20 Books of 2020 (Pt. 23)

Reading is the greatest activity in the world and it has all the ability to make you vanish from the real world into an entirely new one where anything is possible and you don't have to see or hear the stupid people you normally live with (if you don't live with anyone then lucky you). Anyways, reading is a great and fascinating activity and here are some other reasons why:

1) Normally only one person reads in the family

If you're like me and live with your sibling(s) and your sibling(s) is loud and annoying, lo and behold reading can help you disappear. All you need is a book and a locked room. They can make noise in their own time and annoy someone else whilst you read and don't have to listen to them

2) It makes you happy

It can be the most tragic story in the world, but the emotional purging can actually make you feel better if you're feeling down or anxious, angry or upset. If it's a happy story then it can make you feel really optimistic and if it's scary then it can probably scare you to death but that makes you a stronger person. No book is ever morbid.

3) It gives you somewhere to go and you don't have to move at all

You can go anywhere in any time period in a book without spending all that money. All you need is enough money to buy the book and you're off. You can travel anywhere in the world with a great cast of characters who normally have an interesting story to tell. Interwoven with great descriptions, landscapes, cityscapes and more - books are the magic of travel without movement.

Anyways, let's move on to the list of books I've been reading. Here's the next 20 - numbers 441 to 460. You can find the other lists on my public page. Here we go...

441-450

441. The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde

I'm going to be perfectly honest when I say this but this is one of the best poetry anthologies I've ever read. With themes of love, death, the human experience, emotional turmoil, family, romance and race. The poetry is smooth and often very well constructed with attention paid to language and craft. The images are completely amazing and my favourite poem was on the The Death of Alvin Frost. It was like a eulogy and an ode all in one. Such a beautiful poetry anthology, I can't understand how I've missed it all this time.

442. The Famished Road by Ben Okri

This was a brilliant book because it was like nothing I've ever read before. It's about a young boy who is clinically between life and death for two weeks and wakes up in his own coffin at his funeral. He is resurrected and the family rejoices, renaming him after Lazarus, the man Jesus resurrected. Then, things start to go wrong and disasters begin to break out wherever the boy is seen. It is a spiritual novel in which you take this deep and existential journey through the new life of this boy who once wished he was never born.

443. Seeing Things As They Are by George Orwell

This was a change from the usual stuff I've read by Orwell. Be that as it may, Down and Out in Paris and London is still my favourite. This was all about Orwell's journalistic days and though you may expect it is all politics and socialism, it really isn't. There are book reviews on Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Aldous Huxley. There are film reviews on adaptations of novels by HG Wells etc. There is also a strange defence of the words of PG Wodehouse while he was interred in Germany.

444. Path to the Spiders’ Nest by Italo Calvino

This book is all about a young child who likes to torture insects so he steals a German army man's pistol and shoots a spider's nest before hiding the gun in there. After encountering a man called the Red Wolf, Pin (the boy) does some growing up emotionally and mentally (though I don't want to tell you exactly what happens because it would spoil the book). The ending is super emotional and it really shows us a side of Pin we don't see ever in the book. It is a beautiful book even though it's very very short.

445. Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

This book was incredible. Through its satire, it kind of reminded me of the way Beaumarchais made me feel when I first read him. This book is about a man who studies to become a lawyer, he then becomes a swordsman and after that, he confounds, amazes and baffles his friends and enemies during the French Revolution in which he keeps changing sides because of political power. I'm not going to lie when I say that this was an excellent piece of satire that was well worthy of the slightly difficult and archaic language that was in there. But I can honestly tell you that I had waited over six months to read this and I'm glad I did. I could appreciate it a lot more.

446. Collection of Sand by Italo Calvino

This book is filled with Italo Calvino's essays on philosophy, culture, writing and so much more. Some of it is autobiographical writing too - Calvino writes about travel and language, he writes about how culture has influenced his writing and he writes about the importance of the fantastical. I always love reading Calvino's works because there is something about his writing that feels almost magical - it is such an immersive book. Be that as it may, I would've wished for one thing - I wish that it was organised better. At the moment, the book is organised by subject matter. Normally, this subject matter encompasses the entirety of the essays that are inside it. But, I feel like it would've been better to organise it in time order seeing as I wanted to notice how Calvino's writing develops over his essay writing. Some of them you can actually tell he wrote before others, but some of them - well, it isn't so clear.

447. Happy Valley by Patrick White

I feel a bit cheated here because I thought this novel was actually going to be really happy and romantic because it's set in a small close-knit village with a bunch of interesting people. However, a baby dies in the first chapter, someone feels like they're going to freeze to death, two women start arguing about a puddle on the floor and a bunch of horrible things happen. I think either that this was false advertising or I just didn't read the summary beforehand and I think it was the latter. However, this book was written brilliantly and you're taken through the lives of people like Oliver and Hilda, a couple - Amy, Alys and others. They are all aptly interesting but all trying to escape something. One of those things is Happy Valley.

448. Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude McKay

This was a very different book of the Harlem Renaissance than what I am used to. Written in 1941, it wasn't published until 2017 when it was found some years before. When reading Harlem Renaissance fiction, I'm used to wholesome headstrong characters who have great fierce identities like John Grimes. But, when reading this book I noticed that many of the characters were deceptive and devious. I noticed that there were more cunning human qualities in characters like the Professor. I also noticed the differences in age and gender in characters like Serephina who has a completely different outlook on life and race than her father (the Professor). The ending will open your eyes as to how adverse to other Harlem Renaissance novels this book really is. I feel kind of weird for calling it Harlem Renaissance at all.

449. The Penguin Book of Early Fiction in England

Several stories and their enigmatic authors. From the widely read Geoffrey of Monmouth and his histories of Britain, to the Arthurian Legends that litter early English Literature, to the lesser known Marie de France and even works to which no author can be attributed. This book is filled with the legends of old. I have to say that my favourite parts were either the biography of Marie de France, the story of King Arthur in many different ways by different writers or even the tales of the Trojan War. It is very interesting to see how fiction and chronicler met at this strange and turbulent time in the courts of Henry II and other widely regarded kings.

450. The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman

This is a book about a woman named Emma Lou who is a very dark shade of black in her skin colour and experiences a wide range of racism from the white people and a wide range of colourism from the black people. Even her own family tell her that she is 'too dark' for a girl and should've been born a boy. However, when she goes to university, it is seen that Emma Lou wants friends that are more intelligent than a southern girl called Hazel who tries to make friends with her and she has a deep-seated prejudice against the southern blacks who are considered 'stupid' and 'backward' to her. She leaves and goes to New York in order to search for a better life, ending up working as a maid. But, as Emma Lou meets a man called Alva, her life is about to be turned upside down.

451-460

451. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

I love old, ageing narratives about mysticism and dark magic and this is only one of them that seemed completely immersive to me. Stories about men with one eye, blind men, men with their lips cut off and others, these Arab tales have mysticism and magic realism like you've never seem. They feel very old and folky in their writing and take a big concentration on how God, life and death all play huge roles in the way in which the main character ends their journey. It's a brilliant book of amazing tales that everyone should read.

452. Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness by Ibn Fadlan

I absolutely loved this book more than I can describe. It's all about the Arabs travelling into Eastern Europe. They meet the Turks and the Vikings and learn all about their culture. I loved all the stuff about the burial rites, religions and their ways of life. I must have read some passages three or four times, like the one on lightning and the one on the Northern Lights. I can't believe I didn't see this book earlier. It has become my favourite travel narrative ever.

453. The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov

Nikolai Leskov was a lesser known writer of the Russian Magical Age and a contemporary of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Russian Magic tales are brilliant and Leskov's tales are written with humour, darkness, vigour, satire and so much more. I have never heard of this writer and yet, he reminds me of a cross between Chekhov and Pushkin in his writing style, but has more magical mysticism in his writing than they put out. I love the way magic mingles with the real world and how Leskov presents the Russian culture through his incredible stories.

454. The Essential John Maynard Keynes

When it comes to random books, I'm very good at finding them and to be honest - I had heard of John Maynard Keynes before I bought the book, but only briefly. When I read this book, I was expecting it to be all about what I had heard - just economics and the market etc. But it wasn't. It was about philosophy and how probability and the way it applies to real life. This book was actually pretty fascinating even though it was often difficult to understand and read. I did enjoy it, however I won't be reading anything like it for a while. Not unless I want my head to hurt.

455. Sons and Fathers by Kathy Gilfillan

This book was absolutely beautiful. It's a bunch of famous guys writing about their fathers and what they meant to them. My favourite parts include John Banville's story about running for a train and Daniel Day-Lewis's poem for his father as he remembers when his father died - Sir DDL was only 15 years' old. This book almost made me cry, it was so beautiful. Some had really close relationships with their fathers and some feel bad for not having more time. Some have had their fathers die on them at a young age and some remember their father's funeral. It will make you tear up for sure.

456. Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue

This book was really quite confusing at first but as it went on, I started to believe it was a good book. The only fault I found is that it claims to be a city mystery novel but it creates no atmosphere. At first, you do get the duplicity of the character of Rodolphe and the link between him and the various smaller side plots in the book (David and Cecily, Tom and Sarah etc.) however, it takes a long time for this to develop and often, you sort of forget that Walter Murphy too - is an important character because you're too busy remembering the schoolmaster's nightmare.

457. The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen

This book is so strange because at first, it starts as some sort of comedy. You see this child who meets a strange traveller and when the traveller asks for the boy's name - he doesn't know. When asked for his parent's names, he still doesn't know. So the traveller takes him and as the book progresses into a war of the body and the mind, it turns into a horror novel. The best part of the book is the chapter-long ending. It's a massive monologue and it just reads brilliantly. That is how you do a first person narrative ending.

458. Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant writer of descriptive narratives. I love the way he describes landscapes because you feel so close to it that you can smell the air in your lungs. This book's best section is possibly part 3, the sea. Ernest Hemingway's descriptions of the seas have been appreciated a lot but this one includes an amazing character, Tom Hudson - against a backdrop of the war. The ending involving Willy and Tom is just one of the most tragically beautiful things ever and it is clear as to what has happened. Hemingway is a genius.

459. War Stories ed. by Sebastian Faulks

I'm not going to lie to you when I say this but I had to put this book down several times. I felt like I was going to be sick on a vast number of occasions and so, I would go and drink water, get some fresh air etc. in order to calm myself down. This book will murder your soul. It has extracts that are so entirely realistic and disgusting to read it is just graphic like nothing you've ever read. Some of the extracts are lighter but the ones that stay in your head are where the dead bodies are being eaten by rats and flies. Or the one where Eric is lying in a pool of his own blood - well, at least his top half is. They still have to locate the bottom half.

460. The Last of the Just by Andre Schwarz-Bart

Going through this book, I thought that the concept was brilliant. But unfortunately, I wasn't overly into the writing style. This is because though the book is about multiple generations of a Jewish family leading up to the Second World War in which the last one dies in Auschwitz, it does move from one to the other very quickly. A bit too quickly to make you feel anything realistic. I would've much more enjoyed it if there was a chapter or two dedicated to each character and even though it would be super long, it would be breathtaking with description and atmosphere. Here I am complaining about the lack of description again.