Dormant: A Definition

Temporarily inactive or inoperative

The above subtitle is actually the second definition you get if you type "dormant meaning" into Google. The first is: "(of an animal) having normal physical functions suspended or slowed down for a period of time; in or as if in a deep sleep". "Normal physical functions suspended or slowed down for a period of time" seems just about as accurate a description it would be possible to find for the UK's Lockdown 3.0, but that's entirely coincidental. This is not a post about COVID.

It is a post to mark the reactivation of this blog after nearly two months of dormancy. The hiatus was not planned, but instead the result of a potent combination of Christmas, boredom, general laziness, and actually having work to do.

But anyway, back to the task at hand which, as hopefully you will remember, was to chronicle each of the books I read in 2020 (and beyond). As you also may remember, it was a resolution of mine to read 50 books in 2020, and I'm glad to say I hit that target on the very final day of what will be widely remembered as a pretty suboptimal 366-day jaunt around the sun.

Having started this blog back in May, when I'd already read 21 books in the year, it has always been an exercise in catch-up. And I will eventually reach the day when I can write about a book soon after reading it rather than having to plumb the corners of my memory (or do partial re-reads) to come up with (hopefully) interesting things to say. But with that day not necessarily imminent, I thought I'd provide the list of books I read in 2020 in a desperate bid to whet the appetite for what's in store. So here we go:

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

2. Following On by Emma John

3. No One is Too Small to Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

4. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy

5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

6. The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather

7. The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

8. Women & Power by Mary Beard

9. All You Need To Know...World War I by Max Egremont

10. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

11. Fox 8 by George Saunders

12. Common Sense and The American Crisis I by Thomas Paine

13. The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

14. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

15. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

16. How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton

17. Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart

18. The Once and Future King by T.H. White

19. Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

20. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

21. Shakespeare In A Divided America James Shapiro

22. The Pun Also Rises by John Pollack

23. Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li

24. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

25. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

26. Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Renni Eddo-Lodge

27. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

28. Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

29. On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

30. The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

31. The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane Kirby

32. Aethelflaed: England's Forgotten Founder by Tom Holland

33. Killing Floor by Lee Child

34. Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

35. Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt

36. To Catch A King by Charles Spencer

37. The Readers' Room by Antoine Laurain

38. The Incomplete Tim Key by Tim Key

39. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

40. The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff

41. Stardust by Neil Gaiman

42. Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar

43. The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

44. Dinner With by Edward Isabel Vincent

45. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

46. The Long Take by Robin Robertson

47. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

48. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

49. The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 1: The Faust Act by Kieron Gillen

50. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Stat attack: That's 14,180 pages, for an average of 284 per book. Fiction edged non-fiction 27-21, plus one poetry collection and one verse novel. The gender split of authors was 29 male to 21 female. One was from the 16th century, one the 18th, five the 19th, 11 the 20th, and 32 the 21st. If forced to—and I see no reason why I would be—I'd say my absolute No. 1 favourite book that I read in 2020 was Frankenstein.

So there we go: 50 books read, but only 29 written about so far. I will continue to tackle them in the order as stated above, so next in line is The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's Baillie Gifford Prize-winning biography of the five women—Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly—murdered by Jack the Ripper.