![\"Books](\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/50775275581_7275862e3f_z.jpg\")
<\/a>Books of 2020 – a twitter thread. Click on the image for the high-res version.<\/p><\/div>\n
You may find it easier to scroll through the thread on Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n It has without doubt been an exceptional year. The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in mid-March disrupted my working and commuting patterns in a major way, but it didn’t seem to create any extra time for reading. The time freed by the loss of a daily commute of at least two hours was absorbed by the expansion of the working day. I have if anything undershot my usual annual tally.\u00a0No matter. It’s not a competition.<\/p>\n My habits did change somewhat: almost half of the twenty-one books I read were novels. Normally, I only manage three or four. I also succeeded in reading my highest ever proportion of women authors \u2013 48%. One of these, Hilary Mantel, produced my favourite book of the year, The Mirror and the Light<\/em>,\u00a0the final instalment of her visceral and magisterial trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. I have already pegged her earlier novel on the French Revolution,\u00a0A Place of Greater Safety<\/em>, as one to tackle in 2021.<\/p>\n Otherwise, it is a little harder to discern the highlights. That’s not because of the books themselves. I think that is more of a reflection of the dulling effects of life during lockdown, where days without events blend into one another, the colours of life merging into a dull monotone.<\/p>\n But some do stand out. Oliver Morton’s\u00a0The Moon: a History of the Future<\/em> was that rare thing, a book of poetic non-fiction, while my first encounter with Toni Morrison in\u00a0The Bluest Eye<\/em> was short and sharp and cut to the heart.\u00a0Brandon Taylor’s first novel,\u00a0Real Life<\/em>, is one of the few I’ve ever read to bring life in a laboratory to life, through the tortured isolation of its gay, black protagonist. By contrast, Kathryn Mannix’s hospice stories,\u00a0With the End in Mind<\/em>, brought death to life in a way that was blessedly reassuring.<\/p>\n Only one novel disappointed me:\u00a0The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em> by Ursula Le Guin. I know it is regarded by many as a classic, but I was left out in the cold by its icy, alien landscapes. Everything else provided many moments of delight and insight, words to map out the world a little more clearly than before. I am grateful to all the authors I read. But for some reason the non-fiction titles figure more sharply in my memory, so I am especially thankful to Adam Rutherford for setting out his anti-racist manifesto (How to Argue with a Racist<\/em>), to Philip Ball for unpicking the entanglement of physics with Nazism (Serving the Reich<\/em>), to John Ziman for delineating the boundaries of science (Real Science<\/em>), to Stuart Ritchie for his accounts of how and why those boundaries are crossed (Science Fictions<\/em>), to Michael Sandel for examining the underbelly of ‘merit’ (The Tyranny of Merit<\/em>), and to Margaret Heffernan for charting a more human course through the complex endeavours of organisations (Uncharted: How to Map the Future Together<\/em> and\u00a0Wilful Blindness).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I made what I think was a smart move at the beginning of 2020. Instead of waiting until the year’s end and then struggling to recall what I thought of the books I had read, I created a Twitter thread\u00a0of … Continue reading