A year, some books, accidental learning

 

December's books. Guess which one's for book group.

In 2021 I made a new year resolution that I kept. This might be a first. It was to read four books a month.

It doesn’t sound much, and it’s nothing compared to people like Andy Miller, but it gave me the chance to tackle a bit of the feeling I get of “so many books, so little time” every time I go on Books Twitter.

Actually I’ve averaged five. I could have read more, but I don’t live alone, and I feel obliged to spend Quality Time with my husband occasionally.

I can read fast – I sometimes finish a book in one or two sittings – but I don’t think reading fast is necessarily a good thing. It dawned on me some time this year that the time spent reading a book is longer than the time you are physically looking at the pages. There’s the time you spend processing it afterwards. If I ate up books at the rate I did as a child, or went from one book straight to another, I’d lose that. 

It’s like slow food, or those “slow TV” programmes that BBC Four shows around this time of year: you have to slow down to get the benefit. One book that really felt like “slow reading” this year was Lev Parikian’s Light Rains Sometimes Fall. You read it without worrying about the destination. Nothing much happens and you don’t read for the plot. Well, small things happen. It’s all about noticing small things: an “exercise in observation”. Which is why it’s such a good book for another covid year. 

So what else have I been reading? About half were new books that came out (or came out in paperback) this year, and the rest were things that had been on my wishlist for a while. A lot of them came from the library. I’d love to illustrate this blog post with a picture of a huge, jenga-like pile of books, but I can’t, because most of them have gone back.

I’m not going to list all of them, because that would be boring, but here are some themes. And some things that I accidentally learnt from reading them.

Middle-aged men

I started the year reading Roddy Doyle’s Love, because it was a Christmas present. I ended it reading Roddy Doyle’s Life Without Children, because that was a Christmas present. I’ve been with Roddy Doyle since The Commitments; we are the same age and he knows how our generation’s minds work.  (And he helps me to understand how men’s minds work.) This is from the new book: "He knew that Taylor Swift and Stormzy existed but he'd no idea what they sounded like." In Love, he uses the phrase “late middle-age”. I’ve been practising using it.

Ghost Town by Jeff Young. A memoir based around a city, remembering a Liverpool that no longer exists. Particularly timely in a year when the city lost its World Heritage status due to bad town planning decisions (are there any other kind?), but universal in its middle-aged melancholy.
From another book this year (see below) I learnt the Anglo Saxon word dustsceawung: “the fascination experienced by someone looking at a ruin a kind of daydream of dust, pondering that which has been lost: dust-seeing, dust-chewing, dust-cheering. The daydream of a mind strung between past and present.” Jeff’s book is like that.

Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan. About life and death, youth and middle age, what it means to live life to the full. The second half makes you think about that stuff. The first half is a hilarious description of young men and music which I absolutely loved. I wanted to keep quoting all of it. Which is funny, because the young men in the book keep quoting stuff they like, too.

Middle-aged women

 

I like that look of determination.

 

Swell, a Waterbiography by Jenny Landreth. It’s weird how many books I’ve read recently about outdoor swimming (Ruth Fitzmaurice, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Katherine May, among others). It must be a Thing. You won’t get me doing it, but I did like the quotes she gave from women who do. “I reclaimed faith in my body”; swimming “to live more vividly in my skin”. I know what they mean, because that’s what dancing was like for me, when I could still do it. I also read Jenny’s amateur theatre memoir Break a Leg, a similar mix of social history and memoir but on a subject closer to  my heart. I liked the warmth in it, especially about her parents. She’s a very engaging writer.

More Than A Woman by Caitlin Moran. Also very engaging, but you probably know that already. I read out the “What are you really thinking” section to my husband and he laughed out loud. She’s also good at switching from funny to political to personal/serious. And I agree with most of it. Especially about the never-ending To Do List (and I don’t even have kids).

Manifesto by Bernardine Evaristo. It made me wish I had her self-belief and tenacity. Favourite lines: “I managed to rid myself of the taboo around ageing; I feel that I’ve talked it out of my system.”  “I was never prepared to settle for less than I desired.” She describes herself as “unstoppable”. I wish I was. 

Out of Time by Miranda Sawyer. About middle age, but more than that: about running out of time. So much resonated in this. She was only in her 40s when she wrote this (it came out in 2016), and I kept thinking: wait til you’re my age. Like Mayflies, it’s about living life more fully. Making the most of the time you’ve got left. I still don’t know what that means.

Autistic women

 

Isn't this cover gorgeous?

I found my tribe in new books. When I got my autism diagnosis three years ago they gave us a reading list and there was only one memoir by a woman on it (Laura James). Now, autistic women – middle-aged autistic women, even – are suddenly visible.

Drama Queen by Sara Gibbs. I identified with so much in this story about trying to survive normal life when you don’t know you’re autistic: a lifetime of embarrassing moments. (And really sad stuff, too.) She was diagnosed at 30, which seems young to me.

Two books by Katherine May: The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and Wintering. There’s obviously a lot of cross-over between my categories, because there’s nature writing here too, which I really liked because they included places I know. The first one was specifically about finding out she is autistic, and I identified with a lot of this, too, particularly as she was older when it happened.

Wintering has been seen as lockdown book, because of timing. There were lots of good quotes about getting through tough times, but my favourite wasn’t about that.  It was: “This isn’t about getting you fixed… this is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.” (Followed by the words “Start saying no.”)

Letters to My Weird Sisters by Joanne Limburg. Subtitle: On Autism and feminism, two of my favourite subjects. Lots to think about and really interesting. Not a memoir, although there is some personal stuff too: “I’ve learned how to arrange my face for the outside world.” “My voice is too quiet but also too loud.” Yes, I identified with that too.

Women getting a late diagnosis of autism was a bit of a theme in the media this year. Joanne Limburg wrote in the Telegraph in November: “Since my diagnosis, I’ve joined a growing group of late-diagnosed women writers who are sharing our experience in print.” I’d love to be part of that club, but for now I’m just a late-diagnosed woman writer sharing my experience online. And an autistic woman reader.

Music

 

Straight from the bookshop.

Bunnyman by Will Sergeant. I’ve written about this already.

You are Beautiful and You Are Alone by Jennifer Otter Bickerdicke. I’ve written about this too.

My Rock’n’Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn. I bought it as soon as the shops were open, and read it in a day. I think it might be her best. Lots of feminist anger. (I didn’t get round to blogging about this; maybe I still will.)

Remain in Love by Chris Frantz. A good read, particularly the early CBGBs era (I also liked the bits about Talking Heads’ European tour with the Ramones, because it describes two gigs that I was at). It’s very funny about the Ramones. “It was April in Paris and we had the day off so Tina, David, Jerry and I decided we would explore while the Ramones went to McDonald’s.” But, also about the Ramones: “You wanted to punch the air with your fist at every chord change. Well, I did.”

Nature

 For a while, my library was closed and they were only doing “click and collect” – you told them what you liked and they chose the books. One of the books they chose for me was The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson. It was worth it just for the cover. I learnt a lot about seabirds and I also learnt the word dustsceawung.

Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Come for the “octopuses are amazing” stuff, stay for the philosophy, biology etc.

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty. I liked the nature stuff, but I liked the people stuff more: the picture of his close-knit, deep-feeling, supportive mostly autistic family, and what it’s like being on the edge of growing up. “I run and laugh and shout, and we all run together and there it is, childhood, still hanging on.”

Light Rains Sometimes Fall by Lev Parikian (see above). In early December, Lev ran a Twitter competition in which he invited people to rename the current microseason (Dec 7-11). I wrote: Humans Feel Weary. Everyone seemed to be having that end-of-year ennui, or maybe weariness was the story of the year anyway.

Grief

I don’t know why I’ve found myself reading so much about grief. No-one in my family has died recently, although you don’t get to my age without accumulating loss (and those losses are on my mind at this time of year). Maybe it’s the general gloom of the pandemic.

I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and The Madness of Grief by Richard Coles (both about losing your partner), but I also found the theme in fiction. I generally read more non-fiction that not, but some novels stood out. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is stupendous on the reality of grief (especially if you're a lone twin). I also liked No one is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, a novel that starts about one thing and turns into something else. And Notes from An Exhibition by Patrick Gale, which includes the perceptive line: “Family deaths I find to be like Russian dolls, each new pain encasing the shape of the ones that have gone before.”

Self-help

I try to avoid self-help books, because they ask you to do things and I’m too impatient to do anything but read them. But I did read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, because I’ve signed up for his emails and they are always full of good sense. There’s a chapter called In The Long Run, We’re All Dead, which is supposed to make you feel better about how much time you’ve got. As part of the promotion for the book, Burkeman sent out an interview he did with James Hollis, called Confronting Finitude.  They talked about the need, especially as you get older, to be reflective and decisive about how you want to spend your life. It made me think.

The real theme

I thought when I started this blog post that the themes were obvious – the categories I’ve used as headings above. But the process of writing this has shown me the bigger, underlying themes that I’ve been drawn to without even realising. 

Maybe, in the second year of a pandemic that doesn’t look like stopping, that’s natural. Anyway, in a second year of pandemic, reading books is all I’ve got to do, and books are what I need. 

I thought the books were helping me pass the time, in a year without plays or films or art. But they have made me think about life, and given me lessons in living.

Next year’s resolution? More books. Some living. Once I’ve worked out what that means.