All the books I read in 2020
The worst year for volume of reading that I can remember; in a normal year not commuting might be thought to provide a bit more time and mental energy for reading, but 2020 was far from normal, my concentration shattered by both the obvious circumstances and that I was going through an especially difficult latter part of the worst two year period in my career.
It started reasonably well (just under half of these were read before lockdown began) with The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, a very nicely written introduction to the physics of time, full of thought-provoking ideas and personal reflections.
High Heel by Summer Brennan is another entry in the Object Lessons series that I'm very fond of dipping into and have mentioned often in previous round-ups. It gave me the phrase "Disney Princess Industrial Complex", for which I remain grateful.
The continuing divisiveness of Star Wars: The Last Jedi remains baffling to me, given that it is easily the most technically and artistically proficient, and true to the ideas of the original, Star Wars movie that has been produced without Lucas's input. This is one of the more readable adaptations, and expands on the movie with some scenes and details that were cut from the original script. If you don't like the movie, it won't change your mind, but honestly - you are wrong!
I may have read almost half of my 2020 list in the first 3 months of the year, but if you include page count then the 800 pages of Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree probably bumps it up toward the 3/4 mark. It's very compellingly written, so those pages fly by, and full marks for being much more inclusive than these stories often are, but as fantasy goes it's a bit lacking with a predictable overall plot and a disappointing and uninteresting threat.
Another book series I have a lot of time for is the MIT's Platform Studies, and Minitel: Welcome to the Internet by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll is another fascinating entry. It examines the French Minitel system, a sort of proto-internet with a Teletext-like interface, and how the highly centralised French political system even influenced the technical architecture. A great read.
The second Object Lessons I read in 2020 was Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, a lovely look at the history, impact and legacy of the Walkman, which like the Minitel in some ways reflected the politics of the time.
I also enjoy a good popular linguistics book, and How Language Began by Daniel Everett was an interesting read. As so often with this field, it's full of fascinating little digressions. It also seems to be part of a minor ongoing feud with Noam Chomsky, whose Universal Grammar Everett is highly critical of. I don't feel qualified to throw my weight behind one or the other, but this book's criticism of the cult of personality built around Chomsky does ring true.
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie is book 2 of the Imperial Radch trilogy which I so much enjoyed the first part of in 2019. It's a tiny bit disappointing - the first one felt very fresh and different, and this one has lower stakes and a much reduced world - but still compelling enough that I managed to read it at a good pace during lockdown.
One thing I miss about living in London is the excellent second hand bookshops (for books in a language I can read fluently). Fractals - Images of Chaos by Hans Lauwerier was a wonderful random find at Skoob Books, a well illustrated guide to the concepts, maths and algorithms behind fractal images, with appendices of BASIC programs to type in and reproduce them! A three decade old blast from the past, contempoarary to my first discovering these images on my Atari STE.
For the 42nd anniversary year I decided to revisit the first three volumes of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time in a very long time. I read these books again and again as a teenager, and sporadically in my early 20s. I enjoyed the reread more than I expected, though still think the Dirk Gently books are better...
Finally for 2020 I read the Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown charity book, a collection of short stories by various authors, many of who have some prior connection to the series. It wasn't as much of a mixed bag as I feared, Steven Moffat's contribution being the highlight, a clever and touching piece of metafiction. And I don't even usually like Moffat!
So that was 2020, not a banner year for reading prose fiction, but it was a bumper year for the easier escapism of comics, which I may cover in a separate piece. I wish I could tell you 2021 was going better, but given how long it has taken me just to get round to writing this you can probably tell otherwise. My mission now is to find a way to get past the mental fog and distractions and get reading again; the world isn't getting any easier to live in, but maybe a bit more reading will make it easier to bare.
-- 1. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli 2. High Heel by Summer Brennan 3. Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Jason Fry 4. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon 5. Minitel: Welcome to the Internet by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll 6. Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow 7. How Language Began by Daniel Everett 8. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie 9. Fractals - Images of Chaos by Hans Lauwerier (trans. Sophia Gill-Hoffstädt) 10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 11. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams 12. Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams 13. Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown by various