What was happening in January? A question I just asked myself, and which I will proceed to ask for every month of this year until we reach today. What follows is a year in reading, based off scraps from my notebook, with added detail. Occasionally, real life leaks in.
I finish Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time on 1 January. Funny, impish, a little mournful (I scribble something at the time about the privilege of being young, but it means less to me now). A good year for The Beatles, I think now, didn’t I also watch all eight hours of Get Back? Fact-check tells me no, that was somehow 2021.
My reading diary is erratic. It’s wise to say that early on. Sometimes I forget books, sometimes I include films, sometimes I just don’t read. I watch The Lost Daughter and don’t get the hype, too heavy in allusions that don’t pay off. But interesting on motherhood and disassociation. I make a mental note to read the Elena Ferrante novel it’s based on. December Me can confirm that inevitably, I have not.
Onto Solar Bones by Mike McCormack which I reread while making a programme for Radio 4 about stream of consciousness. Later in the year (April), I’ll meet him while in Galway, and think he’s great. But I don’t know that yet.
14 January. The paperback of little scratch is published and I have my first proper launch (the original publication came during a lockdown). I’m in bed at 3 and up at 8 for a Radio 4 interview. My voice is a little lower but I think I get away with it.
I see Licorice Pizza at the cinema and find it fun but baggy, as if every plot option had been included to cover all bases. Later in January, I read Wivenhoe by my friend Sam Fisher. I still remember the cold of it: the oppressive setting, the quiet of footsteps muted by snow.
Hello February, and hello The Red Arrow by William Brewer. A great set-up and some banging sentences, but maybe not as spiky as I was hoping. (Does that make it my own fault if it doesn’t live up to what I expected?). I also finish Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras, which Leo Robson sends me in the post with no explanation.
8 February: My stream-of-consciousness doc on Radio 4 airs.
I read Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez, having met him halfway through the reading of it to do a talk at King’s College London. I liked it (and I like him): there’s passion, sincerity, hurt, isolation, the molding of the self when young.
By now I've read Christina Riggs’ Treasured, a book about Tutankhamun that’s both vivid and political, and which I’m sad to finish. I forget to write it on my list. But on a Friday, 18 February, I record in my ‘reading’ diary that has already become anarchy, that I watched Boiling Point.
20 February. I finish About Kane by Graham Saunders and reread Sarah Kane’s last play, 4:48 Psychosis. I make a note after this entry that I NEED TO READ LUCIA’S BOOK (Osborne-Crowley, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, which I finally do in July).
23 February. I see The Souvenir Part II in the cinema. It’s beautiful, wry, clever, leaves me with a buzz. I think it’s the thrill of both watching a well-made thing and a live thing, that displays the layers of its construction. You feel like you’re watching something being created.
28 February. I start reading Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings on the overground but get distracted and never go back.
Do I read anything in March? I don’t have any notes. When I scroll through the photos on my phone I see a picture of a page from 9 March, referring to “in-yer-face theatre”. I definitely do re-read Aleks Sierz’s In-yer-face Theatre at some point this year (it goes unnoted), but I’m not sure that’s it. A mystery I’m not passionate enough about to solve.
On 12 March, my fantasy dinner is published in FT Magazine.
Suddenly, it’s April. My reading diary does not take note of the 1st, when I turn 27. I race through a proof of a book I don’t particularly like, then head for Cúirt Festival in Galway, Ireland, on the 4th. After one of my events, a student comes up to me and says “I usually hate listening to English people speak in their horrible accents but I actually really enjoyed listening to your reading”. I laugh and thank them. I’m surrounded by Irish people for a week and they do all sound very nice, it’s true.
I meet some brilliant Irish writers. I make a note to self to read Pure Gold, Homesickness and Dance Move. December Me knows I still have Dance Move left to read, but I haven’t forgotten.
On the way back, I read some of The Raven’s Nest by Sarah Thomas, which I finish on 13 April and enjoy very much.
I come home to the news my boyfriend has Covid, which I shortly have too. It’s only the extent of a cold, so I get some reading done. I read Pure Gold by John Patrick McHugh. I liked him when I met him in Galway and now I like his writing, which is a good feeling, and always a relieving one too.
I launch into my proof pile for one of the only times this year. I read Either/Or by Elif Batuman and Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. On 21 April, I reread The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes after being recommended it might be helpful as I write my second novel. It is.
I delay interviewing the artists Jane and Louise Wilson until I’m Covid-free. When I meet them, they’re great and infectiously chatty.
In May I buy a copy of Homesickness by Colin Barrett, which I have been looking forward to. I’m not disappointed: he’s king of rhythm. I email him to say how great it is, and realise not for the first or last time, how hard it is to represent fully the way a book can make you feel.
I read Maryland by Lucy Kirkwood, ahead of doing an event with her at Charleston Festival on 20 May. The event is fun, but not for the first time I wonder whether it’s really my role to answer questions on consent and sexual assault, to say how effective #MeToo has been. I know it’s the nature of publicity, but I can’t not wonder. A man in the audience visibly bristles throughout. Afterwards, his wife comes up to me and Lucy to thank us emphatically, while he stands behind her, looking at his shoes.
On 23 May I finish The Passengers by Will Ashon, and then it is June. I attend my first wedding of the year, which takes me to Bulgaria, where I begin Extinction by Thomas Bernhard. I finish it at home. Bernhard is as good as ever, and there are some excellent names (Spadolini! Wolfsegg!).
This month marks five years with my boyfriend. I don’t note that in my reading diary or anywhere else, but I remember.
I read Avalon by Nell Zink in Victoria Park with a can of Fanta, and then: July. Usually a good month for reading, but it’s so hot that my brain slows down.
9 July. I read Fall by John Preston (about Robert Maxwell). I read Lucia’s book, and tell her over a drink a few days later. I admire her work very much.
14 July. I give a workshop at Queen Mary’s University. Afterwards, someone asks for a selfie.
16 July. A wedding in Wales. I make friends with a few pigs. Real ones, I’m not insulting the guests.
At the end of July, I finish Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill, which, as I have said already elsewhere, is a tonal triumph. I make a note that I forgot to write down G by John Berger. Not sure when I read that. I watch Taxi Driver on the same day, and watch the Women’s Euros final the next. We win.
August. My reading diary, as I should’ve guessed, is scrappy by this point. I keep forgetting to put things down. I began by writing my thoughts after every book, now it’s mainly remembering to note the title two weeks later.
I read Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm.
I go to a press screening of Nitram (the film lingers). A man keeps laughing at things that definitely aren’t funny.
5 August. I watch No Direction Home, the Scorsese Bob Dylan documentary. I’m not sure what my logic is for writing down what I watch. A minority seem to make it into my notebook, but I’m going with it. 18 August, I finish Experience by Martin Amis. Sad, moving, all with that voice. Amazing attention to the way memory works, to honest time. No, his depictions of women aren’t always as great.
22 August is the deadline for a Radio 4 short story I’m writing, which I make.
30 August. I finish A Women’s Game by Suzanne Wrack, which my boyfriend comes home with one day in a Waterstones paper bag, after I mention in passing I want to read it. Interesting and angering.
31 August. I go into the BBC studios to record my short story. At some undated point I read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein, which I keep accidentally thinking of as Alice J Toklas including, I see now, in my diary entry.
6 September. My twin brother gets married! I begin The Furies by Janet Hobhouse on the way to the wedding.
19 September. I finish re-reading The Infatuations, which I started after learning of the death of Javier Marías. The Infatuations was the first Marías I read (which, from leafing back through my notebook, I can see was in January 2018, the same year I first read George Saunders, who I am about to read and re-read a lot of).
On 23 September, I write the obituary of Hilary Mantel. I want to reread Giving up the Ghost but realise I’m not going to find the time. Instead, I finish Hobhouse.
30 September. My short story, Last Time, airs on Radio 4.
In October, I go to the launch of Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset, a book which includes a creative piece by me. When did I write that? This year, yes, but when?
7 October. My friend Josie gets married in Blackpool. The night ends in a place called The Flying Handbag. (The day begins with my friend having the breakfast special: a Full English on top of a pizza.) I bring a book with me but don’t open it.
I read, undated, some George Saunders, as I prepare to interview him. There’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, The Braindead Megaphone, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Liberation Day (twice). I re-read Tenth of December but not Lincoln in the Bardo because I’ve read passages of that throughout this year. (Never made it into the diary). I read various short stories of his from other collections, haphazardly fitting in what I can. I reread his piece in the New Yorker about his writing education that always fills my heart. At the end of the month, we have lunch.
Then, I stop reading? No, that isn’t true, but I haven’t finished anything since. A few friends are waiting on me to read their books. I want to but I haven’t, not yet, for which I try to not feel bad. I write, as I have throughout the year. I plan, as ever, to note more down next year. I know if I don’t record my thoughts live they’ll shift a little from how they were, or be forgotten entirely. That’s just the game. But still. We’ll see. There are other things to do, and it’s not meant to be a chore. But it is true that when I am reading, I benefit. That is what I think, whenever I look back at a year in reading. Sometimes I read many books, sometimes far fewer, but within what I read there are always things I retain: that I learn from or that send me in another direction, whether a different line of thought, motivation, or something else. Sometimes, it's only a feeling.
Beginning of December. Unprompted, my mum sends me this photo. Same bullshit, different year. Bye for now.