One-line book reviews: my best reads in 2021

Image by Mariusz Matuszewski from Pixabay 

Another year of reading passes … and writing these blogs really does help cement the books in my mind, and allows me to enjoy them all over again.

I was gently nudged on Facebook when posting last year's blog to read fewer books by dead, white men. I tried – feel free to send recommendations my way. 

Alongside the books listed below, this has been, again, a year for the short story (I aim for one a day): in magazines, ezines, books, and compilations by one author and many (not sure where to start with short stories? Try The Best British Short Stories by Salt Publishing, Ambit, Brittle Star, Carve, Confingo, The Dublin Review, Fictive Dream, Frogmore, Into The Void, Litro, Mslexia, Neon, The Paris Review, The Pomegranate …) I've also had a couple of short stories published; you can find links to them at the end of this post.

A reminder of why I keep a record of the books I read: 

1) I've got a poor memory and find it really frustrating not to be able to remember the titles of books I've enjoyed, especially when discussing books with other people. 

2) In 2019, Dan challenged me (well, he challenged himself, and I took up the challenge) to read 30 books a year. Having an aim of reading 30 books each year is very good for keeping me off Twitter. Not that my tweets aren't brilliant and insightful, mind, and should be read by everyone from that dishy Canadian PM to Jürgen Klopp …

Like last year, I won't bother to link to books. JFGI. As ever, I would encourage you to use a local bookshop or Hive if any of them appeal to you, sanctimonious Leftie that I am. 

1. The Errant Hours by Kate Innes: the first of a trilogy set in the 13th century, based on real-life events, apparently. Gentle criminality, bread, beer and a maiden saved by a rich nobleman. Readable, but not quite engaging enough to make me want to read the rest of the trilogy.
   
2. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead: a shocking and inspiring novel about a woman escaping her slave owners using a network of secret routes (including a fictional underground railway) and brave strangers to reach a safer part of America. I don't think I've ever rooted for a heroine so much before. Inevitably, it's heartbreaking.
   
3. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite: I suppose it's quite a sassy read but I just didn't believe at all in the two main characters. More of a novella.
   
4. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman: given to me by a great friend, this book ticks the "heartwarming" box with a thick permanent marker. It tells the story of a grumpy old Swedish man (who has a legitimate reason to be grumpy) and how life is made complete by one lovely woman. And how, later, it became complete once more.
   
5. The Lake House by Kate Morton: not to be confused with the film of the same name, this is an enjoyable book that follows a familiar structure of a person in the present working through their gremlins by unravelling a mystery from the path. Excellent in places, it is RUINED by the oh so convenient ending.
   
6. The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett: a prequel to the Kingsbridge Trilogy, but sadly nowhere near as good. I don't feel Follett gets under the skin of the 10th century as successfully as he did for the 12th. Plus his Beautiful AND Determined!!!  female characters are beginning to annoy me. 
7. Heresy by SJ Parris: the first in the series set in the 16th century about an Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno. Great fun. Not as good as Shardlake but better than most historical fiction.
   
8. Prophesy by SJ Parris: the second in the series set in the … you get the drift.
   
9. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens: The subtitle of the novel in its original guise, "Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation" hints that this is not the most dramatic Dickens novel, concerned as it is with the murky world of Victorian business. It lacks any of the truly great characters that Dickens created but it has lines of surprising poetry – "The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery". And the common themes of poverty, broken families and social justice are explored in a more subtle way than in his other novels. Plus it has the line: "Never, for any wrong, inflict a punishment that cannot be recalled." Worth remembering that one.
10. Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith: a rollicking good read and a deserved bestseller. I was aware of the accusation of, but did not observe while reading, the "pernicious anti-trans tropes".
11. Zikora by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: an inspirational short (but longer than most in magazines) story about motherhood.
    
12. Quichotte by Salman Rushdie: so many subplots it felt like I was holding two or three books at a time. It's lyrical, fantastic, imaginative, unruly, insightful, playful, dramatic, ridiculous, odd and much more. A literary map of a familiar yet unknown land. Relationships, families, exile, race, celebrity, modern culture or lack of it, loneliness. It's a brave roadtrip of a novel, with strangely unlovable characters. An epic without a hero. I liked the start, got a bit bogged down in the middle, wondered how on earth Rushdie was going to tie it all together, and felt satisfied at the end.
13. The Iron Chariot by Stein Riverton: I've never seen or read any other Scandi Noir so I haven't got much to compare this to. But I loved it! Thrilling, dark, bleak, with a little bit of suavity thrown in. Just don't read the intro beforehand because it'll ruin it.
    
14. Summerwater by Sarah Moss: a collection of short stories unified by the thread of the location – all the characters are on holiday at the same caravan park in Scotland, largely having a miserable time. Characters appear fleetingly, and then become the principals in their own story. The "overthinking during sex" story is downright hilarious and, although there are dark moments, overall it's an invigorating, contemporary read. I just didn't like the ending. Too tidy. Sorry.
    
15. On Beauty by Zadie Smith: you don't have to read Howard's End first. I'm not sure I've ever read Howard's End. In fact, it's pretty pretentious to write an homage to Howard's End isn't it? In fact the whole book is pretentious, dripping with artistic adventures and hyper-realism as it narrates the adventures and misadventures of academics annoying and shagging each other across the globe, and it's wonderful for it, even if it is written with an eye on the Booker panel.
    
16. Fire in the Thatch: a Devonshire mystery by ECR Lorac: no tittering please. I picked up this beautiful edition with its picturesque tea-towel cover from the British Library bookshop as a little treat to myself, and it really was a treat; a neat little crime story set in the English countryside at the end of WW2. The only downer was my favourite character was killed off after only a few chapters. Ah well.
    
17. To Sir, with Love by ER Braithwaite: those who have known me a while will allow themselves a wry smile at this choice. It's a first-person account of Braithwaite's struggles and triumphs as he establishes himself as a teacher in the East End of London. Strangely, the racism he encounters seems less vicious than what we see today, perhaps because it was less insidious, less anonymous, and more based on stupidity and lack of experience, than on cultivated hate. I'm cannot pretend to know what it's like to experience racism, nor can I understand the mindset of people who believe one colour of skin to be superior to another, but this book is a wonderful, if nostalgic, read and reminds us to celebrate inspiring teachers, always.
    
18. The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell: if you don't like anthropomorphism, look away now. If you do like heartwarming, animals, schoolboys, ruminations and motorbikes in South America, this is a book for you. Very readable.
    
19. The Man Who Disappeared by Clare Morrall: I was womanning a school book stall in a small space, and didn't have many customers. After tidying up the donated Beanos one too many times, I decided to live the message and just stand there reading a book. And I chose this one, about a woman and her children whose comfortable, middle class, suburban lives are torn apart when the father goes missing. Strong characters, weaker setting (I think veryrichtoverypoor might jar a little more than this book suggests), but a book I do not regret reading.
    
20. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell: before this came out, O'Farrell probably didn't get the recognition she deserves as a writer of – I believe – similar quality to Edna O'Brien, Anne Tyler  and even Iris Murdoch, possibly because her novels are more 'samey' and narrower, (although possibly also just because she's not old or dead). This book changes all that. It's shorter than you expect, and follows a well-trodden path of Tudor fiction, but in a pair of beautifully sewn new silk slippers. The opening section of the second half of the book, describing how the plague reached England, is some of the best writing this century. Warning: it's inevitably a sad read.
    
21. The Binding by Bridget Collins: a fascinating exploration of what the world might be like if we bound up our painful memories in a book, and filed them away from our souls in a place where they could not harm us. There's a long love affair in the middle, in which memory takes a back seat, and this book is probably longer than it needed to be. Interesting and readable though. 
    
22. A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot: a crime novel, a WW1 novel, a love story … and yet in some ways a subversion of all those genres. Definitely read it.
    
23. Sacrilege by SJ Parris: The third in the series … you get the drift.
24. Arthur and George by Julian Barnes: In 1903, 27-year-old George Edalji was accused of maiming a pony near the village where he lived with his family, including his father, who was a local vicar. This novel, leaning lightly on the historical evidence, explores the racism and police incompetence that accompanied the trial, and the subsequent involvement of the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in support of Edalji. It also explores "Arthur's" love affairs and fascination with spiritualism. It's well-written and enjoyable, although the absence of women grew tiresome.
    
25. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: Brilliant. Scary. Not great for reading during a pandemic as it narrates the apocalyptic consequences of a virus spreading across the world. LOLS.
    
26. The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells: this won the EU prize for literature, and it is a European novel, written by a German-Swiss author, and full of wonderful and now seemingly more distant European settings, with wine and mountains. It's about not marrying your first love, and how you may live to regret it. Another sad one I'm afraid. 
    
27. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín: I expected passion; instead I got sensible characters and perfectly manicured writing. Love affairs that don't quite bubble over, transatlantic adventures that somehow fail to shock. I enjoyed this book, but it left me a little cold.
    
28. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym: in a way, this novel is like an eccentric 1970s precursor to the mega-best-seller The Thursday Murder Club, dealing as it does with retirement life. Yet oh what a dark and empty life of tinned food and long library days awaits some of us in our old age. It's poignant and elegant but the humour didn't really ring through for me. Read through the prism of the decline of office working, it's easy to forget how the structure and companionship of office life can offer much to people who live alone. Are we as a society ready to generate the social warmth that will replace office life? So many of the structures that kept people company have retreated: unions, churches and pubs. But the human interactions of 30 years ago are also starting to disappear: chatting to people at the checkout, in the ticket office, on the bus. There has been a retreat into the family unit and loyalty to the family far outweighs any other claim on our time and hearts. And if you don't have a family, or if the family unit is a place of fear, the world can be a desperately lonely place.
    
29. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell: the old criticism that you can't really know poverty if you've got the safety net of being a public school-educated intellectual can be levelled at this book – although this was Orwell's first publication. Written in 1933, it contains no spectre of war and instead is a really quite jolly account of the horrors of working in restaurant kitchens and smoking loads of roll-ups. "The more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it," Orwell warns. Only Burmese Days to go!  
    
30. From the Heart by Susan Hill: obviously once you're a grandee of the literary world, editors no longer actually edit your work as this short novel about an earnest woman pursuing a career as a teacher could have done with a lot of red pen.   
    
31. An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd: Catch-22 transported to WW1 and the East African front. OK so it's not quite that, but that's the bell it rang. Gruesome in places. Another book, and one of the better ones, about the stupidity of war.
    
32. Treachery by SJ Parris: The fourth in … you get the drift.
33. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters: not her best, mainly because the first section is too long. If it's a Waters novel, and there are two female characters, you know they're going to cop off before long. And the sense of time (just after WW1) is much less evocative than in her Victorian and 1940s novels. It gets much more interesting when it transforms into a crime novel – not a whodunit; rather a willtheygetawaywithit? 
    
34. The Liar's Gospel by Naomi Alderman: as distasteful as crunching on a clementine seed, as raw as a slaughtered lamb, this is a telling of the Easter story (and a good chunk either side) from the perspective of Mary, Judas Iscariot, Caiaphas and Barabbas. I didn't exactly enjoy it, and I probably wouldn't donate it to the little library at church, but it is an excellent novel.
    
35. Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers by Henry Williamson: nature writing is all the vogue these days, and can be a bit too full of nostalgia and whimsy, with a tendency to anthropomorphise. This book truly evokes the sights and sounds of England's wildernesses, from forest to river to sea. It's from the perspective of the animals but not in a Farthing Wood sort of way. It's much less sentimental and raises interesting questions about how animals feel fear and pain, and whether they grieve. Death (not a spoiler as Williamson put it in the title …) in this animal world is not violent but inevitable, and brief. There is a lot humans could learn from the way these animals die.
    
36. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass: I can't quite believe they managed to make a film out of this book! In an audacious interchange between first and third person narration this is a stunning masterpiece about identity, fractured families, madness, war, glass, love, jealousy …  It takes an idea and expands it like a balloon maker, stretching and contorting it, exploring it far further than would seem possible, always returning to a central thread of ridiculing what should be valued and valuing items of ridicule. It's fantastically imaginative yet all the ideas are rooted in and routed around reality. This is a world turned upside down, inside out, reflected in a mirror, darkly, where the objects of life drive the narrative as much as the characters and their emotions, where a voluminous skirt, or a carpet runner, an onion or, of course, a tin drum receive weighty chunks of dedicated prose, entire pages of one paragraph and sub-clause heaped upon sub-clause like pancakes in an American diner. I bet it was an absolute bitch to translate.
    
37. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: if Crime and Punishment is a novel about protecting the self, at all costs, The Idiot is a novel about self-sacrifice – how far will you go to show love for others? What damage will you do in your attempts to do good? From the nihilism of Raskolnikov to the failed utilitarianism of Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin (yes I have copied and pasted that) who seeks to save everyone and in the end makes everyone unhappy. I only read Dostoyevsky because my Dad loves his novels, and now I've left it too late to have a proper conversation with him about them.  
38. The Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch: every page seeps with Pre-Raphaelite drama: fires, suicidal maidens, doomed love affairs with poor Russian emigres. A whirlwind of a novel in which everyone is unhappily in love with everyone else, and – exciting as it all is – you can't help thinking, as you do when you watch Downton or A Very British Scandal, does no one around here have to work for a living?
    

So better late than never eh? If you only want one recommendation, read The Tin Drum if you want to read a classic, and The End of Loneliness if you want to pretend you have. 

And my stories:

• In Praise of Fire (The Manchester Review)
• Legacy (East of the Web)
• Leaf identification (Litro)
• Mammals (Mslexia – you need to pay for this one)
• The Unbidden Guest (self-published on Wattpad)
• The Tunnel (self-published on Wattpad)