Good morning everyone,

How are you doing? Well, I hope. I hope you are safe and that everyone you love is safe.

I also hope that you are ready to be distracted by some guff about books, because that is exactly what I have for you today. This includes my yearly review of books, from what was a pretty big year for my reading. You already have my books of the year, of course. There are more recommendations in this review, as well as a link to a big list if that's the sort of thing you are into:

I also reread A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was, yes, very well written and so forth, but also felt like Joyce himself was just skewering me aged 17. I last read Portrait when I, like its main character, was an insufferable teenage try hard. As I read I could almost hear myself thinking, mmmmmm this dude thinks about Ibsen when he walks past shops and so do I.

This did not feel great.

https://vincennes.medium.com/vincennes-review-of-books-2020-7e0e0bd9b4ba

Potentially one of the reasons we can read all of these books is Betty Ballantine, key innovator in the paperback format. And also in science fiction! Thank you Betty:

“She birthed the science fiction novel,” […] With the help of Frederik Pohl, a science fiction writer, editor and agent, Mr. Wise said, “She sought out the pulp writers of science fiction who were writing for magazines and said she wanted them to write novels, and she would publish them.” In doing so she helped a wave of science fiction and fantasy writers emerge. They included Joanna Russ, author of “The Female Man” (1975), a landmark novel of feminist science fiction, and Samuel R. Delany, whose “Dhalgren” (1975) was one of the best-selling science fiction novels of its time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/obituaries/betty-ballantine-dead.html

Now here's one of my favourite authors, Iris Murdoch, with a review of a Charles Sprawson book about swimming. I present this for the sheer joy in the reading of it. She's so good:

I am not in the athletic sense a keen swimmer, but I am a devoted one. On hot days in the Oxford summer my husband and I usually manage to slip into the Thames a mile or two above Oxford, where the hay in the water meadows is still owned and cut on the medieval strip system. The art is to draw no attention to oneself but to cruise quietly by the reeds like a water rat: seeing and unseen from that angle, one can hear the sedge warblers’ mysterious little melodies, and sometimes a cuckoo flies cuckooing over our heads, or a kingfisher flashes past.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/03/04/taking-the-plunge/

Love,

Alex.