It's January first, which means it's time to tally up how many books I read this year. The answer, which I won't know until I reach the end of this entry and do some actual tallying, is probably going to be lower than most of my friends would assume. I may not even have made 52, which is my yearly goal.
A lot of my friends assumed that I spent most of the pandemic reading on my couch like a "Twilight Zone" character who has time enough at last, but I spent most of the pandemic trying to distract myself. There was a lot of cooking, a daily regimen of Facebook posts, setting myself up to work from home, hanging pictures on my walls after living in my apartment for a year, a three week period when I contemplated making a plate wall out of vintage Pyrex tableware, deciding to go low carb in quarantine (I've lost a little over 30 pounds since March), and a weird stretch for a couple weeks when I didn't read anything. Every time I sat down to read, I just fell asleep, so I ended up playing video games while binging Netflix instead.
Last year I ended up with a tally of 40 books for the year. Not bad, but not my goal of 52 (one book a week). This year I swore I was going to do better and get back to my normal reading level, but like I explained above, 2020 didn't turn out quite like anyone planned. When I last updated on my reading in November I was up to 36 books. I've read at least four books since then, but did I read enough to get to 52?
Let's tally up the rest of my November and December reading and find out!
37) Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars. I've been getting back into Stephen King this year, after a stretch when I found his work kind of self-derivative and less entertaining than I had for the past couple of decades. The stories in this book, like the title suggests, tend to be a little on the darker side. They're definitely not happy endings, which may not be for everyone in the current circumstances, but I found them engaging and at least one of them is still sticking in my head this many weeks later.
38) Edgar Cantero's The Supernatural Enhancements. I remember this book getting a lot of fanfare when it came out, as groundbreaking and exciting. A man and his companion inherit an estate, which may be haunted, and may also be the meeting grounds of a secret society. The house is full of mysteries that they must unravel, which the author presents in the form of riddles, codes, and puzzles. I can see how people thought this was fun, but there has to be a clever story beneath the clever storytelling, and that didn't really happen here. When everything was said and done the actual plot was kind of dull, and I was reminded of that time someone told me that Special Topics in Calamity Physics was as good as The Secret History and it really, really wasn't.
39) Octavia Butler's Kindred. Before the pandemic I'd been at the used bookstore and realized that I hadn't read any of Butler's work since I was in college. I wanted to add more work by people of color to my reading, so I grabbed this and left it on my "unread books" shelves for a while. Oddly, the week after I decided to read it, Dolly Parton mentioned that it is one of her favorite books, so I guess Kindred was having a bit of a moment there. It's a really good book about a modern black woman who keeps being summoned through time to save her ancestor from death, with the complication being that she's being pulled to the antebellum South and the ancestor is white. He has enslaved her other ancestor, and she is forced to keep saving him so that he can father the child that she'll descend from. Butler doesn't shy away from the horror of the situation, and she gives it a realistic (within the circumstances) resolution when she could have given a more romanticized, expected one.
40) Tom Parker Bowles' The Year Of Eating Dangerously. I was halfway through this book before it occurred to me to read the author information on the jacket and realize the author was Camilla's son from her first marriage. I binged "The Crown" during the pandemic, so I was mildly surprised to realize I had a book vaguely connected to the royals here in my house this whole time. It's weird to read a book about travel during the pandemic, when we cannot (or at least should not) be out traveling. The author spends a year hopping around the globe eating food that is dangerous or taboo, or that is produced in dangerous settings. To his credit, he tries to temper the stunt eating with visits with locals and guides to also work in some of the culture and traditional cuisines of the places he visits, but most of this was just a long list of foods I won't ever eat.
41) Budd Schulberg's The Disenchanted. A fictionalization of F. Scott Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood at the end of his life, this story had me wishing, as I so often do when I read books about Fitzgerald rather than by Fitzgerald, that he would hurry up and die already. I love my imaginary literary husband very much, but the sloppy drunken self destruction is eventually overwhelming, and I just want it to end. I imagine Zelda and I had this in common.
42) S.K. Tremayne's The Ice Twins. At first it seems like we're only dealing with one mystery in this book. Reeling from the loss of their daughter, a married couple and the surviving twin move to a remote Scottish island that they just inherited, hoping to rebuild their lives. As soon as they get there, their daughter starts telling them that she's the other twin, and that they held a funeral for the wrong one. Did they make a horrible mistake? And why is the husband so angry, and what's he hiding in his locked chest of drawers? And why does the wife have gaps in her memory? And is the dead twin a ghost back for revenge? This was a nice, tense read on the treadmill all the way up to the end, when the story falls apart completely and you're denied witnessing the actual climax.
43) Anna Kendrick's Scrappy Little Nobody. This was funny, and kept me from realizing that I was working out on the treadmill. It was a fun read that would probably also be good for a trip, if we can ever get on an airplane again.
44) E. Lockhart's Genuine Fraud. The basic premise here is "What if The Talented Mr. Ripley was bout women instead", but it's well written. The story unfolds in reverse, which made it pretty interesting, because it starts out seeming like one kind of book, and slowly unfolds into being a completely different one.
45) Rebecca Fishbein's Good Things Happen to People You Hate. A collection of essays billed as "hilarious", I found this entertaining, but wouldn't go quite as far as hilarious. There are some funny parts, but it's not a funny book.
46) Mariko Koike's The Graveyard Apartment. Why not round out the year of not being able to leave your homes with the story of a Japanese family that wants to leave theirs and may not be able to. They thought the apartment in the brand new high rise was a great place to grow into their lives and move past their marriage's dark beginnings, and sure, it's next door to a graveyard, but worrying about that is just superstitious nonsense, right? Nope. Not at all, actually, and the worse things in the building get the more it looks like they may never leave.
So, to wrap up the year, I ended up six books ahead of last year, but six books behind my goal.
Maybe in 2021 we can do better.
