Books read in 2020

Better late than never.

FICTION

Havelok the Dane and Gawain and the Green Knight were both read for a class on food in literature.

 

My book club , which focuses on books about Chicago and by Chicago authors, read Carol Anshaw's Right After the Weather, Willa Cather's Song of the Lark, and Sara Paretsky's Deadlock.

 

For my Italian class:  L'Arminuta, by Donatella Di PIetrantonio; La Vita bugiarda degli adulti, by Elena Ferrante; La mennulara, by Simonetta Agnello Hornby; Isola di Neve, by Valentina d'Urbano

 

I took a class about Giuseppe di Lampedusa. In class we read Steven Price's fictional biography, Lampedusa, and, of course, The Leopard (a re-read for me), but I also re-read The Professor and the Siren, as well as (for the first time) two non-fiction works by Lampedusa: Places of my Infancy: a memory, and Letters from London and Europe (1925-30) 

 

Due to the pandemic, theatre stopped in March.   But Court Theatre did a lot of online "deep dives" into plays they had intended to produce.  So I read Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: a communion rite and Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt.

 

Probably also due to the pandemic, I did a slew of very light reading - humor, mysteries, etc. 

So:

This Undesirable Residence, by Miles Burton 

Give up the Ghost, by Margaret Erskine

Unpunished: a mystery, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Leavenworth Case: a lawyer's story, by Anna Katharine Green

The Second Man, by Edward Grierson 

Israel Rank: the Autobiography of  a Criminal, by Roy Horniman (this is the book on which "Kind Hearts and Coronets" was based)

The Plain Man, by Julian Symons

Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers (a re-read) 

Rear Window and four short novels, by Cornell Woolrich

Hunting Season and The Safety Net, by Andrea Camilleri 

Puppies, by Maurizio de Giovanni (one of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone series) 

Raffles, by E.W. Hornung 

Venice Noir, an anthology edited by Maxim Jakubowski 

The Thief of Venice, by Jane Langton 

Trace Elements, by Donna Leon 

Black Betty, by Walter Mosley 

Murder at the Frankfurt Book Fair, by Hubert Monteilhet 

The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes,by Jamyang Norbu 

Revenge: Short Stories by Women Writers, edited by Kate Saunders

The Lacquer Screen, by Robert van Gulik 

The Womansleuth Anthology, edited by Irene Zahava 

 

P.G. Wodehouse amused me with Ring for Jeeves, Ukridge, Tales of St. Austin's, The Small Bachelor, and Meet Mr. Mulliner.

Other humor included Craig Brown's The Marsh Marlowe Letters, and Alexander McCall Smith's  The Geometry of Holding Hands and The Promise of Ankles.

 

I found some excellent new (to me) authors this year. I binged a bit on French author Antoine Laurain, reading first The President's Hat, followed by The Red Notebook and The Reader's Room. 

Two excellent collections of short stories were Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones, and  The Bus Driver who wanted to be God, by Etgar Keret. 

 

I also returned to old friends, such as Anthony Trollope (He Knew he was Right, The Belton Estate, Lady Anna), Wilkie Collins (No Name), Sharyn McCrumb (a re-read of Ghost Riders), and Edith Wharton (The World Over).

 

Other fiction reading included:

Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, ending the story of Thomas Cromwell

Emily Danforth's Plain Bad Heroines (longer than it should have been!)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited 

Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist

Nancy Springer's Fair Peril

Paul Theroux's The Greenest Island

Lisa Wingate's The Book of Lost Friends

E.H. Young's Miss Mole

 

I think I'll do a separate post for the non-fiction, and then get to 2021!