection will be published by Faber, but in the meantime please read his pamphlets Aunty Uncle Poems and While I Yet Live. We should have got a lifetime of his work and friendship, but the gifts he has left us with are extraordinary and I am so grateful. He will never be left behind.
Coming soon
Next year there are so many exciting books! I have a big stack of proofs to read so I can’t say much about them yet, but I have read The Lodgers by Holly Pester which is incredible on the precarity of housing and how that bleeds into or sets the stage for equally precarious personal relationships. Sarah Perry’s beautiful, compassionate Enlightenment on friendship, the universe and faith. Right now, I’m reading Sinéad Gleeson’s Hagstone, which I already love only a few chapters in.
I’m looking forward to reading Jason Okundaye’s Revolutionary Acts, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Chimene Suleyman’s The Chain, Strange Bodies by Tom de Freston, Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Top Doll, Constance Debré’s Play Boy, Maggie Nelson’s Like Love, How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Poutney, The Vast Extent by Lavinia Greenlaw, Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time and Free Therapy by Rebecca Ivory. I’m going on holiday soon and I’ll be taking Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli and Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon. I’ve long admired Sinclair’s poetry and I met Sheena at an event in December and bonded with her over some stolen white wine. It wouldn’t be a lie to say I’m already a fan.
What a list! Adored HAGSTONE as well as lots on your list & I think you’ll love the new Heiti 💙