Books of 2020: Stay-Aways

Say what you will about 2020.  It's all true.  Also, though, 2020 proved a great year for reading.  (Well, not for magazine reading.  Not commuting has put me woefully behind despite some good summer memories of lounging outside with a magazine.)  A grand year for books!  I read 28 books in 2020, which pales in comparison to some fast readers but is the most I've read in a year since I started tracking in 2000.

And good news: Only 21% of those books fall into my Not Recommended category.  That's down from a three-year moving average of 25%. 

And yet, I like to start with the bad news in my annual rundown.  Friends don't let friends read bad books!

Worst of the Year: Fiction 

(nb: I actually have no non-fiction worst pick this year.  Some non-fiction that I read for special interest reasons turned out not to be recommendable to others, but I don't hold that against those books enough to blog about it.)

Golden Hill, Francis Spufford, 2016 

What does one do when one's spouse loves a book and recommends it?  What if said spouse has been reliable before?  What if the cover has promisingly-interesting art?  These are the easy questions.  One reads the book.  What does one do if, having started it, one kinda hates the book?  One persists.  See above.  What if after hundreds of pages, one still hates it?  If one is a completist reader like yours truly, one finished the book.  Then, then one contemplates whether the last x pages can redeem the 299-x pages that preceded them.  I will not reveal the value of x, but if you get to page 50 and hate this book, just stop.  Spufford teases and teases and teases and usually doesn't just not pay off what he has teased; he zags hard into passages that make one read through one's splayed fingers.  In summary, if tedium interrupted by violence and off-putting licentiousness turns you on, by all means, read this steaming pile of poo.  Otherwise, give it a wide berth.

The Awkward Age, Francesca Segal, 2017

You know how the resolution on a high definition TV can be too good?  Although it might make  sense when watching sports or a Marvel movie, that level of pixel perfect detail can overwhelm a sitcom viewer.  I felt that same uncanny, uncomfortable feeling when reading The Awkward Age.  At first, Segal's ability to render characters in startling reality lured me in.  Small descriptions conveyed masses of information.  Her characters' interactions blended the immediate and the layers of relational matter that set up the moment.  The title may refer to the teenagers in the novel, but I suspect that Segal was being more sly than that.  The divorced and widowed middle-aged people evince their own awkwardness, to say nothing of the divorced grandparents who are still each other's boon companions.  After a plot turn that I maybe should have seen coming but did not, the novel got to be anything but the escape I wanted from this pandemic- and violence- and deceit-wracked year.  People of all ages behaving badly in vivid detail repelled my interest and failed to help with sleep.  Segal's writing, hauntingly specific as it is, definitely impresses.  The plot threw me for more than one loop,and I definitely wanted to see where things ended.  Sadly, despite her strengths, including dropping breathtaking turns of phrase into the narrative here and there, Segal has constructed a novel out of people from whom I desperately wanted to look away and a story from which I wanted to get away.

Dishonorable Mention:

Slade House, David Mitchell, 2015