#allenderreadinglist2020

[robinallender]

The Clown of Unknowing

Unsurprisingly 2020 was a good year for reading (not much else to do). I ended the year reading The Cloud of Unknowing, a work of fourteenth century Christian mysticism, which was great. It’s a sort of medieval Headspace. 

2020 was also the year that I got into audiobooks. I listened to Danny, the Champion of the World (cosy), Limmy’s That’s Your Lot (genius), From the Oasthouse (obviously) and Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, which I remain convinced is the most profound comedy that humankind has ever produced.

My reading resolutions for next year are to read one book at a time (currently in the middle of eight) and to tackle some biggies; I’m thinking Karamazov, The Man Without Qualities and Ducks, Newburyport. And I’ve never read Jane Eyre. I’m also looking forward to the new Gwendoline Riley and Patricia Lockwood novels. And, yes, I’m still reading Finnegans Wake.

Happy new year!

Here are the books I read in 2020:

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction – J. D. Salinger Charlotte Sometimes – Penelope Farmer A Tiler’s Afternoon  – Lars Gustafsson Three Women – Lisa Taddeo The Lion and the Unicorn – George Orwell The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith Before I Was a Bear – Eleanor Tindall Winter – Ali Smith (need to read Spring and Summer!) The Voice in My Ear – Frances Leviston Pond – Claire-Louise Bennett (loved this) Kudos – Rachel Cusk Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race – Reni Eddo-Lodge Franny and Zooey – J. D. Salinger (and look at this wonderful first UK edition I got for my birthday) Titus Groan and Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake

I fell a bit behind with my book blog so I did one post to catch up on having read Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo, The Vanishing Hours by Barney Norris, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison (get it for the psychogeographer in your life), Intimations by Zadie Smith, The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride (brilliant, I want to read everything she’s written) and Killing for Company by Brian Masters (grizzly but gripping).

I read lots of poetry: Joe Dunthorne’s O Positive, Jay Bernard’s Surge, some Thom Gunn (Thom Gunn is wicked), some Keats (ditto) and Sam Riviere’s After Fame.

I also read Clive James’s brilliant book about Philip Larkin, Somewhere Becoming Rain, which made me go back to Larkin’s poetry, about which I wrote this longish piece.

I took up online tutoring this year and so I read a lot of children’s books and some long-neglected classics:

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë Frankenstein – Mary Shelley The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy – Penelope Lively Tom’s Midnight Garden – A. Philippa Pearce Matilda – Roald Dahl

(There’s a post about them all here.)

And finally here’s a post about Beatles books I read (or dipped back into) this year because of the podcast. They include:

Revolution in the Head – Ian MacDonald Dreaming The Beatles – Rob Sheffield One Two Three Four – Craig Brown Fab Fools – Jem Roberts

And of course my trusty Beatles for Acoustic Guitar book.

[robinallender]

What a wonderful birthday present! A UK first edition of Franny and Zooey from my girlfriend Ruth – ‘You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.’

[robinallender]

Earlier this year, like many other people, I found myself without work in the middle of a pandemic. 

A few friends suggested I try tutoring online, so I started offering my services as a guitar and English teacher. Over 200 lessons later I’m taking a break from tutoring because I finally have a full-time job, for which I feel unbelievably lucky.

I will miss tutoring though. It was pretty amazing to see a student go from not being able to play a single chord to being able to play ‘Scarborough Fair’ faultlessly all the way through; or to show a student a Robert Frost poem and for them to say, ‘This is wonderful’!

I read ‘Ozymandias’ with a few students preparing for their 11+ exams and I was astonished by how mature and profound their responses were to this difficult poem. It was incredible to see children realise just how much can be achieved with so few words. Kids at that age are so bright; it’s a shame that not all of them have the opportunity for one-on-one tutoring – because all kids are capable of these insights, but not all of them have the opportunity to articulate them.

I’ll miss the laughs too. One girl wrote me a delightful story about a family of tiny people who lived inside a watermelon. I asked one student if he could use the word ‘disappeared’ in a sentence and his example was: ‘Barrington, your handbag has disappeared’. Some inventive excuses too: one student said they didn’t finish their story because they wanted it to be ‘more mysterious’.

I also taught adults with literacy issues and through that I read three absolute classics for the first time (I’m ashamed to say). And guess what, they were absolutely amazing. Pride and Prejudice is the most sarcastic book ever written and is genuinely hilarious, and Wuthering Heights is true horror in the most sublime sense and one of the most disturbing novels I can remember reading. And to think I thought that they were both ‘just’ love stories. (I didn’t even realise that Kate Bush was singing from the perspective of Kathy’s ghost.) Also Frankenstein is so good it spawned an entire genre.

I also read some brilliant children’s novels. Matilda and Tom’s Midnight Garden have lost none of their magic. Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy was a revelation – a sort of Wicker Man for kids. Genuinely brilliant!

[robinallender]

I have neglected my book blog, so here are a few that I enjoyed/am enjoying this year. 

Girl, Woman, Other is brilliant. A kind of Inspector Calls of modern Black Britain, with the values of interconnectedness and empathy at its heart. 

The Vanishing Hours is a lovely novel with hints of Ishiguro at his most uncanny. One of the main plot devices seems eerily similar to Quantum Leap however. I asked the author on Twitter if he’d ever seen it and he hadn’t! 😬 But it’s still a very touching story. I loved it. 

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again:

Hypnotised by light slanting through trees in stripes, they hallucinated lorries like coloured boxes at the top of a hill, crows with a black muscular stride, flat earth under some vast clouds. Blackened spires. Sunny dips and lifts, dogs barking in houses and gardens and outside shops, mystical June weather on hillsides, architectures of rain and sunshine, surreal tractor rallies in the middle of nowhere –

In Intimations, Zadie Smith uses the pandemic as an opportunity to zoom out, to draw meanings from the the madness. As Aurelius, whom Smith quotes in the epigraph, said, ‘Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!’ 

The Lesser Bohemians is fragmentary, Joycean – a big stylistic risk for an author to take, but Eimear McBride succeeds brilliantly. Far from being an affectation, it actually makes the world of the book more vivid, more real; capturing the spontaneity of thought like marbled paper. Also, why say drunk when you can say ‘enslithered by pints’? 

I’ve also been reading Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen by Brian Masters, following the brilliant ITV adaptation starring David Tennant. I thought you don’t really need to see a photo of a serial killer, so instead here’s a nice photo of a sunset. I was talking to my friend about Dennis Nilsen and he looked at me incredulously and said, ‘The It’ll Be Alright on the Night guy?’

[robinallender]

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

[robinallender]

Ulysses is many things. Difficult, obtuse, very, very rude. It’s also a humane book that celebrates plurality, metropolitanism (not a pejorative!) and tolerance. Happy Bloomsday!

[robinallender]

I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion. The couple’s divorce, in other words, had nothing to do with her secret envy of them and her desire for their downfall: it was her own capacity for storytelling – which, as I had already told her, had affected me all those years ago – that made her see her own hand in what happened around her. Yet the suspicion that her own desires were shaping the lives of other people, and even causing them to suffer, did not seem to lead her to feel guilt. It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.

[robinallender]

And then, after lunch, I’d take a blanket up to the top garden and I’d lie down under the trees in the top garden and listen to things. 

I would listen to a small beetle skirting the hairline across my forehead. I would listen to a spider coming through the grass towards the blanket. I’d listen to a squabbling pair of blue tits see-sawing behind me. I’d listen to the woodpigeon’s wings whack through the middle branches of an ivy-clad beech tree and the starlings on the wires overhead, and the seagulls and swifts much higher still. And each sound was a rung that took me further upwards, and in this way it was possible for me to get up really high, to climb up past the clouds, towards a bird-like exuberance, where there is nothing at all but continuous light and acres of blue.