Reading in 2020

The Copper Beech

Immense, entirely itself,

it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it

and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell

darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the centre, not very high in the branches,

I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.

 

-Marie Howe

I have very little to say in defence of 2020. It felt like an utter vacuum of a year. It was hard to write. It was hard to think. It was hard to be. Reading was the only thing which came easy to me in 2020. I’m not sure I would have survived this horrendous year if I had not been able to read. I know many of you have had a difficult time with reading this year. You’ve been struggling with concentration and anxiety, noisy houses and lack of free time. Everyone has had a difficult year and everyone’s version of difficult has been slightly different. My experience has not been the same as anyone else’s and I don’t want to judge, compare or be anything but awed by our collective ability to keep pressing on. Reading should never be a competitive sport. I’ve spent many years undoing harmful reading behaviours learnt in school and university. In the past, I’ve almost killed myself trying to read all the books I’m supposed to have read and have frequently felt embarrassed by the rate at which I read. A few years ago I concluded that it is best to read whatever takes your fancy at whatever rate sits comfortably with you. So, if you’ve read half a book this year and enjoyed it immensely, I am very glad for you. And if you’ve desperately wanted to read this year and been unable to, I offer sympathy and the hope that next year reading will return to you. Please don’t worry. I am certain your appetite for reading will eventually come back and the good thing about books is they do not come with a ‘read by date.’ As I’ve said before, the great book you fully intended to read this year will still be just as great when you’re ready to pick it up.

For me, 2020 was most likely the reading year of my life. Unless we’re all heading towards another ice age, I don’t anticipate living through another period when I’ll have quite so much time for reading. I read almost 320 books in 2020. I read everything from Enid Blyton to Joan Didion via the complete history of the static caravan. I read all 66 of Agatha Christie’s crime fiction novels. I read an enormous amount of essays. I read classics I’d always intended to read: Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, (astounding), Du Maurier’s Rebecca (my uncontested book of the year), Madame Bovary (a bit less racy than I was expecting) and Walden, (not at all impressed; Thoreau was a sanctimonious prig). I read around sixty books in translation. I didn’t quite meet my target of having a quarter of my reads be works in translation, but I thoroughly enjoyed shifting my gaze from British, Irish and American writers to discover what was going on in the rest of the world.

I have never been so glad of my hoarder’s instinct when I found myself stuck in a two up two down with nothing but thousands of paperbacks for company. Zadie Smith in her most recent essay collection, Intimations, talks of how the writer structures her time, “conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.” Faced with an endless amount of unstructured time and a brain too sluggish and anxiety-ridden to write anything more than a Postcard Story, I also cut my time into manageable segments. I used books for knives. Half an hour of a novel in bed each morning. An hour on the couch with a mug of tea and a non-fiction book in the afternoon. Another hour with a novel before sleeping each night. A book propped open in front of my plate each time I sat down to eat. Books for company, sustenance and occasionally, distraction. Books to hook my loneliness on.

Having finally succumbed to Micheal McCann’s repeated recommendations, I discovered the poet Marie Howe this year. I know her poem, The Copper Beech isn’t about reading, but when I sat down to write this blog it came to mind straight away. This year I escaped into books as often as I could. I let other people’s words shelter me. With a book I could practice being alone whilst still feeling as if I had company. And as the world outside my front door grew sadder and scarier, and I felt overwhelmed with anxiety, fiction allowed me a safe place to pin my emotions; I could “watch it happen without it happening to me.” Perhaps this is why I was so drawn to narrative this year. My favourite novels and short stories were characterised by reasonably traditional plots and well-drawn characters: the kind of novels like Rebecca and Marianne Lee’s excellent A Quiet Tide, which drew me in and, for a brief period, allowed me to forget what was happening in the real world.

Arthur W. Frank in The Wounded Storyteller, (one of my favourite non-fiction reads of the year), writes, “you have to learn to think with stories. Not think about stories, which would be the usual phrase, but think with them. To think about a story is to reduce it to content and then analyse that content. Thinking with stories takes the story as already complete; there is no going beyond it. To think with a story is to experience it affecting ones own life and to find in that effect a certain truth of one’s life.” The novels and short stories which most captivated me this year offered more than mere escapism. As Frank, points out, they gave me a framework for navigating the strange times I was living through. They reminded me that my life was still, and would continue to be, a story when everything felt flat and static and without vitality.

Whilst I struggled with more abstract and experimental forms of writing and (with a couple of notable exceptions from Sean Hewitt and Rachel Long), 2020 proved to be an absolute wasteland for me and poetry, I read and enjoyed more non-fiction books this year than I normally would. Perhaps this was simply because I made the time necessary to read slowly and carefully with a pen in hand. I kept a sacred date with my living room sofa each afternoon between four and five. I took notes on ideas I wished to return to. I read instinctively skipping from one referenced writer to another so Olivia Laing led to Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, on and on in a glorious loop which, at best felt like a long, meandering conversation with the world’s most interesting collection of people. I was missing conversation by this stage. The every other day ‘weather and what are you having for dinner?’ phone calls with my parents were no substitute for the kind of furious debates I was used to enjoying at book festivals and readings. I needed to be assailed with provocative thoughts. For me 2020 was the year of the essay. Reading non-fiction kept my brain from turning to mush and in turn gave me ideas to inspire my writing. Reading essays also helped remind me of my place in the world. It was good to remember the sort of conversations I’d had in the past and would, hopefully, have again. It felt like keeping a toe in the door.

I am a reader first and a writer second. The latter will always be dependent upon the former. One fuels the other. In the simplest terms, if I don’t have any experiences, observations or interactions, I won’t have anything to write about. This past year I haven’t been able to travel or meet new people or enjoy the real world cultural experiences which usually feed my creativity. I’ve been watching the world through a screen. I’ve found it challenging at best and, at times, impossible to remain motivated. When it comes to writing, my imagination feels thin and stuck. If it weren’t for reading, and the odd film, I’d be hard-pushed to come up with any ideas worth writing into. Toni Morrison understands this when she writes of the bleak void left in the absence of art and the need to support writers during perilous times. “How bleak, unliveable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.” Reading not only gave me the framework I needed to navigate 2020, I believe it gave me the fuel I needed to fashion a response. Reading the writers who came before me, writing during their own peculiar and difficult times, is like surrounding myself with a great cloud of witnesses. It’s impossible not to be a tiny bit inspired and motivated by their strong words.

I’ll leave you then with Will Eaves top tips for writers, taken from his recently published, and unsurprisingly brilliant, essay collection Broken Consort. What’s intended for writers, could just as easily be aimed at anyone attempting to make it through 2020 in one piece. This is probably the wisest, simplest and most sensible thing I read this year and it’s no surprise that Eaves’ advice begins with reading, slowly and carefully and ends with the exhortation to look up. This is reading as a means of practicing hope. It’s a pretty good place to begin a fresh reading year.

“Read slowly and carefully. Write letters. Eat properly. Walk. Don’t be afraid to stop: other people matter more in the end, and it’s not a race. Resist jargon, (George Orwell: ‘ready-made phrases… perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself”). Learn to spell and punctuate. Look up.”