Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance, essay-like poems that collect sentences around a theme, an intriguing and possibly replicable way to work, with some quite brilliant results; Marina Abramovich, by Ossian Ward, a kind of extended catalogue of her work throughout her life, a lifetime performance of the self as a work of art, a disruptive force, a dramatic presence; Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham, oddly wooden in manner, but it grew on me the more and more counterfactual it became, a counterfactual history almost more plausible than the reality of the Trump years; Victory Park, Rachel Kerr, nothing not plausible in this novel, a kind of Great Gatsby without any Gatsby, and without the Fitzgerald style; Haruki Murakami, After the Quake, surreal little stories that are also slice-of-life-like and ought to feel resonant and full of meaning but I found them instead forgettable; Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty, an unusually structured autobiography, in essay-like chapters, with poetry-like sections sometimes, small paragraphs or sentences that stand alone, the occasional vivid sentence or detail shining out here and there in a way that could perhaps have really lifted off if the juxtapositions worked harder, more consistently, more like Elisa Gabbert's poems are working; Who Thought This Was A Good Idea? by Alyssa Mastromonaco, a surprisingly bland and uninformative account of her years working closely with Obama, I learnt pretty much nothing at all; Crudo, Olivia Laing, increasingly captivating, 2017 as seen through the eyes of a fictional Kathy Acker, written in a brilliantly distinctive oddly jaunty style, good on the way life is about the life of the everyday at the same time it is caught up in wider current events, caught up and at the same time adrift, and drifting; Lilly Dancyger, Burn it Down: Women writing about Anger, and Liz Byrski, Women of a Certain Rage, two collections of essays about anger that I didn't really take much from even though I am so interested in anger as a positive force.  "On Transfeminine Anger" by Samatha Riedel and "Rebel Girl" by Melissa Febos were standout essays from the Dancyger collection, and the second collection was worth reading for Julienne van Loon's "Regardless of Decorum: A response to Seneca's 'On Anger'; Nick Riggle, This Beauty, which is the book I really wanted to read when all I could get was his surprisingly good book on Awesomeness, but this book, although it had its moments, and although I pretty much agree with a lot of what he says, was uninspiring, not in itself beautiful, and not really conveying the beauty of the days we live in the way, for instance, Robert Dessaix so compellingly does, in books like ​What Days are For; A Fortunate Woman: The story of a country doctor, by Polly Morland, the updating of John Berger's book A Fortunate Man, which I haven't read, a detailed and sympathetic account of the working days of a doctor which takes on additional urgency as the COVID pandemic hits; My  Mess is a Bit of a Life, by Georgia Pritchett, a memoir in wonderfully small chapters, not really chapters as much as prose poems or quips, a brilliant model I think of to offer to writing students, but also with an increasingly serious narrative that she allows to stop short too abruptly I think, something about the overall structure and also the combination of the serious and the comic holds it back, I think, from going as deep as it could; A Lack of Good Sons, Jake Arthur's sweet and dazzlingly inventive poetry collection, with beautifully place excalamation marks, and all kinds of voices and perspectives taken up, with verve!  Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton's thriller, very readable, with the gap between reader and character satire creates even as the action brings you closer, brilliant in the way it foregrounds the environmental costs of the internet and the associated technologies, and the pacts we all make with those in power, but in its own way accommodating and limited by the satire and the thriller genre arc that is driving the plot; Lessons in Chemistry, ​ by Bonnie Garmus, cute and smartly constructed, just a little kitsch; Animal, Dorothea Lasky's nicely odd and constantly surprising essays on poetry and the shared imagination - a brilliant organising (or disorganising) principle bringing in bees, ghosts, shame, nakedness, wildness, colour, the material, in a way that opens up to more and more resonance the more you think about it; Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso, an increasingly chilling novel in small vivid chapters, brilliantly evocative of childhood; Maurice, E M Forster, with that oddly awkward early twentieth century way of trying to get at hard to define states of mind through imagery, that doesn't quite work and yet is moving in the attempt and is attempting something not so much attempted any more (also, I was so pleased with the ending, expecting tragedy); The House on Half Moon Street, Alex Reeve, an historical crime novel with an inventive plot; Mr Cadmus, Peter Ackroyd, nasty and silly; Adam Kay, Undoctored, oddly soothing to read when sick; The Other Side of Silence: A psychiatrist's memoir of depression, Linda Gask, which I completely forgot I'd read before till about half way through when she got to the part where her psychologist abruptly left off seeing her, and from then on I remembered almost every word; We Spread, Iain Reid, a really quite wonderfully uncanny little novel set in a sinister aged care home; Jo Walton, Among Others, because I really wanted to reread Diana Wynne Jones but they have all been on too high rotation, then I remembered this which is extraordinarily good, even better than I remembered, strange and brilliantly working with the conventions of mid-twentieth century YA as well as the best Diana Wynne Jones-like fantasy; Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox, nicely all over the show; Toni Jordan, Dinner with the Schabels, light-weight Australian comedy; Janice Galloway, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, a sort of 1980s Plath Bell Jar story of psychological disintegration, quite harrowing to read, even though glinting and funny in parts, with rather less social commentary, but still sharply written; Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape, essays all circling around environmental issues, the first, on girls turning into plants, I particularly loved, and the last, which is less about ecology and more about how to live and really about not knowing how to live, except through overworking, which is no kind of an answer, but then, is having a shower and celebrating the small win of eating granola any more of an answer? no;