2020 was a bumper year for book publishers. It seems, cloistered at home, that we all bought more books. But have we been reading them? Several friends, all of them dedicated readers, told me last year that they found it difficult to concentrate on books, their minds infected with anxiety and sadness while their bodies stayed untouched by the virus. I read slightly fewer books in 2020 than I did in 2019 (thirty-seven versus thirty-eight), mainly because the places I’ve grown used to consuming them most intensively – airplanes, hotel rooms, departure lounges and the like – were denied to me.

For the first time I can remember I read slightly more non-fiction than fiction (nineteen versus eighteen). Why? I’m not sure. The year’s highlights were all non-fiction: Caste, Underland, Stories of the Sahara, The Man in the Red Coat, and A Month in Siena. Every one of these was wonderful. In contrast, while I read several good novels (The London Train, Here We Are, and especially Hamnet), not one was groundbreaking, brilliant, or completely captivating. I’ll need to choose my fiction more wisely in 2021.