Books of the Year

(Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash)

I never keep track of how many books I read in a year, but one thing is for sure: it’s never enough. I spend most of the year thinking how great it would be to finally read that novel by so-and-so, or re-read such-and-such, or even tackle Proust, but time is short and seems to get ever shorter, while my to-be-read pile gets ever higher.

I have, however, read some excellent books this year. One of the great things about reviewing is that I often discover authors and books I would never have otherwise read. Highlights this year include Andrew O’Hagan’s book of essays The Secret Life, which contains a gripping account of his abortive collaboration on Julian Assange’s autobiography; Philip Hoare’s wonderful RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (though I never did work out why the title is all in caps and run on like that); and Richard Ford’s moving memoir about his parents, Between Them.

Fiction-wise, the novel I loved most this year was actually published last year: Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk. I had never read any of her books before, so this was a real revelation: a hypnotic read, drenched in Spanish sunshine, and quite unlike anything else I have come across. I also very much enjoyed Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land and Paul Theroux’s Mother Land.

But my overall book of the year was one of the first I read back in January: Xiaolu Guo’s terrific Once Upon a Time in the East, her memoir of growing up in an impoverished Chinese village. I mentioned earlier in the year in this blog that it would definitely be a contender for book of the year, and as it turns out nothing since has quite matched it. It very much deserves its shortlisting in the biography category of this year’s Costa Awards, and I hope it wins.