Not just a year but a decade in books
As is becoming sort of traditional, I thought I'd have a quick look back at what I read during the last year. The photo below is by no means a scientific sample but it does skew towards non-fiction, which is what the year felt like it did.
Some of the books I read in 2019
However, given that the Guardian kept on reminding me it wasn't just a new year but a new decade, I had a look back through my reading lists 2010-2019 and as a proportion I actually read more non-fiction in both 2018 and 2013 than I did in 2019 so I'm not sure why it felt so prominent.
As ever, there were library books (only 2 that I got all the way through, it's scandalous), e-books (8), and books I've subsequently given away (2) and hence aren't represented in the picture. Plus the ones I couldn't be bothered to pull off shelves in 3 different rooms and pile on the floor (apologies to Messrs Hobsbawm and Wodehouse, among others).
Standout novels of my reading year were probably the first two volumes of the Dark Gifts trilogy by Vic James (I still haven't read the third) and the Joe Sixsmith series from Reginald Hill (from the nineties, by the author best known for detectives Dalziel and Pascoe).
I read such a range of non-fiction in 2019, from Bruce Dickinson's fab autobiography What Does This Button Do? to a selection of books about the north or being working class, the brilliant Gig by Simon Armitage, and a couple of economics books. It doesn't make sense to say which was 'best' but Erebus by Michael Palin, The Northumbrians by Dan Jackson, and Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane both got me thinking and got me wanting to write some kind of follow-on or response.
I only read 39 books in 2019, the joint lowest total of the decade (alongside 2011). I'd like to say it's because I've been writing so much instead, but it's really not. Just over half the fiction was sci-fi or fantasy, which is about average for the decade, and just over a third was crime, which is on the high end. Though come to think of it, both novels so far in 2020 have been crime so maybe I'm going through a phase (riding a crime wave?). I should dust off the half-written detective novel this year.
Over the decade I've read 479 books, though I'm quite sure a few of them will have been the same book again (there's a book on writing crime fiction that I remember getting out of the library twice, for a start). It might be a lot if you stick them in one bookcase but less than 500 in 10 years is not that many. When I think about how many new books come out in a year, even just in the genres I'm interested in, it gets a little overwhelming. It also makes me feel less bad about abandoning a long fantasy series partway through if it's no longer absolutely compelling me to read on. I never felt guilty about not reading the must-reads and award-winners just because someone told me to, so no change there.