A year of firsts!
More photos than normal, and, of course, a lot of reading...
How was 2024 for you? For me, it’s flown by, each year faster than the last, but when I started thinking about this piece, it occurred to me that for me it was a great year full of exciting Firsts!
My first granddaughter…
My first commercially published book..
My first booklaunch (at Hatchards, no less!)
My first literary festival appearance
My first visit to Southern California and Arizona
My first time at Wembley Arena (seeing the Taylor Swift Eras tour - definitely a highlight in a year of great events)
And the not so good…my first broken bone (which considering my age, I’m also very relieved to say!). It certainly made it a Chelsea Flower Show to remember.
And on a lighter note - my first and probably last ever ride in a Christmas carol-blaring rickshaw. There was an excuse - the complete failure of the London transport network to function on the one evening in twenty years when I had tickets for the Royal Opera House - no tube, no buses, no taxis, and a husband with a post-operative knee and a possibly pre-operative hip…We were seriously running out of time - and it became quite the most thrilling, hysterically funny seven minutes of my life - from Leicester Square to Drury Lane via one way streets the wrong way, through red lights, pedestrian shopping malls and Chinatown - at one point I was convinced that we were trailing a string of Peking ducks behind us, so intimate did we become with the restaurants of Gerrard Street. I just wish I’d thought to film it. Has anyone else ever arrived at the Royal Opera House with squealing tyres, flashing tinsel lights and a chorus of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer at full blast?
There was another important first for me in 2024 - it was the first time I have ever managed to make and keep a list of the books I read and/or listened to, right through the year. I have surprised myself…88 books read, 12 audiobooks listened to. A nice round 100! Obviously I’m not going to list them all, but here are some thoughts;
Audiobooks - I’ve been listening to one book a month ever since Audible came up with the monthly subscription plan. And for nearly all this time I’ve listened alone, as I walked the dog, travelled, sewed or cooked. But for the past few months my husband I have spent far more time in the car together, and so we have been listening to the extraordinary feat which is Len Deighton’s Bernard Sampson nine-volume spy thriller. I remember reading Berlin Game and a couple of sequels in the 1980s, and watching Ian Holm play the man on television. As a historical document of life during the Cold War, it is gripping and terrifying. It’s also an excellent study of a marriage, albeit not under normal circumstances. Two spies in one family! The other great ‘listens’ this year were performed by two celebrity readers: Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, read by Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks reading his own novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. I really enjoyed them both.
Otherwise, my reading this year divides nicely into new books and old, some of which I have read before, for reasons which will become clear. I have to admit that for the most part, the re-reads and older works were vastly preferred to the current bestsellers. I did enjoy The Bee Sting, but found little to love in the over-hyped The Examiner, The Fraud, The Cloisters or In Memoriam. Of course, Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings was in a class of its own, such beautiful prose.
This was a year when I immersed myself in the literature of the 1930s and 1940s. I discovered JB Priestley, I wallowed in Dorothy Whipple, I tried Josephine Tey with mixed results, I fell in love with Laurie Lee. Here are some of the books I wrote about
Otherwise, looking down the list, there’s a lot of comfort reading: SJ Maclean’s wonderful Seeker books, which I enjoyed even more the second time around, and a new series to me by Elly Griffiths, the Ruth Galloway mysteries. There were two massive tomes, one of which, my latest triumph, all 1250 pages of The Count of Monte Cristo, is a lot more ‘unputtdownable’ than I expected, and certainly more so than my other conquest, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. (Isabel Archer joins my little list, along with Anna Karenin and Madame Bovary: famous women characters created by male authors, that I don’t quite believe in…Anyone else?)
Along with my other new Substack friends, I have become a fan of Penelope Fitzgerald (Human Voices was my favourite), Nina Bawden and Barbara Pym, and I’ve re-read Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety, Angle of Repose) and my favourite Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin. All of these have more than earned their place in the big downsizing exercise of my bookshelves that will be the major theme in 2025. My rule of thumb will have to be ‘use it or lose it’ - if I’ve never read it, and still don’t want to now, or know that I never will again, it’s got to go. It’s going to be hard - but so far it’s found me some joyful discoveries (the Dumas, for instance, which had been on my shelves untouched for twenty years), and some great re-reading experiences (Akenfield, and most recently Anna of the Five Towns - what a fantastic exploration of coercive control, in the household of the miser Tellwright. I do not understand why Arnold Bennett is so little read today.)
My tip for 2025? you are going to hear a lot about this book, Broken Country, by Claire Leslie Hall. It’s a really compulsive mixture of crime, mystery and romance, and I was lucky enough to read it in advance. Order it now!
Wishing all of you a truly happy and peaceful 2025, with lots of quiet reading time! And if you have enjoyed this, please do hit the ‘like’ button - my readership has been growing slowly and steadily over the year, and I’d really like to keep it visible. Hitting ‘Like’ or better still, ‘share’, would be so helpful. Thank you.
Penelope Fitzgerald is my Queen. Due a re-read any day now. Thanks for all the great recommendations!
*idolise! Baby typing there 🤣.