During 2020, or more precisely during the time from March 15, 2020, when my wife and I began to impose a lockdown and mask mandate on ourselves (followed the next day by such state measures in Kentucky) until the middle of March 2021, two weeks after my wife and I had received our second vaccine inoculation, I read 80 books—more than in any year I can remember.
I read mostly for amusement, including a dozen P. G. Wodehouse books—Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge, Blandings Castle, and Monty Bodkin books. The biggest chunk of my reading was mysteries, from the end of the nineteenth century up to J. K. Rowling’s first Cormoran Strike book and Derek Miller’s Norwegian by Night. There were a couple of Graham Greenes in there, and a few abstruse entries such as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, by H. Bustos Domecq—a Jorge Luis Borges collaboration, and Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok’s The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. I read Martin Edwards’s The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, which sent me to many mysteries that were new to me. And I also read some true crime books: William Roughead’s Classic Crimes and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.
I read some good fiction—Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Louis de Bernieres’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin—and revisited some, including Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat, four Aldous Huxley novels, and my third reading of Death Comes for the Archbishop. A couple of take-me-back-to-Sicily books by Leonardo Sciascia. Some Shakespeare plays.
I read two books about maps: Jerry Brotton’s A History of the World in Twelve Maps and Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps. One autobiography—Malcolm X—and one autobiographical/fantasy, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
The nonfiction included a fascinating book on The Sarpedon Krater by Nigel Spivey, which combines grave-robbing and art-world intrigue with the tracing of visual motifs up and down the centuries. I also enjoyed Peter Murphy’s The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem, which traces Wyatt’s ”They Flee from Me” from its original manuscript form, through changes made by friends who copied it, through other changes made by editors, to the final, sensible return to what Wyatt actually wrote. What we also get in Murphy is a history of the beginnings of English Literature as a subject of study, and a condensed look at the move from scholarship to criticism in the school subject of English Literature in the twentieth century. Another book I found engrossing, though dense, was Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life, a look back at a pervasive prejudice in American religion, politics, education, and popular culture. One of these nonfiction books was in manuscript, my son Matt’s The Silence of the Miskito Prince; you’ll be seeing it soon, I think, on the University of Minnesota’s offerings in Early American Studies.
One curious thing about my reading during that long Covid year was the number of books I began and stopped reading after thirty, fifty, or a hundred pages. These included mysteries such as Peter Lovesey’s Wobble to Death (my tolerance for details about Victorian walking races might have been sustained for five or six pages, but not the first forty), The Benson Murder Case (just dull), and Tracks in the Snow, an Edwardian detective novel. I read a big sticky chunk of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Manservant and Maidservant before I grew tired of her method of unrelieved dialogue to tell a story that didn’t seem to have much point. And I also got tired of Chekhov’s buffoon of a narrator in The Shooting Party after thirty or forty pages, but I will surely revisit this one, perhaps in another translation, perhaps via audiobook. I couldn’t get very far in one of Elizabeth Peters’s mysteries about her Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody; Peters’s idea that late Victorian discourse consisted of unrelieved clichés makes for unrelieved tedium. The pandemic gave me lots of time, but also left me impatient with less than really entertaining books.
Sometimes my truncated reading is more than irritation that a book is not better. I got thirty or forty pages into Younghill Kang’s East Goes West and probably not so far into Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, although these are books I will probably take up again. Because I am an immersive reader rather than a resistant one, it sometimes takes me more than one try at a book to surrender to its world for the whole experience.
When I finish a couple of books at nearly the same time, I sometimes cast about for the next thing to read, and at such times I often consult others’ recommendations, such as Martin Edwards’s that I mentioned above. I had read somewhere that Graham Greene, when he worked as an editor for Eyre and Spottiswoode, proposed a series of neglected books for publication as The Century Library and managed to publish fifteen of his proposed titles. One of the suggested titles that didn’t make it was John Meade Falkner’s The Nebuly Coat, from 1903. I found it free on Kindle and an audio version on LibriVox, which is also a free service. I spent a very enjoyable several days reading and listening to alternate chapters, with frequent belly laughs. It’s about an architect who goes to a village church to do some restoration, and the people he encounters, including the church organist, who imagines he’s being followed by a man with a hammer who wants to bludgeon him. There is also the local nobility in the form of Lord Blandamer, a mysterious peer whose title may be as unsteady as parts of the church, where his coat of arms, the “nebuly” coat of the title, adorns the stained glass windows (the “barry nebuly, argent and vert” are bars of silver and green that have a stylized likeness to clouds, or nebulae). The church characters are worthy of Trollope, and the others are depicted with Dickensian enthusiasm. There is also a mystery, enough about church music and architecture to interest without being tedious, and a pretty girl named Anastasia, whose lineage might be more than it seems, though she’s not a Romanoff. The Nebuly Coat was a great find, and I will be back to sample other titles from Greene’s The Century Library.
