Books I read in 2021

I still scan my books into Goodreads when I take them back to the library so I can see what I've read - it is only a partial picture this year because the library has been closed for most of the sitting weeks, so I've read a lot of books that were borrowed, second-hand, bought from shops or even (gasp) books I already own and just haven't read yet. I'll put the list in here for anybody who cares, it is the usual very random mix. A bit more science fiction / fantasy than usual, and some of them were very good. I loved the Tamsyn Muir books (final in the trilogy due out next year I think) - brilliant world building but also there is something about her humour that I just clicked with - turns out she's from HOWICK so that explains it. It's a kiwi thing. I also loved the book by Susanna Clarke, and John Burnside was an absolute find, as you can see I think I read everything the library had. 

Other than that the books by Benjamin Wood, Charlotte Wood, Ian Pears and Benjamin Markovits are still memorable. This is my test, if I can't remember anything about the book at this point then it probably was good not great - and if a book isn't even good then I don't finish it and it doesn't go on this list. With the exception of the book by Inga Simpson - I used to work with Inga and I kind of hate-finished it because she was a bit high-maintenance and it comes through quite clearly in this memoir. And I don't know if I'll bother reading anything else by Sally Rooney. But other than that I can say that all the books on my list were worth finishing, which is quite a compliment in a lockdown year of very limited focus. 

Shards of Earth (The Final Architects Trilogy, #1)	Adrian Tchaikovsky
How to Be Both	Ali Smith
Rules of Civility	Amor Towles
Autonomous	Annalee Newitz
Christmas in Austin	Benjamin Markovits
The Ecliptic	Benjamin Wood
The Reader	Bernhard Schlink
Life after Truth	Ceridwen Dovey
The Weekend	Charlotte Wood
The Word Ghost	Christine Paice
You Think It, I'll Say It	Curtis Sittenfeld
The Song of the Orphans (Silvers, #2)	Daniel Price
Influx	Daniel Suarez
Slade House	David Mitchell
Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002	David Sedaris
Square Haunting	Francesca Wade
The Amazing Mrs Livesey	Freda Marnie Nicholls
The Golem And The Djinni	Helene Wecker
Arcadia	Iain Pears
Understory: a life with trees	Inga Simpson
Killing Adonis	J.M. Donellan
Ashland & Vine	John Burnside
Havergey	John Burnside
A Summer of Drowning	John Burnside
The Secrets of Wishtide	Kate Saunders
Single, Carefree, Mellow	Katherine Heiny
The Quick	Lauren Owen
Inscape	Louise Carey
The Guest List	Lucy Foley
The Midnight Library	Matt Haig
Star-Crossed	Minnie Darke
How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation	N.J. Enfield
Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life	Nina Stibbe
My Life with Bob	Pamela Paul
Coventry: Essays	Rachel Cusk
The Sunlit Night	Rebecca Knight
Between Them: Remembering My Parents	Richard Ford
City of Blades  (The Divine Cities, #2)	Robert Jackson Bennett
Normal People	Sally Rooney
Oligarchy	Scarlett Thomas
The Choke	Sofie Laguna
Piranesi	Susanna Clarke
Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)	Tamsyn Muir
Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)	Tamsyn Muir
I Shall Wear Midnight	Terry Pratchett
The Master Bedroom	Tessa Hadley
Agency	William Gibson

Yet another beach weekend

Unexpectedly, everything at work sorted itself out last week, and rather than being a last minute bunfight it turned out to be very quiet at the end. So I took a half day recreation leave on Friday afternoon and headed down the beach. It was rather fun to stop in Braidwood for lunch and poke around the cafes and shops instead of barrelling straight through.  I even got a walk in before it got dark ... although the storms were brewing. There were enormous electrical storms and heavy rain all through the night. 

Saturday wasn't much better, so I stayed indoors most of the day and sewed myself a pair of pants and read. I finished a biography of George Orwell (long, detailed, but surprisingly interesting) and a biography of Edgar Allan Poe (short, not very detailed, but interesting because his life was a TRAINWRECK). Mostly what I learned was that if you want to support your family financially don't become a writer, and tuberculosis is an awful hideous illness that cut down whole families over agonising decades. 

There was a patch between rainstorms where I went for a nice walk, but I wasn't tempted to swim, even though the water temperature was quite warm. The pants turned out quite well although they were a bit of an experiment - a 'wearable muslin' where you use fabric that you aren't especially fond of, but that you will wear, before trying again with the good stuff. I have some good stuff in mind so will make them again.

Sunday was much sunnier but also much colder as the temperature dropped into true autumn. The snowfields got their first dusting and I reckon you could feel it where I was! Despite this lovely blue sky I did not swim. The main beach had the nippers in training and quite a few surfers, but not many fat middle-aged ladies. We are a cowardly bunch.

What I've been reading

Late last year it started to irritate me that I could never remember what books I'd read. I could remember characters, or plots, or settings but never anything useful like a title, or an author. Which is hopeless when you're trying to tell someone you've read an excellent book set in Greece, or about an old woman. I borrow my books from the Parliamentary Library, which has a small but perfectly formed fiction collection. And it's literally 100 metres from my desk ... talk about enabling. Even if I wanted to break the reading habit (which I don't) it would be impossible with my supplier downstairs giving it away for free.

Anyway the only bad thing about the library is that it's a primarily research library, not a lending one, so they don't have a record of what you've borrowed. So I whinged for a bit about not being able to keep track, then decided to do something about it and installed Goodreads. It has an excellent scan function, so now I'm in a routine where before I drop my books back I scan the barcode with the iPad camera and put the book in my "2018" shelf on Goodreads. It is very simple, and means I can tell you that for the first six months of 2018 I read the following 61 books (in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top):

Leonard Woolf: A Biography	Victoria Glendinning
The End of the Day	Claire North
The Women in Black	Madeleine St. John
Re Jane	Patricia  Park
Primary School Confidential: Confessions From the Classroom	Mrs. Woog
Sorcerer to the Crown (Sorcerer Royal #1)	Zen Cho
One Fifth Avenue	Candace Bushnell
We Are Not Ourselves	Matthew  Thomas
Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (Flavia de Luce, #8)	Alan Bradley
Relatively Famous	Roger Averill
The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen	Syrie James
King of the Badgers	Philip Hensher
Where There's A Will	John Mortimer
Ink and Bone	Lisa Unger
An Unkindness of Ghosts	Rivers Solomon
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)	Alan Bradley
The Passengers	Eleanor Limprecht
As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce, #7)	Alan Bradley
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)	Alan Bradley
How Hard Can It Be? (Kate Reddy, #2)	Allison Pearson
Love & Fame	Susie Boyt
Dying: A Memoir	Cory Taylor
Too Close To Home	Georgia Blain
The Girl With All the Gifts	M.R. Carey
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman
This Side of Paradise	F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)	Becky Chambers
Cooee	Vivienne Kelly
Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris	Edmund White
A Red Herring Without Mustard (Flavia de Luce, #3)	Alan Bradley
The Supernatural Enhancements	Edgar Cantero
The Secret Recipe for Second Chances	J.D. Barrett
Dyschronia	Jennifer Mills
The Wonder	Emma Donoghue
Breathless: An American Girl in Paris	Nancy K. Miller
The Days of Abandonment	Elena Ferrante
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society	Mary Ann Shaffer
Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1)	Ernest Cline
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro
Eleanor & Park	Rainbow Rowell
Of Human Bondage	W. Somerset Maugham
Norse Mythology	Neil Gaiman
Wedding Night	Sophie Kinsella
Cosmo Cosmolino	Helen Garner
The Jane Austen Project	Kathleen A. Flynn
Finnikin of the Rock (Lumatere Chronicles, #1)	Melina Marchetta
The Group	Mary McCarthy
Diary of a Provincial Lady	E.M. Delafield
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August	Claire North
Stardust	Neil Gaiman
When We Were Orphans	Kazuo Ishiguro
The Outcasts of Time	Ian Mortimer
DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense	Joyce Carol Oates
Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark, #1)	Veronica Roth
Let Me Be Frank With You	Richard Ford
Landline	Rainbow Rowell
The Forgotten Garden	Kate Morton
The Distant Hours	Kate Morton
I've Got Your Number	Sophie Kinsella
She's Not There	Joy Fielding
Then We Came to the End	Joshua Ferris

Most of them are reasonably lightweight - I read for pleasure not for learning - and I haven't included about another twenty that I started and then decided life was too short to read a boring book (most literary prize winners end up in this group because I am a philistine and book judges are mental). Also this list doesn't include the really crappy ones I download from the ACT public library for when I travel ... this is mostly anything by M.C. Beaton, the Phyrne Fisher series and many with the words 'regency' and 'romance' in the title. Embarrassing, but I can't read anything remotely intellectual in a plane or an airport. I think it's the avgas.

If I had to pick three books off this list as worth reading I would say The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which we did for book club and loved;  When We Were Orphans  - bits of which still stay with me randomly; and the most recent one - a biography of Leonard Woolf who I knew absolutely nothing about (and cared less to be honest) but Victoria Glendinning is such a superb biographer that I loved every page.