Review of 2019 Reading Year

Another good year’s reading with 26 books read and reviewed with a decent proportion (60%) by ‘new to me’ authors.  Six titles via the reading group added random variety if variable quality, though two choices do make the best-of list. Female authors were underrepresented this year – must do better next. As for the ‘bookpacking’ reading journey, we crossed to Africa where I found the writing more to my taste than in Latin America, with one book making the list.

My nine best reads of the year are as follows. (Full review month in brackets.)

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – Bill Bryson: Hilarious recollections and inciteful reflections on his life and times as a young boy in Des Moines, USA. (March)

Touching the Void – Joe Simpson: Literally incredible but true story of one mountaineer’s moral dilemma and another’s gripping refusal to perish in the pitiless Peruvian Andes. (March)

Beartown – Fredrik Backman: About so much more than a junior ice-hockey team in a left behind Scandinavian town, where rounded characters grapple with ethical issues and conflicted loyalties. (April)

By Night the Mountain Burns – Juan Thomas Avila Laurel: Unusual and memorable narration of a boy’s experiences on a small island off the coast of Africa, written in a style that has rhythms and repetitions that evoke the oral tradition of story-telling. (April)

The Wrong Boy – Willy Russell: The story of two journeys, one from Failsworth to Grimsby and one from boyhood to adolescence, related by the traveller with laugh out loud incidents in the former and more moving episodes in the latter. (June)

Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally: A novel that tells the story of the German industrialist who deflected, deceived and defied the state to keep his Jewish workforce out of the Nazi death camps; unemotionally told but still fascinating, horrifying and uplifting. (July)

Ironopolis – Glen James Brown: Six potent narratives over four decades of life in a struggling Teesside community that interlock, overlap and conflict in the search for truths. (August)

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things – Jon McGregor: A curiously but effectively constructed story of a day on a street that is unremarkable until something happens to stun the residents. (August)

The Wicked Boy – Kate Summerscale: A Victorian true crime is forensically examined in its social context, but it is the after-story that packs a punch; brilliantly researched and written. (September)