2020 Reading Year

Living with a fervent bibliophile who kindly keeps my to-read stack topped up means I usually manage to read a good few books in a year. This year I got through 76, a list still dwarfed by the pile of books I would like to read but haven’t got round to yet, but considerably more than the 50 or 60 I usually manage. A rare pandemic silver lining. Based on my instant reaction – a star rating out of 5 in Goodreads – these were the top three books that I read this year, all receiving a full 5 stars:

What they all have in common is being wholly satisfying reads. I read most of Benjamin Myers’s The Offing in our garden as April turned to May in, if I remember correctly, a blaze of spring sunshine. A refreshingly uncomplicated novel with a small cast – just the two central characters – leaving space for evocative descriptions of food and a bygone but not over-idealised or quaint countryside. As for the Palin, I didn’t set out to like Erebus as much as I did, but I am happy to report that its place in my top three has nothing to do with the relative fame of the author. A great story told with buckets of easy-going charm and above all just so very readable. And if books aren’t for reading, what are they for? Lastly Bring Up the Bodies, the second book in Mantel’s trilogy based on the career of Thomas Cromwell was every bit as good as I had been led to believe and works well as a standalone. However, based on the sage advice of Bookish Beck (and looking at the length of them), I am unlikely to bother with the other two.

Next up are three more top picks from this year’s reading that rewarded more time and thought:  

I read Tim Dee’s deservedly lauded Greenery over a fairly long period. His writing is unquestionably beautiful and intense, packed with unusual metaphors. I tended to read a few pages at a time and then let them sit. The passages about migrant birds in the Sahara stood out for me as particularly vivid, in part because they cover places I am never likely to go, but also as they best show off Dee’s eye for scale. He expertly places an individual warbler’s struggle for survival at an oasis into the great flow of spring across continents, without losing hold of either. Illuminating.

Bruce Cockburn is a legendary guitarist, songwriter and humanitarian whose music I only discovered almost half a century into his career, perhaps because, despite his legendary status, he’s not exactly a household name outside his native Canada. In his introspective and thoughtful 2014 memoir, he comes across as a thoroughly decent and grounded human being; no rock-star braggadocio here. I enjoyed reading about the experiences that sparked many of his best-known songs, as well as others I was yet to discover, his reflections on religion and spirituality, and tales of travelling in Central America during the Reagan years – which served as a timely reminder that American governments have been up to no good long before the time of Trump.

Bruce Cockburn at St Pancras church in London, November 2018. Live music! Imagine that.

Soil and Soul, by Alastair McIntosh, is an extraordinary book that combines theology, ecology and activism into a spellbinding whole that has much to say about our lives as individuals and in community. Despite the depth, it isn’t heavy going at all but instead infused with the quiet joy that for me is the hallmark of good writing about spirituality.

Some more of the books discussed below – those I had immediately to hand, not all are pictured (it is still Christmas so I’m still lazy!)

Fiction

Rounding up some more fiction, another memorable read this year was Octavia E. Butler’s powerful 1979 novel Kindred.It’s an unflinchingly realistic portrayal of slavery in the 19th century, seen through the eyes of a young African American woman from the present who unwillingly ends up travelling back in time. The time-travelling mechanism is not fully explained, which stops it feeling contrived; instead, you instantly accept it and get pulled into the story.

The Bearkeeper’s Daughter by Gillian Bradshaw is more conventional historical fiction, set in sixth-century Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire. Supporting a plot full of high adventure and political intrigue, Bradshaw’s recreation of the period is again totally believable, although I can’t claim to know anything about Byzantine history!

More jumping around in time with T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, which flits back and forth between different stages in the lives of two eco-warriors. Boyle often incorporates conservation or ecology themes, but through characters who are deeply flawed and all too human. Written in 2000, the ‘future’ segments of the novel are set in a post-apocalyptic 2025. With only five years to go, things aren’t quite as bad as he imagined yet, thankfully, but sometimes it feels uncomfortably close.  

Speaking of the future, I also read more sci-fi this year. Highlights included The Martian (Andy Weir), which was terrific: gripping and witty (I’ve not seen the film). H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man is a perfectly paced page-turner that feels much more modern than its 123 years.

Lastly, we both reread Mark Dunn’s irresistible comic novel Ella Minnow Pea this year. It is, as the subtitle says, a “progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable”: fiendishly clever and consistently funny.

Nature

I’m including Watership Down (which I don’t actually remember reading as a child at all) in the nature section because what struck me most about it was Richard Adams’s descriptions of a slice of southern England, through Berkshire into Hampshire, that I know pretty well – it is as much a book about the countryside as it is about talking rabbits. In May we took the book along for a walk up to Sandleford Warren, the location from which the rabbits originally flee – and which is, ironically, threatened by a housing development in real life. The most recent planning application was rejected by West Berkshire Council in October, but will be the subject of an appeal sometime next year.  

Less on the nature theme but sticking with the local connection is Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England. In a conversational, fact-rich narrative, Shrubsole packs an impressive amount of information into relatively short chapters. As a Lib Dem who has joined in with ‘The Land Song’ at party conference (and wishes we would reclaim the mantle of reformist radicalism), I was primed to be a receptive audience for the book, but wondered if the sometimes overtly partisan tone might decrease the potential to convert some of the very powers being railed against to the cause of land reform.

Partly by accident and partly by design, much of my ‘nature’ reading this year was broadly about the relationship between people and wildlife. Richard Mabey’s Unofficial Countryside remains strikingly relevant and, considering his age when it was published, the writing is remarkably assured. In The Accidental Countryside, Stephen Moss shows how some of those ‘unofficial’ wildlife hotspots are managed and protected today, often through the vision and dedication of conservationists who stumbled on these special places, much as Mabey did in the 1970s on his ramblings round the London fringe. In Into the Tangled Bank,Lev Parikian – whose easygoing, humorous writing is always good company – takes us to some more special places for wildlife in Britain. In this case they’re all connected with notable naturalists and conservationists who have influenced how we interact with nature. Some, like Darwin’s Down House in Kent, and Peter Scott’s house at Slimbridge, I have visited myself and heartily recommend; others are now be on my ‘to visit’ list for the future. Veteran naturalist Peter Marren’s Rainbow Dust considers the history of a particular tribe of nature lovers, butterfly enthusiasts, while in An Indifference of Birds Richard Smyth puts us firmly in our place by taking a refreshing bird’s-eye view of our role in their history.

I caught up with two more nature writing classics this year with Arctic Dreams and The Living Mountain. Arctic Dreams is a masterly survey of the ecology and anthropology of the Artic andthe only book by the late Barry Lopez I’ve read. Another long, detail-packed read, it also features some seriously beautiful passages. By contrast, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain concerns itself with a smaller patch, the Cairngorms, and is consequently a much slenderer book. However, it makes a comparably grand survey of what is the closest thing we have to an Arctic landscape in Britain. Finally, in a year of considerable astronomical excitement, from comets to conjunctions, Under the Stars seemed a very appropriate read. Matt Gaw’s second book, like his first, is distinctive by simple virtue of not being from the usual nature writer’s perspective of walking around in the daytime. His writing is fresh and unpretentious, and I look forward to seeing where he takes us next.

Did you read anything good in 2020? What’s on your to-read pile for 2021?

The Seafarers by Stephen Rutt

Scotland, 2005. That’s the trip I always cite as my ‘conversion experience’ as a birder. Perhaps the most memorable element was a boat trip out to the seabird colonies of the Treshnish Isles. Puffins were the draw, but other memories are more vivid. The sudden appearance of a great skua, powering through at low level causing consternation among other birds and excitement among birdwatchers. A minke whale blowing spray near the boat. The dark eye of a shag up close, inscrutably ancient, a pterodactyl that somehow survived to the present.

On Lunga in the Tresnish Isles, 2005. The hair!

Captivated by the peace and isolation of Scottish islands and the incredible sights, sounds and smells of seabirds we did it all again the following year, heading farther north. We started on mainland Orkney, travelling overland by train before catching the ferry from Thurso. During a few days on the Westray we experienced a small island community, intriguing to a child of English suburbia, though mostly I remember the rain and superb traybakes in the village café. Finally on to Shetland, making our way up to Hermaness, the very northern end of Britain on the island of Unst. Towering skua-ruled cliffs with the most inquisitive, trusting puffins I have ever known, no land between us and the North Pole. Some four years later we visited Skomer in Pembrokeshire, another famed seabird destination, but since then our visits to Britain’s seabird islands have, alas, largely dried up. I’ve caught up with seabirds on and off since but perhaps let the full wonder of seabirds and the magic of islands drift out of my life.

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In that respect The Seafarers was a timely read. It takes the reader, via a series of personal journeys, through the major groups of ocean-going birds that visit Britain while also introducing a significant seabird location in each chapter. It’s an appealing blend of travel, descriptive nature writing, popular science and biography. Author Stephen Rutt balances a highly personal account of what seabirds have meant for him with some solid seabird facts which are well explained, detailed but not at all dense. Rutt is a young birder, naturalist and writer. Since I too am a bearded, balding young (though not nearly so young as he) birder who is not fond of crowds I was probably predisposed to enjoy his voice, and I did, but I also admired its freshness. He successfully avoids the ‘lone white male’ clichés often accused of dominating nature writing, so far as I can tell, though I’m probably susceptible to them myself and not an expert witness. The writing is accomplished throughout and Rutt’s prose is distinctive, concise yet poetic.

It is also a highly persuasive read in places. The life-affirming simple joy of birding shines through. The particularly well-crafted short chapter on vagrant birds may be one of those rare pieces of writing to actually change my mind. Where I have lately been inclined toward the view that twitching exotic vagrants is ‘..a morbid act, a premature wake for a waif that won’t last out the day’, as Rutt puts it, I was won over by his “faith in the wondrous, sense-defying, thrilling capacity that birds have of being lost and making that seem…OK”. Couple that with the pleasure of catching up with old friends (the seabirds themselves), being reminded of favourite places from travels past (or places I’ve been wanting to spend time and I’ll most likely be seeking seabirds again sooner than I would have done if I hadn’t picked up this book.

The Seafarers is an original contribution, despite having elements in common with a number of other recent books. One notable similarity is that it weaves in biographical details of significant literary and scientific figures from the past. R.M.Lockley and James Fisher feature here and both seem good inclusions as perhaps slightly overlooked figures in 20^th century ornithology. The biographical passages, together with elements of cultural history, are well-judged and put the authors experience into context rather than distracting from them.  The Seafarers also follows on just two years after Adam Nicolson’s The Seabirds Cry. The latter is the more complete (and global) treatment of seabirds, what we know about them and why they matter, but that’s not really a criticism of Rutt’s book. The Seafarers is as much an autobiographical account of the transformative power of birding as it is a compilation of seabird lore. What they have in common is that both books are love letters to this extraordinary group of animals. With The Seafarers Stephen Rutt has added his own unique chapter to the shared history of people and seabirds on these islands, as well as establishing himself as a writer with real promise. I look forward to seeing what he turns his thoughts to next.

Thanks to Elliot and Thompson for providing a copy for review. 

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Review: Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? Lev Parikian

Lev Parikian is a professional conductor, a writer and, until the beginning of January 2016, a lapsed birdwatcher. Then, while he was on a simple walk through the park, eight Canada geese flew low overhead and left his year transformed in their wake. The “everyday beauty of the spectacle” reawakened a long-neglected interest in birds. Reviewing a childhood list that was, in birding parlance, rather ‘stringy’, and considering the birds one could realistically hope to see in a year, Parikian formulated his New Year’s resolution: 12 months, 200 birds.

Why anybody would lose interest in something quite so wonderful as birds is a profound mystery. But I sympathise. It’s happened to so many of us. As a child I was keen on birds – on the shelf I still have my copy of Spotting Birds, with its un-lifelike illustrations (already old-fashioned when it was published in 1964), which nonetheless I pored over, dreaming of seeing a white-spotted bluethroat, roller or woodchat shrike. Pity I didn’t realise at the time that the book was a translation from the Czech and came with no warning that I would have a hard time finding any of those in England circa 1990.

Anyhow, the world is full of interesting things and some have to fall by the wayside; besides, we’re encouraged to give up ‘such fripperies’ when we ‘grow up’ – aren’t we? Thankfully, I found birds again a few years after graduating; or rather, I should say they found me. They made themselves too obvious to ignore, from the oystercatchers stark and incongruous on the lawns of a Scottish castle to the sudden white flash of a wheatear’s rump skipping over a coastal rock. And so it is that I’ve been Considering Birds in the field since about 2005 and on this corner of the web (perhaps the name should have been Reconsidering Birds) since 2011.

Not coincidentally, that’s also the year that I, too, resolved to see 200 species. I don’t remember exactly why I decided on 200, but it seems to be a sweet spot: enough to ensure a bit of a challenge and plenty of varied birding adventures whilst not unduly risking family, finances, career or sanity. Many birders see a fair few more than 200 in a year – 300, even – but unless you’re spectacularly lucky the only way to reach those heights is to spend pretty much all of your spare time twitching – that is, pursuing rarities already reported by somebody else, and often criss-crossing the country to do so.

I don’t particularly hold twitching against anybody (though consider my eyebrow raised at the carbon footprint), but Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? won me over from the start by obviously not being another  straightforward narrative of twitching and listing, as much as I enjoy books like The Big Year. I admire the way the author set about building his list: for the most part, planning extended stays in good birding areas and trying to track down the species that are usually found there*.  This book is much more about the journey, the joys and frustrations of birdwatching, and the assortment of characters you meet in the often strange but ultimately wonderful community that is Britain’s birdwatchers. In pursuit of his target, Parikian never loses sight of the things that matter most to him, with the elements of family memoir woven into the narrative lending a touching emotional depth.

Obviously, the developing bird list does have to feature, and this is a potential pitfall for any bird writing. I’ve read plenty of trip reports that end up as total yawn-fests despite describing an extremely exciting day’s birding. Fortunately, this aspect of Why Do Birds is handled notably well. The ornithological cast of the book parades before us in entertainingly varied fashion without getting tedious.  The pace is helped along throughout by pithy prose that’s sprinkled with wry humour, the overall effect calling to mind Douglas Adams: a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Birdwatching, if you like.

Many of Parikian’s experiences along the way will be happily, or occasionally grimly, familiar to fellow birders, from the travails of describing the location of a small, well-camouflaged bird in a large, homogenous patch of vegetation to shadily toting binoculars through a residential area in pursuit of waxwings (honest, officer!) to the reticence to speak up in a bird hide for fear of sounding like an idiot. But above all, Why Do Birds is a timely reminder of the pleasure of watching birds in an increasingly distressing and confusing world. It isn’t a book solely or even primarily for bird-nerds: I can see many uninitiated folk being prompted by this book to pick up a pair of binoculars for the first time. Those of us already devoted to birding will be reminded why we started in the first place – for the love of birds, for their beauty, for the sheer exhilaration and fun of engaging with these wonderful, wild creatures that are all around, waiting for us to notice them.

This post is part of the blog tour launching Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? Do check out the other posts! 

*I don’t begrudge him the odd twitch, and enjoy the various ways he attempts to justify them to himself. I wouldn’t have made it to 200 in 2011 without a bit of indulgence; indeed, by my rough calculations, I would have ended up four species short. Did Parikian make it? Sorry, you’ll find no spoilers here!