Vincennes Review of Books 2020
2020 offered plenty of opportunities to look at bar charts, I hope you are okay to start 2021 with one more:
I read 88 books in 2020, making it my second biggest year of reading on record, by one book. I have always assumed that my reading habits are driven almost entirely by the length of my commute, and last year I found out that that is not entirely true. I was very keen to start my days not with the news but someone else’s world. It meant a lot to be able to do that.
It was, though, not the easiest year, and I reread a lot of books to cheer me up. In some cases, I was blindsided by how good the book was. I texted close to a whole chapter of Brideshead Revisited to my father, and spent a chunk of August striding around brandishing a copy of Dubliners while saying things like “this young man can really put a story together! Someone should write an essay about that!”. It’s true, though; Dubliners is more precise, and much more kind, than I remembered.
I also reread A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was, yes, very well written and so forth, but also felt like Joyce himself was just skewering me aged 17. I last read Portrait when I, like its main character, was an insufferable teenage try hard. As I read I could almost hear myself thinking, mmmmmm this dude thinks about Ibsen when he walks past shops and so do I.
This did not feel great.
A huge chunk of my reading year — 37 books out of 88 — was given over to reading books by/about/relevant to F. Scott Fitzgerald. This was profoundly rewarding. I know I announce I’m going to do “reading projects” every year, but you’ll notice that every year, also, I report that I’ve totally half assed the previous project. The point here is that I really did this one, and it was great to go really deep into a topic. This is not an argument against half assing, more an argument for picking my “projects” more carefully.
In the service of reading around Fitzgerald, I read two dime novels from Open Library. These were from the 1910s, the era before dime novels became mucky books, when they were shortish novels for kids that came in magazines. One of them was mystifyingly bad. Either there was a spare child at the end of it whose story was entirely unresolved, or I did not understand the ending at all. The other one, though, The Red Privateer, was amazing. The main characters were a Latinx woman, a Black man, and an Irish little person. There was a white man, and he was nominally the hero, but he spent most of the story fainted while the main characters captained ships and had adventures in founding America. It was so much fun. Don’t all check it out the library at once.
I also read a lot of books about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short fiction. The best was Alice Hall Petry’s Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction, and the most entertaining was Stephen Potts’ The Price of Paradise. The thing is that a lot of the later stories aren’t very good, or at least aren’t up to the standard you would expect based on Fitzgerald’s novels, so a chronological survey, as Potts’ is, kind of turns into “And then he published this story in this magazine… AND IT WAS BAD! And then he published another story in another magazine… AND IT WAS ALSO BAD!!!” It very much captures the “feel” of reading things and wishing you weren’t, but being unable to stop reading them.
Speaking of which. I quit a book in 2020! Longtime readers of the Vincennes Review of Books will know that I almost never do this. I quit reading a Louis de Bernières book for the sole reason that I wasn’t enjoying it and immediately texted everyone in my phone book to let them know. The response was pretty universally “I’m proud of you”, although the intimations of mortality that inspired me to quit didn’t help me at all later in the summer:
Last year I did recommendations in sets of twos, that was quite good. Here are three sets of two books I loved last year. Let’s start with the borderline topical:
Two books about medicine and illness:
Bad Blood — John Carreyrou
I know that you’ve all read this already, because I read it in January and whenever anyone saw it on my desk at work they would tap it and say “good!” or “so good!”. They aren’t wrong, it’s — I mean, it’s horrible, it’s a story about people who destroyed lives — but it’s so engaging, and there are lots of telling/awful details like this one:
Pale Rider — Laura Spinney
I’ve already bigged up this history of the Spanish Flu in the newsletter, it really put a lot in perspective for me about people’s responses to the pandemic. Turns out conspiracies abounded 100 years ago too, and that as a species we aren’t all that good at remembering or thinking about pandemics. I can’t recommend this highly enough.
The upcoming recommendations are all about teenagers, a good unplanned theme to come out of 2020. Maybe these resonated especially because my reading habits were much more like those of my teenage than my adult self; structured, disciplined and home based.
Two non-fiction books about being a teenager:
Teenage — Jon Savage
Incredible book about the birth of the modern teenager in the US, UK and Germany. I read this on the Heath in the summer, around the time about 60 teenagers assembled for a huge fight quite close to where we were sitting. It really made me appreciate, amongst other things, how much more frightening (i.e., stabby) teenagers used to be! Most of the lads who were fighting in the summer were wearing masks, and in any case it broke up pretty quickly.
Terms and Conditions — Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Oh wow oh wow you must read this entirely charming book about life in girls’ boarding schools from 1939 to 1979. I laughed out loud several times, here’s a sample that just about destroyed me:
Two short novels about teenagers:
Spring Night — Tarjei Vesaas
This book really captures the weirdness and the betweenness of teenage life and thinking, and the ways in which people never stop being strange, never really understand their own motivations, even when they are much older. It’s lovely.
Albert Angelo — B. S. Johnson
This is a book about teaching. B. S. Johnson is so, so good. Beautiful, truthful, fresh writing, no self pity when there could have been lots. It’s a tremendous London book as well, set in Clerkenwell and the Angel, all these places I missed.
Let’s see how I did with my aims from 2019:
1. Easy books
Why did I say this? What did I mean by it? I think I meant I wanted to read for pleasure, which I did, but “Easy books” doesn’t remotely cover that and is not, I don’t think, a useful category.
2. Books by, about or relevant to F. Scott Fitzgerald not covered by the above rubric
Yes, I did that! See above.
3. The Bible (as ever, let me know if you want to join me)
I did this, using the M’Cheyne One Year Reading Plan that was great and which I will also use this year.
4. Pepys’ Diary for 1664
Another year of vigorous social climbing, also preparing for a war with the Dutch. FORESHADOWING.
Here are my reading aims for 2021:
- Rereading Ulysses
- The Bible (as ever, would love to have you along for the ride)
- Pepys’ Diary for 1665
Previous reviews: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006
Lists of books read: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004
