I feel bad saying it, it is a mark of my privilege and comfort, but was not the most terrible year of my life. In many ways, it was even a good year. My family spent a lot of time together last year; among other things, I watched my daughter grow into someone who edits YouTube videos with aplomb. At not-quite ten she is already the house IT person. As an introvert, I found staying home all the time the opposite of a burden.
Last week I had to be somewhere relatively crowded, for the first time in months , and boy am I going to be in for a rude awakening when this is all over. I missed seeing friends, but honestly my social circle here is small, and I continued to connect with readers from all over the world on BookTwitter.
Most excitingly, I had a lot of time to read. For good or for ill my response to bad times is the same as to goodβto escape this world and its demands into a book. I think back to the hope I sometimes felt in the first days of the pandemic that we might change our ways of livingβI mean, we will, in more or less minor ways, but not, it seems, in big ones. I feel hopelessness at the ongoingness of the pandemic, the sense that we may still be closer to the beginning than the end.
I suppose what most concerns me when I say that was not a terrible year is my fear of how much more terrible years might soon become. My anxiety about the climate-change-inspired upheavals to come sent me to books, too, more in search of hope than distraction. A few of the titles below helped with that. Mostly, though, reading books is just what I do. For the second straight year, I managed to write briefly about every book I read.
You can catch up on my monthly review posts here:. All told, I finished books in , almost the same as the year before though, since some of these were real doorstoppers, no doubt I read more pages all told. Sadlyβif predictablyβI read no collections of poetry or plays last year. Only 4 were re-reads; no surprise, given how little I was teaching. These are the books a reader reads for. My book of the year. A road novel about a cattle-drive from the Mexican border to Montana around Thrilling, funny, epic, homely.
