and the books chosen by writers & readers as being the most memorable of 2020

... so to pick up on my comment of yesterday:

'Those of you who receive (and read) my newsletter will know that in the last two I've offered a mini-competition, which has proved popular. The most recent one was a request to readers to write a maximum of 300 words on their 'best book' of 2020. It didn't need to be a book published during this year, only read.

'Well, I found it hard to choose a winner, so left it all on one side for a week or three. During that time, 3 names rose to the surface, and tomorrow I will post their pieces – a diverse and eclectic selection.'

So today, here are three very different pieces of writing about three very different books. What they have in common is that, in one way or another, they're all about journeys:


DEBBIE HORTON




Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Was it my favourite book of 2020? This isn’t such a straightforward question.  My email to other members of the reading group was bewildered. Melville’s relentless enthusiasm was ringing in my ears and my 20th/21st century mind was offended by the horror of whaling, especially as I had read that the population of Right Whales is down to a few hundred, and they’re still being caught, not for their oil, but by becoming tangled in commercial fishing lines. I felt as if I’d been tossed about on the crest of an intense, unpredictable sea for the entire 469 pages. It has been claimed to be the best novel written by an American.  What really? I wrote sarcastically. I regret much of what I said. I let it rest, and … my mind keeps coming back to it. I’ve dreamed about it.  It’s bizarre, beautiful, and haunting. Some of the language is sublime and funny. The gathering together of nations on the whaling ship is intriguing.  It’s interesting enough that Melville is a man of his time, but he also seems out of his time, or on the edges of it. He’s anti-hierarchic, and insurgent. His striving to understand the whale, in body and spirit, the copious research that he undertook, and his careful exposition of the whaling industry, is painstaking and passionate. It’s a book of its time, but also a book of the future. It’s prophetic in places; he could see where the slaughter was leading.  He wanted his contemporaries to know about whaling, and where the bones in their bustiers and the oil in their lamps came from, so, he hoped, they could use them sparingly. What’s new? It’s a continuing enquiry, just translated to different products. This book affected me strongly but it was strange, very strange.



JULIUS SMIT



The Footing, Longbarrow Press, 2013

The Footing is an anthology of new poems, written by seven mostly Sheffield based poets, on the themes of walking and landscape. Brian Lewis, founder of Longbarrow Press, writes in the introduction that the poems are ‘…alive to the possible worlds that are envisioned, if only briefly, in the act of walking, the paths behind us and the paths before us.’
    A collection of poems does not only begin with the words themselves, but also with the sense of their presentation. Binding, typography, paper and layout all contribute to the transmission and absorption of the texts, and The Footing certainly measures up to these demands.
    The anthology bears all the hallmarks of connecting the reader with the seven poets, in how each engages with journey, place and memory. Walking is about slowing down and the poems enjoin the reader to contemplate multiple landscapes as containers of discovery: historical and contemporary.
    From the moment I held and opened this impeccably produced book, I was pulled into its myriad resonances of sounds and textures. Images came at me from many directions as I moved slowly through the poems, stopping at intervals to bask in their associations, imagery and voices. Localities were magnified as I lingered in them, alive to their senses and relationships.
    I have returned many times to these poems as sites, and the sites as poems, wanting to live longer in them. The writer, Rebecca Solnit (author of Wanderlust) is quoted on the inside of the dust wrapper: ‘…walking is a mode not of travelling, but of being.’ It’s what draws me back to the poems in this anthology; the poems being and I’m walking within them.

The Footing is available direct from Longbarrow Press - https://thefooting.wordpress.com



JULIA USMAN




Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, Frances Wilson, Faber and Faber, 2008.

Lockdown coincided with the first curlews returning to the moors above my home in Swaledale.  These wistful spirits soon turned my mind to the poetics of journeys.  Enjoying the slowing pace, almost too much, it allowed the movement in the natural world to quietly shift into a preoccupation. Nest building became the paramount focus of home, garden and the surrounding uplands.
    And so, with ease, I wandered into the Romantics, last visited with intent many years ago at university.  But it was not to Coleridge or Keats I found myself turning, nor to William, but to the gentler voice of Dorothy Wordsworth, which seemed so fitting for the mood of 2020.
    Of course, April brought the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of her brother’s death, of which much was made.  But it was the welcome of a song thrush each morning that reminded me of a Wordsworth musing on his sister: ‘Her voice is like a hidden Bird’.
    For me, Dorothy remained the unheard voice of the Romantic period.  I knew of her ardent championing and support for William and the journals she kept of their lives alongside Coleridge and other dominant literary forces.  But I should have realised that an intelligent woman, who was happy to live in the shadow of an ego, would not be anything other than a complex character.
    Wilson captures the intimacy of the Wordsworths' relationship.  Dorothy’s sensuality and sensibility, the innate wildness of the young girl, the darker places in her character, such as the debilitating moment of self-awareness on the day William married Mary Hutchinson, eventually leading to the sad regression into mental health problems and dementia at the end of her life.
    A poignant biography of a talented and troubled lady.

Debbie, Julia, Julius, thank you.