[sidenote: none of these books were actually published in 2020, I’m just completely exposing myself]
So 2020 was an interesting year for me, reading-wise. I’ve completely dropped off of WordPress since starting my History MA because it massively affected my reading. I only read about 43 books this year; the brainpower I usually commit to plowing through as many classics as I can get my hands on had to go towards my dissertation, even during lockdown. I felt myself gravitating to shorter, more modern texts – I think all of my favourite books this year were written in the last century (bar one), which is very new for me. I’ve also come to terms with the fact that I like fantasy a lot more than I like sci-fi – I don’t know how I was ever unsure about this. Anyway, I should have done this last year and bragged about how much 19th century literature my unstable employment situation allowed me to blitz through (apologies to Trollope and Radcliffe in particular, I’m sure I’ll write about Barchester and Udolpho at some point), but lets jump into this very self-indulgent update.
5. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1985)
This book made me so angry. I did not like the ending. Poetic? Yes. Beautiful? Yes. A mastery of language, prose and style? Absolutely. But one of the main characters is absolutely intolerable and I had to put the book down multiple times and the fourteen-year-old. Are we just not going to talk about the fourteen-year-old??
There is something special about this text. The fact I finished it despite knowing, knowing, it wouldn’t end the way I wanted it to, is proof enough.
You can feel the heat coming from this book, and it doesn’t leave you easily.
4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain (1889)
If there are three things that really get me going, its a) fin de sèicle literature, b) Arthurian literature and c) radical literature. Probably in that order. So believe me when I say, fuck, this was a guddun.
Twain picked up his pen and said, ‘Slavery is bad, guys, and so is child labour. Also, maybe all of this unchecked factory growth isn’t great? And what could be the consequence of all of this new war technology we’re developing? Surely this can’t end well, right? Right, guys?’
He takes Arthurian tropes and satirises them, while using the setting and its customs to analyse and challenge his own world too. Its biting, its sharp, its witty, its sad. There is something foolishly innocent about the naïveté of those who inhabit this chivalric world, which only serves to worsen the impact of the total decimation their society faces at the hands of ‘progress’. For a book about a time traveller, Twain’s ending is ominously close to a scene from WWI. Also, the illustrations are gorgeous.
I thrived reading this. This book was like a shot of supercharged nerd juice for me, but I still think its an apt and valuable text for anyone to try.
3. Circe, Madeline Miller (2018)
The one YA book I picked up this year! I did a YA purge of my bookshelf in 2019 (the genre has never really been for me, the books are just so pretty and its all that book people my age seem to read) and somehow Miller’s The Song of Achilles survived when TRC didn’t, which is impressive: I am not a Greek mythology person – Owain Glyndŵr I recognise, three quarters of these Gods, demi-Gods and heroes? Nope. Not a chance.
When it came to reading The Odyssey, I dragged myself through it kicking and screaming. Now, though, it feels almost like it was worth it – almost. Like The Odyssey was just part of Circe‘s world-building. Don’t tell anyone I said that.
Circe is lonely and bitter and vengeful. I could have done with a forewarning about the sexual assault, but overall I liked reading about an angry witch tending a small garden on her own island retreat.
2. The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan (1990)
Please God no spoilers I am only on Book Four. So I found a few of The Wheel of Time books in a secondhand bookshop going for £3 each and they were gorgeous and it reeked of high fantasy and what can I say, I love a good chosen one trope and this series has like, three.
Big cast of characters, definite hints of Arthurian inspiration (Morgase? Galad? Gawyn? Elayne?), three cute boys because it’s my imagination and if I say they’re cute then that’s just how it goes, new fantasy races and gendered, half-lost magic lore? Yes please!
This is my favourite of the series so far, because nothing else has quite come close to first travelling into Shadar Logoth, or first encountering what resides in The Ways (think like a fantasy wormhole, but haunted). I can get into the politics, but its the spooky archaic magic that really does it for me. And also Perrin.
1. The Once and Future King, T. H. White (1938-1977)
My dissertation text. How do I summarise something that has become perhaps my favourite book ever? Time for a Top 3 within a Top 5, although I could write about this forever.
3. The Comedy
It creeps away as the book develops its darker tone, but I love the discussions about ‘Red Propaganda’ as King Pellinore tries to tell Ector and Grummore about the sword in the stone, before ‘announc[ing] in capital letters’ its famous engraving. Its very funny, in its dry 1940s British humour way. It feels like jokes my Grandad might make, with a deadpan face but a twinkle in his eye, and I love that.
2. Lancelot
My favourite character in anything ever. Torn between his Word, his unyielding love for both Arthur and Guenever, his personal fears around sexuality and violence, and his absolute faith in the chivalric code and the world Arthur hopes to build, Lancelot is the most heartbreaking character I have ever read. This is only added to when one understands White’s personal struggle with his homosexuality and his own relationship to violence. There is a desperation to White’s Lancelot – to do good, to be good, to uphold completely the code to which he subscribes. But Lancelot is human (and also, sexually assaulted), and falters to a degree which a knight who wants to do miracles simply cannot. His section of the work, The Ill-Made Knight, ends with Lancelot performing a miracle which he knows he does not deserve to have been able to do, and he cries. I did not read this as an absolution, as others have, but a punishment, a condemnation, a ‘Look, one final time, at what you could have been.’ Maybe I’m wrong, but it made me cry, which books don’t tend to do. I’m still sad about this.
1. The Realisation that White isn’t just Merlyn
Of course White is Merlyn: they both lived in small cottages, with pet birds, were teachers and had great beards. Merlyn serves as White’s mouthpiece throughout the novel; he is the source of wisdom, of political takes, of cautionary tales.
But there is something of him in Arthur, too. Arthur is Merlyn’s student, raised to fix the world. White was a school student during WWI, with hope for a peaceful future resting on his generation’s shoulders. Arthur struggled deeply with the cracks that appeared in his system, and sought out remedies that only proved to be temporary. His Round Table shares a likeness with the League of Nations, plagued with personal contests for honour and pride. Arthur fails in his mission to maintain peace, to teach the world his theories for Might and Right, with his society crumbling into war. White wrote his final part of this text, The Book of Merlyn, in 1941. It was deemed too politically charged to be published until 1977, after White had died. It is a damning critique of war, nationalism and borders. It is a lecture, and one that I think readers in the ’40s deserved.
It also contains the second passage in this text which made me cry. I spent so long thinking about the similarities between White and Merlyn, that I almost missed the poignancy of Arthur’s realisation that, ‘he had never had a happiness of his own… He wanted time off, to live. He did not want to be sent back to pull, with lowered eyes, at the weary yoke… He wanted to be let alone, to be off duty like a boy, to retire perhaps into a cloister, to have tranquillity for his own old heart.’ p.785-6. The anguish of White, an ardent pacifist, whose Arthurian work serves as his own personal wartime service, runs deeply through the finale of this work. Inevitably, Arthur returns to die, all hope for a better future resting, yet again, on the shoulders of another generation.
‘The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.’
T. H. White, The Once and Future King (London: HarperVoyager, 2015), p.202.
Plans for 2021
I have one semester left of my new postgrad course, and then I’m going to spend the summer working and reading as much as I possibly can. I own so many books I haven’t read yet, and I want to get through as many as I can before I commit to anything PhD-like.
I wish I could read things that are coming out now, but I feel like I have a centuries-long backlog of things to read, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to be current. For now, The Wheel of Time series has my complete attention.
Crossed The Wall 