I know I'm out of the habit of book posts when I'm sat here wondering how to introduce this - the best book post of the year! I absolutely love end-of-the-year book lists and peruse many of them myself, so I hope you will enjoy this (although if you've been paying attention none of the below will be particularly surprising). And in the interests of catching you up as it's been a while, I thought I'd also give you a quick overview of the rest of the books I read between July and December.

So, surviving the first few months of parenthood. I started drafting this list in the wee hours in those first early weeks of motherhood and I'm finally returning to it now (as Ines is fast approaching the eight-month mark!) to polish it up for you and reflect on things I found useful during this hugely transitional time.

So okay, towards the end of March I brought forth a whole new person which predictably created a bit of a Life Schism. This means that those books I read before are mostly lost to pre-baby existence when my world didn't revolve around a soft, snuffling little cherub and the ones I read after were mostly read by the glowing light of my Kindle during night feeds... Needless to say the reviews for these couple of months are probably not going to be my most astute work, but I will do my best because there were some interesting and thought-provoking novels in here.

I may not have read much this month but I did find two great contenders for top books of the year; so far I seem to be hitting my goal of quality over quantity! Long may it continue.

There’s not a whole lot to report from this month (rather unsurprisingly as we remain firmly in lockdown…) so no ramblings this time, let’s just get straight into the books!

Sometimes when I write these blog posts about my monthly reading, they seem to me to become a kind of diary. December was tough for all sorts of reasons and I feel like I don't remember much of it as a result. Similarly, these books feel remote and somewhat tainted by my state of mind (should Rosewater have gone in my top books of the year? Or That Reminds Me? Would they have if I'd read them at a different time? It's impossible to tell until I reread them). But I have done my best to refresh my memory of them and pull together my disparate thoughts.

When I thought back over my reading year, I felt instinctively that it could have been much better. A bit of a negative way to begin this post maybe, but those were my initial feelings. Perhaps had the year not been quite so difficult in other ways, I would feel differently. Coming off the back of my year of buying no books and reading mostly backlist titles from my shelves, I felt I went too far in the opposite direction (typical!) and read too many trendy, recently released books over backlist titles I probably would have and should have prioritised for being more my kind of book.

I've had people ask me a few times recently whether I think they should read the two preceding books in Tsitsi Dangarembga's trilogy, and after finishing this final novel my answer is a resounding yes. I had quite a strong emotional reaction to this book, but I have seen a few reviews recently from people who read it as a standalone that felt rather meh about it all. Whilst it can literally be read as a standalone (whatever needs explaining is explained), I think my appreciation of this novel is definitely down to my having followed Tambu's journey from childhood, but also the development of Dangarembga's writing over the three, and the weight of all that she explores over the course of the trilogy.

This month I set aside the 2020 Booker longlist for a time and instead focussed on some more seasonal reading. There is a mix of books here but they all have something sufficiently ~spooky season~ about them. That is, apart from my audiobook reads; I've been focussing more on nonfiction for my audiobooks and enjoying them a lot more - finally!

Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward

This book went places I could never have guessed, and for that reason I don't want to say too much about it or its plot so as to preserve the wonderful surprise of a book that defies all expectations. I read it in one heady afternoon and found it to be a fun, experimental and sometimes moving ride.

Recently I've been in a bit of a reading slump. For some reason I just can't find the concentration for reading and therefore this month's reviews may be more haphazard than usual as I search through my brain fog for pertinent things to say. Nonetheless there were some great books in August, though they might bear a reread when my focus is a little more sharp.

Finally! A book I listened to that I really enjoyed. The last audiobook I really genuinely liked listening to was Stardust back in January, and there have been a lot of duds both before and after, or books that I thought would have worked much better had I read them instead. So I'm very pleased to announce that I liked this one, though I am also looking forward to rereading it physically in the future. Also this book was recommended to me by the lovely between.bookends so thank you Varsha!

With everything going on in the world at the minute, I struggled to get as much reading done as I wanted to this month, but what I did read was mostly of a very high quality, so swings and roundabouts, eh? I also wanted to champion Black writers more than usual this month in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests.

I’m finding it hard this month to sort my books into highs and lows. Almost everything I read was valuable and enjoyable, though I didn’t absolutely love anything. For that reason this month we’ve got the good and the bad instead. Indeed, after what I wrote in this blog post, I’ve finally decided to stop giving ratings to books on Goodreads (more chat about that in my June books post), so from now on I’m just going to let the books decide how to group themselves instead of having any rigid formulation.

It may just be my imagination but I feel like a lot more of my books are hitting the mark this year than last. There are fewer lows and more highs, and it feels like I'm getting much better at not just putting down books I won't like, but only picking up those that I will. Long may it continue!

It's safe to say that March was a bit of an unusual time. Even though I read some of these books before everything really started to change drastically, the endless torrent of news has served to decimate my memory of them. And those books I read afterwards are foggy from a limited concentration span. If your reading is suffering even though you appear to have more time on your hands, don't beat yourself up. Most reading requires that bit more concentration than your average TV show, and sometimes I just want to lose myself in an easy sitcom.

Below I have put together various resources I've discovered over the past couple of weeks in light of the recent Black Lives Matter protests. I wouldn't know about much of this or be able to compile this list without the tireless work of the black community. I made this post for myself as much as anyone else to compile a lot of the information I’ve seen so that I can refer back to it - not to take away from those people who have put the work in over the past couple of weeks (and many, many years) putting this stuff out there in the first place.