A Look Back at 2020’s Reading Projects, Including Rereads

Major bookish initiatives:

• Coordinated a Not the Wellcome Prize blog tour to celebrate 2019’s health-themed books – in case you missed it, the winner was Sinéad Gleeson for Constellations.
• Co-hosted Novellas in November with Cathy (746 Books).
• Hosted Library Checkout each month.

Reading challenges joined:

• 12 blog tours
• Six Degrees of Separation: I started participating in February and did nine posts this year
• Paul Auster Reading Week
• Reading Ireland month
• Japanese Literature Challenge
• 1920 Club
• 20 Books of Summer
• Women in Translation Month
• Robertson Davies Weekend
• Women’s Prize winners (#ReadingWomen)
• 1956 Club
• R.I.P.
• Nonfiction November
• Margaret Atwood Reading Month

This works out to one blog tour, one reading project, and one regular meme per month – manageable. I’ll probably cut back on blog tours next year, though; unless for a new release I’m really very excited about, they’re often not worth it.

Buddy reads:

• Crossing to Safety with Laila (Big Reading Life)
• 6 Carol Shields novels plus The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, Deerbrook, and How to Be Both with Marcie (Buried in Print)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Idea of Perfection with Laura T.
• Mother’s Milk with Annabel
• 666 Charing Cross Road with Liz

Self-set reading challenges:

• Seasonal reading
• Classic of the Month (14 in total; it’s only thanks to Novellas in November that I averaged more than one a month)
• Doorstopper of the Month (just 3; I’d like to try to get closer to monthly in 2021)
• Wainwright Prize longlist reading
• Bellwether Prize winners (read 2, DNFed 1)
• Short stories in September (8 collections)
• Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist reading
• Thematic roundups – I’m now calling these “Three on a Theme” and have done 2 so far
• Journey through the Day with Books (3 new reviews this year):
  • Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore
  • Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen
  • [Up with the Larks by Tessa Hainsworth – DNF]
  • [Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer – DNF]
  • Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell – existing review
  • The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński – read part of
  • Eventide by Kent Haruf
  • Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler – existing review
  • Talk before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg – existing review
  • When the Lights Go Out by Carys Bray
  • Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
  • Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys
  • Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay – existing review
  • Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham
  • The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe
  • Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch – read but not reviewed
  • Silence by Shūsaku Endō
  • Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez – read part of
• The Four in a Row Challenge – I failed miserably with this one. I started an M set but got bogged down in Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (also a bibliotherapy self-prescription for Loneliness from The Novel Cure), which I had as a bedside book for much of the year, so only managed 1.5 out of 4; I also started an H quartet but set both Tinkers and Plainsong aside. Meanwhile, Debbie joined in and completed her own 4 in a Row. Well done! I like how simple this challenge is, so I’m going to use it next year as an excuse to read more from my shelves – but I’ll be more flexible and allow lots of substitutions in case I stall with one of the four books.

Rereading

At the end of 2019, I picked out a whole shelf’s worth of books I’d been meaning to reread. I kept adding options over the year, so although I managed a respectable 16 rereads in 2020, the shelf is still overflowing!

Many of my rereads have featured on the blog over the year, but here are two more I didn’t review at the time. Both were book club selections inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. (We held a rally and silent protest in a park in the town centre in June.)

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama: Remember when there was a U.S. president who thought deeply, searched his soul, and wrote eloquently? I first read this memoir in 2006, when Obama was an up-and-coming Democratic politician who’d given a rousing convention speech. I remembered no details, just the general sweep of Hawaii to Chicago to Kenya. On this reread I engaged most with the first third, in which he remembers a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, gives pen portraits of his white mother and absentee Kenyan father, and works out what it means to be black and Christian in America. By age 12, he’d stopped advertising his mother’s race, not wanting to ingratiate himself with white people. By contrast, “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.” The long middle section on community organizing in Chicago nearly did me in; I had to skim past it to get to his trip to Kenya to meet his paternal relatives – “Africa had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land”. then/ now

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot: This Wellcome Book Prize winner about the use of a poor African-American woman’s cells in medical research was one of the first books to turn me onto health-themed reads. I devoured it in a few days in 2010. Once again, I was impressed at the balance between popular science and social history. Skloot conveys the basics of cell biology in a way accessible to laypeople, and uses recreated scenes and dialogue very effectively. I had forgotten the sobering details of the Lacks family experience, including incest, abuse, and STDs. Henrietta had a rural Virginia upbringing and had a child by her first cousin at age 14. At 31 she would be dead of cervical cancer, but the tissue taken from her at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins hospital became an immortal cell line. HeLa is still commonly used in medical experimentation. Consent was a major talking point at our book club Zoom meeting. Cells, once outside a body, cannot be owned, but it looks like exploitation that Henrietta’s descendants are so limited by their race and poverty. I had forgotten how Skloot’s relationship and travels with Henrietta’s unstable daughter, Deborah, takes over the book (as in the film). While I felt a little uncomfortable with how various family members are portrayed as unhinged, I still thought this was a great read. then / now

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I had some surprising rereading DNFs. These were once favorites of mine, but for some reason I wasn’t able to recapture the magic: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I attempted a second read of John Fowles’s postmodern Victorian pastiche, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, on a mini-break in Lyme Regis, happily reading the first third on location, but I couldn’t make myself finish once we were back home. And A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan was very disappointing a second time; it hasn’t aged well. Lastly, I’ve been stalled in Watership Down for a long time, but do intend to finish my reread.

In general, voice- and style-heavy fiction did not work so well for me on rereading. Autobiographical essays by Anne Lamott and Abigail Thomas worked best, but I also succeeded at rereading some straightforward novels and short stories. Next year, I’d like to aim for a similar number of rereads, with a mixture of memoirs and fiction, including at least one novel by David Lodge. I’d also be interested in rereading earlier books by Ned Beauman and Curtis Sittenfeld if I can find them cheap secondhand.

What reading projects did you participate in this year?

Done much rereading lately?