Firstly, as we wander towards the end of another decade, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for reading the scribbles through its thirteenth year. In those thirteen years you have notched up 4,141,308 visits and added 67,269 comments to 4496 posts, whilst at least 1321 of you receive each post by email.
I hope you know how much I appreciate you all; those who comment or email, those who I know read and enjoy silently, those who contribute via the donate button (thank you, much appreciated) those who send things by post. You all contribute to what feels to me like a knowable and incredibly valuable community and long may we thrive and continue to share books and life together, as well as those vital conversations about vacuum cleaners and scent and Ikea of course.
Now then, I never usually do those end of year 'Best Books I've Read' round ups, mainly because I can never actually choose, and if I do I feel mortified about the books I've left out. However each year I do put the books that have left the greatest impression on the Top Shelf alongside the 'Best Books I've Ever Read' just to see if they will ultimately make the cut and join the rest.
Are you keeping up...
Does anyone else do this?
It all started when friends would ask for a reading suggestion, or perhaps a good book group read and, surrounded by thousands of books, could I think of a single one?
No I couldn't.
Things might be further complicated this year by the fact that I have filtered a lot of books read onto the Tinker's Cott shelves so that our holiday visitors can share them, so it's all a bit of muddle but nevertheless I see that seven books are sitting up on Top Shelf and I think they may all be promoted...
'Should Julia Blackburn knock at your door and suggest that you go for walk together, just stop whatever you are doing....switch the iron off, plug the Dyson back in to recharge, put your book down, get your boots on and go..'
'On the surface Lanny is the story of a young, middle-class couple and their son who move to a village about an hour's commute from London; she a crime thriller writer, he something in finance and their young and unusual child Lanny...
'You seem to me a child of the old times, a proper human child...'
On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings
Now I have to confess that I never actually wrote a full blog post about this one. Just praised it to the heavens as I was reading, promised more dreckly, but dreckly never seems to have happened. Looking back I see it was caught up in owlet-watching season and a summer break, plus I took the book along to an Endsleigh Book Group session and talked endlessly about it there, so my apologies but it was superb. Deserving of all the praise and accolades it received and more, and if you can make head or tail of my notes (click to enlarge, hopefully) perhaps you will get a flavour of the book.
I learned a great deal about Lincolnshire the unsung county, and about visual imagery, through Laura Cummings' informed analysis, but I think the ultimate message for me was what a daughter can do for her mother when faced with a conspiracy of silence about her mother's past. This coupled with the most incredibly moving finale that insisted on a complete reappraisal of my assumptions about 'certain people' in the book. It was moving, generous and allowed for some healing and redemption that quite took me by surprise. Plus an observation that resonated with me...
'In the great democracy of family albums we all have photographs upon which disastrously nothing is written.'
We rarely have photos printed these days and to that end I sent Offspringette a photobook of our year here in Devon in with her Christmas parcel. A friend recommended a free phone app (photobooks) that offers a free twenty page book a month for the cost of the postage. There is another that offers thirty free printed photos (Free Prints) a month and we are enjoying seeing prints again which had become prohibitively expensive to do on a home printer.
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
'Four war-damaged people holed up in a villa, once a nunnery, near Florence towards the end of the war. The German retreat has been considered and brutal. The countryside is laced with landmines and booby traps at every turn and whilst Sikh sapper Kip ('the warrior saint') sets about defusing more of them each day back in the villa Hana cares for 'the English Patient'. The anonymous man so badly burned that he is unrecognisable and clearly dying. Into the mix comes David Caravaggio (thief, drug addict and now thumbless after Nazi torture) a character along with Hana who both first appeared in Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion.
What I may have missed first time around I gleaned by the shovel-full this time. '
'Well, how lucky was I when a book group in Berkshire sent me a copy of Forty Autumns by Nina Willner. The group had read and discussed this 'family's story of courage and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall', were recommending it far and wide and thought I might like to read it too....Not only had her mother Hanna fled the divide as a young adult, succeeding after several attempts, but Nina Willner had worked for US Intelligence in Germany during the years of the Cold War....'
'Just a single family live on the Norwegian island of Barrøy. Hans and Maria with their daughter Ingrid, Hans's sister Barbro and his father Martin along with three sundry others who eventually find themselves living as part of the family for reasons various. Life is harsh, the weather is brutal, hardships abound, and merely eking out an existence in such an extreme environment takes every ounce of courage, energy and kroner that the family have....'
Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly
'Back in harness to a member of the family she has served in the past and who is now dying (painfully) Mary Ann Sate writes her own story alongside that of her 'master', though his takes second place to hers. Mary Ann privileges her own experiences, looking back on her life and creating tantalising shadows of events yet unknown and still to be explained....'
Think yourselves very lucky that I'm not attempting a Best Books of the Decade because when I added them up from the sidebar lists there were 752 to choose from but at least here are seven good 'uns to be going on with.
And now its your turn... your best reads of 2019
On your marks...get set...GO
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