My top reads of 2020

I read 76 books in 2020. That’s a little more than I read in a normal year, but not much. I’m surprised actually – it’s been far from a normal year and I thought I’d have read more. I did watch the entire seven seasons of Buffy though, so that probably accounts for quite a bit of reading time… 

 

So, without further ado, my top reads of 2020: 

 

TOP NOVEL

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell 

A book that sweeps you up and tears out your heart. I’ll tell you how good this book is: I read this right at the start of the first lockdown and it managed to fill my head totally with something other than You-Know-What. 

 

TOP CHILDREN'S BOOK

 

Friend Me by Sheila M Averbuch 

 

I was bowled over by this middle-grade thriller. Tense, thrilling and with an attention to detail that would put a lot of adult thrillers to shame, plus an emotional core hits home. Clever, very clever. 

 

TOP NONFICTION

 

A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson 

 

At the start of the year my family decided that we were each going to recommend a book for all the others to read. I would never have picked up a non-fiction book about bees of my own volition, but Dave Goulson made the subject entirely fascinating. 

 

TOP REREAD

 

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman 

 

I got a Folio Society beautiful set of His Dark Materials from my family for my birthday. I used to love The Subtle Knife the most. In fact, I think the first time I read The Amber Spyglass I didn’t really understand what was going on, which seems odd now, as it’s absolutely clear and so magnificent. What books these are! 

 

TOP OLD BOOK

 

Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart 

 

I spent several weeks at my mother-in-law’s when the first lockdown happened and started working my way through old books on her shelves. It’s been hard to pick a ‘top book’ from those I read, as I wouldn’t unequivocally recommend any. I don’t know why it comes as a surprise that books date. Of course, we all love books we’ve read years ago, but when we read old books for the first time nowadays… so much exposition, such slow build, not to speak of casual sexism, racism, treatment of children that ranges from bizarre to abusive… Of course they’re of their time, and that’s fascinating, but it’s hard to lose yourself in the story with all these alerts going off. The Mary Stewart book I’ve chosen is a mystery with a slightly supernatural air. It was diverting rather than gripping, but the Scottish countryside was gorgeously brought to life.  

 

 

 

 

Thursday's Child by Noel Streatfeild

Thursday’s Child was the first book I wore out. My original copy was a paperback with a photo from a TV series I never saw. I read it until the spine cracked and the pages came out in chunks and then I carried on reading it until it was a collection of small sections and individual pages that had to be handled with extreme caution. 

I suppose that the larger child here is Margaret who was dressed up as a boy to work on the canal boat, but if you picked up the book unknowing, you'd read the image as two boys. Seems an odd choice for the cover to me.

When my paperback Thursday's Child was finally impossible to read, my mother bought me a hardback copy, the very first hardback I had ever owned apart from a handful of Beatrix Potters. So now I had not only a book I adored for its story, but the first book I fell in love with as an object. Imagine the thrill of owning such a treasure! 

Look how much I loved this book - I covered the dust jacket with stickyback plastic when it started to disintegrate. And stop to appreciate the image of Margaret drawn by Peggy Fortnum who's responsible for the original Paddington Bear illustrations.

A number of books have held top spot for me over the years, but Thursday's Child probably held it for longest and has never been out of my personal top ten. What is it about this particular story? I think, for me, it’s the epitome of what I think of when I think ‘children’s books’. Feisty hero, no parents, thrown into situations where she has to fend for herself, protect others, form a team, while preserving her own identity with determination. Though most of my favourites have elements of fantasy or magic in them, historical novels like this tick the world-building boxes that suit me. And honestly, the things that Noel Streatfeild throws at Margaret Thursday barely give the reader pause for breath: an orphan with a mysterious background, a cruel orphanage, an escape to a canal boat, joining a travelling theatre, the discovery of long-lost aristocrats. And as the author speeds her characters through triumph and disaster, she takes the time to give even the minor players and the baddies real depth. 

I have loved almost every Noel Streatfeild book I’ve ever read – I can even forgive her for the much inferior sequel to this book because of course you have to write a book called Far to Go if you’ve written one called Thursday’s Child. I have a soft spot for Ballet Shoes and my copies of the Gemma stories show evidence of much rereading, but for me, if you could only read one of her books Thursday’s Child should be the one. 

This post is part of a collection of seven about children's books that I love. You can see the original post here, with links to all the books I've written about.

Miniature World Building

When we talk about world-building in fiction, it sounds like something huge. We think Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones with their great historical backstories, myriad characters and entire languages. Or we think of the intricacies of science fiction – creating believable alternate realities or different scientific laws. Then there are books like Watership Down, where Richard Adams spins a mythology and history around real rabbit behaviour. Where books that take the reader into other worlds work, they’re deep and involving, they never for a moment give you cause to stop and question their plausibility.

But world-building works on a small scale too.

One of my favourite childhood books was Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare. I can’t tell you where it came from or who gave it to me. It seems like a book I always had.

My well-read copy of Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare, illustrated by Cecil Leslie

You can tell right from the start that some serious world building is going on here. Many – perhaps most – books that take their world-building seriously will provide readers with a map. There’s no map in Five Dolls in a House. Instead, there’s a section of the house. Oh yes! It’s like a signpost to say, ‘Here’s the world you’re in right now. Focus on this.’ And how many times I flicked back through the pages to work out who was where at various points of the story, how often I simply examined the picture and wished I owned this house myself.

Section of dolls' house from Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare, illustrated by Cecil Leslie

The premise of the story is that Elizabeth wonders what the dolls in her dolls’ house do when she’s finished playing with them and closed the front of the house. She peeks in the window but of course the dolls are just lying where she left them. Then all at once Elizabeth finds herself walking up to the front door of the house. This strange magic isn’t referred to at all; Elizabeth just accepts it without question and I, as a reader, went along with her. When Elizabeth meets the dolls she tries to explain who she is, and the dolls take her explanation that she owns the house and the fact that she already knows all their names to mean that she is their landlady.

Every detail of the dolls’ world is considered. They moan about how dreadful it is to live in a house where the whole of the front comes off sometimes. They have to pretend to have dinner because all the food in the house is made of plaster (Elizabeth remedies this with a chocolate biscuit and jellies). Some pet mice take up residence in the house and the dolls use them as horses to pull a little carriage (with disastrous results!).

It’s a joy! The characters are gorgeous – Vanessa, the eldest who is a terrible snob, Jane, the beauty, Amanda, clever and naughty, Jacqueline, the French paying guest, Lupin, who always goes about in her vest much to Vanessa’s disapproval, and the monkey who lives on the roof and is always making cheeky comments and causing mischief.

So much is packed into this short book. As with many chapter books for younger readers, each chapter is a complete story but the whole has a narrative that reaches a satisfying conclusion. Long after I was grown up, I did discover that there were sequels to the story, but I can’t bear to read them. For me Five Dolls in a House is a completely perfect miniature world and I don’t want to know any more.

This post is part of a collection of seven about children's books that I love. You can see the original post here, with links to all the books I've written about.

The seven books I'm not posting covers of

I keep being tagged in those social media posts where you're supposed to put up a number of books you love or books that have changed you or just books. With no comment or explanation, they usually say. I suppose this is so that it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. Maybe so that it provokes other people to comment. I've done this before, I always want to shout about books I love, but the tags are coming so thick and fast in the current situation - what else have people got to do but look back at books, movies, music, paintings that they love - that I can't bring myself to join in. And besides, I find I want to comment. I have things to say about books. I want people to hear them.

So I was lying in bed, thinking about what I might choose if I was posting seven books that mean a lot to me/changed my life/I want to share. I thought I'd need to browse through my bookshelves but actually seven books appeared in my head straight away. Of course, as a children's book nerd, all seven are children's books. I do read other things. I love many, many books aimed at adults, but I don't feel nearly as passionate about them as I do about the children's books I love. Why would that be? Is it because the books I loved as a child stood out more because the pool of all the books I had read was smaller when I read them? Is it because I wasn't consciously looking for books that were like books I'd already enjoyed, so that finding these was a joyful happenstance?

I'd be interested to know if adults who don't read children's books have stand-out books from their childhoods that they would consider including in a list of favourites. As us children's writers know, many adults see children's books as less worthy than books aimed at adults. I think if anyone who had been a reader since childhood gave it some thought, they would easily put their finger on a few stand-out books from their childhood.

So here are the seven books that sprang into my mind.

What can I say about them? They seem distinctly 'girly' to me, but that could be to do with the era in which I was a child. There's a clear progression in when I took up each as 'my favourite book'. But somehow even when I championed a new one, all the others still remained 'my favourite'. The order is:

Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare

Thursday's Child by Noel Streatfeild

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Henrietta's House by Elizabeth Gouge

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

Fifteen by Beverley Cleary

So I thought, instead of just showing you covers, I'd tell you why I love these books. I've already written about most of them on this blog. You can click on the titles above to see what I had to say.  The rest I'll write over the course of the next few weeks. There isn't after all anything much pressing to do at the moment.

Retreat!

Retreat: (noun)
3. The act of retiring or withdrawing into privacy or into some place of saftey.
4. A place of seclusion or privacy.
OED

There is a house in France that feels like home to me. Though it doesn’t belong to me, I have a key and I know that whenever I want to go there I can. My family and I have been going on holiday there since, well, since before we were a family. As time has passed and I have moved house and my parents and friends have moved house, this has been the most constant place in my life.

But things change and now the house is to be sold. It’s taking a while, but a couple of months ago I realised time was running out for me to do something I have always promised myself I would do – to go there alone to write. I’ve written there before, writing time set aside during holidays, and once for a week with a writer friend, but never alone. Two weeks all alone? I’d be lonely, they said. Won’t you be scared? Won’t you be bored?

But I wasn’t lonely. I wasn’t scared or bored. It was the most extraordinary thing to have my brain emptied of all the things I usually have to think about for other people, of having to walk dogs and clean things and cook and make money and pay bills. Because of the time difference all the TV programmes I might have watched were on late so I didn’t watch TV. This is the essence retreating, of course – the putting aside of everyday life. It is utterly relaxing. I thought about my work, I read a little, I daydreamed, I slept, I ran. I wrote. I wrote. I wrote.

The lovely annexe where I worked

I had planned a new book. Three thousand words a day was my aim. In two weeks – let’s call that twelve days to allow for travelling – that would make 36,000 words. That’s a good start on a book that might be around 50,000 words in the end. First drafts just have to be hammered out. They’re always terrible, but once the words are on the page you can start sculpting them into something better. My plan was very precise – divided into scenes on a spreadsheet with only two or three places where I had written ‘[they go from A to B somehow]’. I plot using the snowflake method with some slight variations. I find this allows me to build my plot in an orderly but creative way. What I didn’t know is exactly what the tone of the book would be or what the characters would be like. I find these are the things that come as I write if I know where I’m going with the plot.

So, day 1, I got up and went for a run. Then I showered and had breakfast. I made coffee and carried it round to the little annexe to start work. It was eleven o’clock by this time and I was irritated with myself for not getting started sooner. How was I going to write 3,000 words a day if I didn’t start until eleven? I wrote for two hours. I had some lunch and sat in the sun (oh how the sun shone those first two days!) and then I wrote for another two hours.

I had written 5,000 words.

A fluke. Must be.

But the next day and the next I got 5,000 words on the page. I kept up the same routine. Four hours of writing, sometimes five, a couple of hours of some other type of work a bit later. On day 7, I wrote the final words. The book was 35,000 words long. Obviously, I thought, as I packed up that day, that was just a start. I would need lots of polish and there would be plot holes that needed work. So on day 8, I reread it and made notes. The beginning needed changing. It always does. There were a couple of other places which didn’t quite work. And lots of other notes of course. But it wasn’t bad. Four more days of revising and then another read. I couldn’t quite believe it.

Lovely evening walks - though I ended up covered head to toe in bites!

The sun shone... some of the time

Of course I haven’t read it again yet. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there are giant plot holes. Perhaps the plot is derivative or dull. Perhaps the characters are feeble. But I don’t think so. I think this book is nearer to done than any first draft I have done more slowly. In a month or two, when I can read it as though someone else has written it, I will bring it out and work on it again. I’m hopeful.

Retreating is extraordinary. Of course not everyone is lucky enough to get the chance to do this. I know I couldn’t have when my kids were younger and I’m privileged to have access to such a wonderful spot to hide away it. But even without being able to retreat completely, I think this experience demonstrates the necessity of clearing mental and physical space for writing so that when I write I can focus on nothing but my story. Just got to work out how to implement that now…

All locked up and ready to leave

Frances - the most real small child I've ever read

I remember almost no picture books from my childhood. I suppose this may be because they would have been library books for the most part. At home, I had a handful of Beatrix Potters which I valued more for their satisfying size than for their stories.

The one story I could remember as an adult was Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban. Why this particular book stuck with me more than all the others I must have had read to me I have no idea. Of course, it is a very fine book, so perhaps my pre-reading self had some literary discrimination. All I know is that this was a book that if I saw it on the library shelves, I would immediately add it to my pile. That copy must have spent more time in our house than it did at the library.

This was the book that I sought out when I had my children. I bought Bread and Jam when my eldest daughter was two and eventually we had most of the Frances books, though the only other one that was familiar to me was A Baby Sister for Frances. We also had a rather delightful tape of Glynis Johns reading the stories. Oh I wish I had that tape still. She was odd and real and just perfect.

Why did Frances appeal so much? What was it about these stories that caught me? Frances, though she is, of course, a badger, is very much an ordinary child. Nothing much happens. In Bread and Jam Frances is fussy about her food so Mother gives her bread and jam for every meal until Frances realises that that’s dull and there are other foods she likes. Put so plainly is sounds almost Victorian – Frances acts up and learns a lesson. But it’s not like that at all. All the characters bounce off the page with life. We know exactly how Frances feels – and she feels so much and so strongly – and we understand it. She is one of the most real small children I’ve ever read. And you can’t help but love her rhymes:

The language of these books has seeped into our family vocabulary. We know what we’re referring to when we talk about things ‘coming out even’. When ever opportunity arises, I will say ‘You can be sure there will always be plenty of chocolate cake around here.’

It’s the detail I love. When Frances watches her friend Albert eat his extensive packed lunch, we get every detail of his ritual as he cracks his hard-boiled egg, peels it, salts it, bites it, then moves on to take a bite of his sandwich and his pickle and a drink of milk. You can feel Frances's envy at every bite. And at the end, her own joy in doing the same with her new non-bread-and-jam lunch, made even more special by the inclusion of a doily and a tiny vase of violets. 

This is very wordy compare to most modern picture books, and I know there are versions out there where the text has been cut, but I believe every word of this is necessary and every word is a great pleasure. For someone who loves children’s books so, I found reading to my kids something of a chore and in particular I disliked wordy picture books. Maybe I could feel the children getting restive and wanting to see the picture on the next page. I never found that with Frances though. I would willingly start again the moment I’d reached the end. Pure quality? Or because it was so embedded in my memory that the book felt like all the very best things about books and childhood and reading aloud.