2020 was an odd year for all of us, although I didn’t suspect that when I chose a thick orange notebook in which to record my year’s reading. It was meant to be used as a diary so it had a page for every day even though they weren’t dated. I used it that way and dated each page as I used it but it did waste a lot of space and I could have used a much thinner notebook. A great feature of this notebook is that it had a pocket in the back in which I could store bookmarks (receipts, dress labels, old Christmas cards and the like).
In March of that year I had an operation to fuse the big toe joint in my left foot which meant that I had six weeks off work, mainly lying down with my foot in the air. I was able to return to work just as lockdown really kicked in so I then worked at home for most of the rest of the year and as a result of my lack of commuting I read fewer audio books.
In early October we moved out of our house and put our belongings in storage while we lived in rented accommodation before moving into our new home at the end of December. Lockdown was in operation and everything was very odd with a lot of tension as we didn’t know how long it would be before the purchase would be finalised. I packed my books into 49 boxes which went into storage and then took a couple of boxes into our rented accommodation as I definitely didn’t want to run out of reading material but despite lockdown and temporary accommodation I still managed to buy 342 new books. I remember getting quite a lot by post from various sources.
I read 355 books in the year with over 200 of them being on my Kindle and my non-fiction total being 17% which meant that it was still short of my target of 25%. For the first time ever I recorded the number of books I started but I didn’t finish and there were seventeen of those – I am quite good now at assessing the sort of books that I will enjoy. You can see my roundup of the year here and my favourite books of the year here.
The first book I read in the year was In the Teeth of Adversity by Marian Babson. This is a light and entertaining crime novel which involves a dentist and a cat. I like her books a lot.
The last book I read in the year was Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell which I listened to on audio and found highly amusing and very touching in places. It’s a classic novel of manners and society in Victorian England but has a lot of depth.
I notice that I was reading a lot of crime fiction. This has always made up the majority of my fiction reading but during 2020 I started to pass on my no longer wanted crime novels to my mother-in-law who really enjoys the genre but who wasn’t that happy with the offering at her local library, even when it was open. I then began to pick up suitable books from charity shops and book tables and passed them on to her after I read them and my choice therefore skewed a little to the cosy end of the crime genre which she prefers to keep her in reading material – she likes mostly British novels and dislikes any form of sex or foul language. Four years later and I am still providing her with a regular selection of new stories ! Authors I have read and passed on include but are definitely not limited to Stephanie Austin, Alex Gray, Frances Brady, Carola Dunn, Peter Robinson, Peter Tremayne and Cara Hunter.
During this year I also started getting one book a month by subscription. These books came from BookNinja which has, I notice, now ceased operating. I got books for about a year from them which were all from independent publishers. In the end I found that I didn’t always enjoy their choice of titles so I stopped subscribing but it did make me realise how very mainstream my reading was and how few books from lesser known publishers I read.
Reading kept me sane during this difficult year. As the world was in turmoil, I was in pain and our place of residence was uncertain but books were always there to entertain and engage as I hope they always will be…
Anne Is Reading 