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; Claudia Jardine, Biter, her brilliant, funny, sexy first full length collection, already noted as an Enthusiam;  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, a 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; The Magician's Daughter, H.G. Parry's latest novel and my favourite so far, a beautifully constructed, sweet-natured yet scary enough story, a kind of take on The Tempest but far more benign, and with magic restored instead of given up at the end; Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld, which started out a little promising, and I like romance, comedy, and romantic comedy, but I felt this failed on all counts really, the jokes weren't very funny, the romance unconvincing, and the obstacles to the romance were either over before they began or were so unpleasant I lost all sympathy for the characters; A Dreadful Splendor, B.R. Myers, a Gothic Romance, and very much both, quite brilliantly twisty to the point of melodramatic excess - I could have done without quite so much Gothic horror personally but you can hardly fault it for fulfilling the demands of the genre so utterly; Fighting in a World on Fire, Andreas Malm, an adaptation by Jimmy Whipps and Llewyn Whipps of How to blow up a pipeline for YA readers which I w as reading because I read some of the pipeline book online and couldn't get it out of the library - an alarmingly convincing case for ethical vandalism, which on the one hand feels irresponsible as a YA adaptation and on the other hand, maybe this is what responsibility looks like now; Stephen King, Fairy Tale, kind of tawdry, and I really don't like his writing style, but he does tell a good story and I was curious to see what a fairy tale by King would read like - loses nearly all the resonance of a fairy tale through being drawn out so long; All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley's beautiful memoir about working for ten years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, full of insight about what it means to have time to look, and what art is, and also wonderful on Michelangelo and his self-flagellation ("I am not in a good place," he wrote, while working on the Sistine Chapel, "and I am no painter"); Love and the Novel: Life after Reading, by Christina Lupton, a completely wonderful memoir that combines thinking about love in her own life and thinking about how love is written about in novels, with brilliant and surprising observations along the way about power imbalances - between reader and writer in ways more comparable than you'd think with people in relationships (well, it is a relationship), teacher and student, friends whose friendship could perhaps be taken as being exactly the friendship they  describe it as even if they are writing a century or more ago, and full of interesting observations on the wild queerness and potential for radical community even in heterosexual relationships, but also on the difficulty of writing within a happy relationship; Joanna Cho, People Person, a lively, funny collection of poems that are conversational and conversations that are poems, funny and sometimes saying the most about communication when the characters don't seem to hear each other at all; Stephanie Burt, We Are Mermaids, poems about inbetweennesses including the inbetweenness of classics translated into contemporary moments, the other city beneath the city, the nephew who is a niece or niece who is a nephew, the closet and the literal closet, the I within the You and the You that means Me, and I also love the love poems to punctuation; Richard Fisher, The Long View, on the longer view of time we need for all sorts of reasons along with the will and the language with which to organise society to combat climate change, really interesting on the different ways time is expressed in different languages, on ritual, on generations and the concept of the seven generations we can relate to, on time-based artworks and the problems with capitalist and even democratic social structures; Horizon Work, Adriana Petryna, supposedly about the work of understanding climate change, but in fact mostly about fire fighting, obviously relevant, and also, possibly, metaphorical, but not the book I thought it would be; Treacle Walker, Alan Garner, a fable I suppose about manhood taking over from boyhood? or the boy taking over the man?  with a spirited vocabulary but who really is it for, not a boy reader surely, but surely not the man either? at any rate, not I, not really; Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, a brilliantly complex exploration of the ways in which mental health is understood and - truly - constructed by the ways we have of understanding it, with in depth case studies, none more interesting than Aviv's own; Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson, somehow brutal and sentimental at the same time, and both in a good way - I was sorry about the fate of [but you should read it] but relieved about the fate of [] and [] - and the little dog...; and speaking of dogs, I've just finished Eileen Myles's Afterglow (a dog memoir), which begins with the premise that her dog has hired a lawyer to sue her, but takes off in all kinds of directions, the way a dog might, following scents, going some truly strange places, sometimes arriving at what feels like wisdom, sometimes at feels more like madness; Hex, Jenni Fagan, a dream-like short novella like a long poem about a spirit-traveller/time-traveller from the present visiting a witch in 1591, the night before she is condemned to die, stranger and lovelier than a quick blurb like this can convey; Saga, Hannah Mettner's brilliant new collection of poetry, rich and powerful, a kind of patterned thought that combines the best of what essays can do with the resonance of dreams; Lioness, by Emily Perkins, another novel about the wife of a property speculator whose fortunes are brought down through wrongdoing she claims innocence of, also about her homewares store, a symbol of her yearning for a domesticity founded on prosperity and some kind of class ideal, an uninteresting idea for a novel that is not very interestingly worked through, except I did feel some sympathy for the wife character, mainly because of the dynamics between her and her adult stepchildren, an always charged and interesting relationship that could have been more the heart of the novel; The Smallest Man, Frances Quinn, an historical novel that is for adult readers but oddly felt like a children's book in ways I can't quite work out, and odd too in the way it was sometimes quite gripping and often quite boring, again not quite according to any principle  I've figured out, but I'm not sure I will take the time to bother; The Art of Practicing, Madeline Bruser, a truly gripping book about practicing music, which, typical of me, I read when I could have just been playing instead; Real Life, Brandon Taylor, which - yes - is well written?  in a very writing school way? but I found all the characters so similarly and pointlessly defensive, hostile, paranoid and secretive that it was a long read, and Miller's violence and warnings of being the wolf in the Three Little Pigs story seemed to herald a violent ending that was replaced by a romantic ending which I suppose is nice?  and there isn't a moral?  if there was one, it would be to take no notice of the ratcheting up warning signs, for the sake of love?  if the prose were more compelling I might have wanted this against my will but I didn't especially; On Saving Time, Jenny Odell, which took me pretty much the whole year to read because I read everything else inbetween, finding it oddly plodding and unmesmerising, unlike her earlier How To Do Nothing which I read and reread compulsively; The Illness Narratives, Arthur Kleinman's 1988 classic of the case study genre, arguing not exactly that illness is socially constructed but focusing on its meaning in the life of the ill person; Dani Yourukova's transporting, brilliant, funny, inventive Transposium, a symposium on love and gender; Poetry's Possible Words, Lesley Wheeler, a combination of memoir and poetry analysis I loved, with every chapter moving back and forth between the reading of a poem, alert to all its details, and autobiographical details that resonate in some way with the reading of the poem, capturing something important about how we read and who we read as; Catherine Lacey, The Answers, a weird novel, which started out weird in a good way with a first person narrative about a mysterious illness and even more mysterious cure, but then headed off in a new direction with a celebrity's girlfriend experiment, not a bad idea but now we are in the third person with multiple viewpoints and the novel just seems all over the show, and then just kind of fizzles out - still, there were some moments; Mothercare, Lynne Tillman, in contrast has a perfectly consistent distinctive tone and decisive air about it, what feels like a ruthless honesty, as she explores what it is to care for a mother who is felt not to have cared enough for you, a book that you'd think would be utterly memorable, and yet, oddly, half way through I came across a scene I vividly remembered without having remembered ever reading the book before - did I read an extract in a magazine?  did I flip through the book in the library and read this section?  anyway, it is the tone that makes the book, the oddly flat sentences that offer a terrifying kind of plummeting; Heidi Julavitz, Folded Clock, a kind of reconstructed  diary, absolutely exhilarating sentence by sentence, even section by section, day by day, but completely put down-able inbetween and leaving me no real inclination to pick it up again, till it started to feel like an obligation, something onerous to have to do, to even open it, and then I'd be exhilarated all over again, but with no more inclination to keep going than before; Melinda Powell, The Hidden Lives of Dreams, super positive, everthing in a dream is good, probably a good way to approach dreaming, maybe; The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, ed. David Shields and Bradford Morrow, a mixed bag, but David Gates's essay did what the title promised, and gave a detailed account of a death, two deaths even.  I did like the essay on flies too, but not as much; The Comfort of People, Daniel Miller, about the use of social media and Englishness, particularly focused on hospice patients;  Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, Whai, a poetry collection - "when I breathe in / hundreds of tiny holes expand / but her pattern holds its place"; Painted Devils, Margaret Owen, the sequel to Little Thieves, and maybe only feels less wildly inventive because it is coming after; Jane Arthur I would like to thank for the exclamation marks in Calamaties! and for the poem "Too Many Decisions" in particular, which speaks to me as a Libran - "To make a decision is to boldly decline all other options!"; The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy, a really quite strange novel, quite haunting, and quite odd, always moving unexpectedly, full of vivid details and unsettling, uncanny, shifts in time and understanding; Mothertongues, Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell, a collage of pieces about mothering, which I know is meant to be a bit of a mess, but, I found it a bit too fragmentary and uneven; What would Lynne Tillman Do, Lynne Tillman, a collection of short essays and other pieces, arranged alphabetically in a way I hoped would be more interesting - not really working with the abcedarian form more than perfunctorily; Rose Carlyle, The Girl in the Mirror, a much hyped thriller I found banal and petty; Hanif Kureishi, The Nothing, also petty and mean but I guess kind about the meanness - an affectionate portrait of meanness? - that all the same didn't really sustain my interest much, unlike the despatches from Kureishi's hospital bed, where he really dwells on the misery of infirmity in much more detail; To 2040, Jorie Graham, the poet I've been most captivated with this year; Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces, essays on the face, because of how interesting always her New York Review essays are, but this I found less interesting, surely not because I am not interested in faces; Listen, A history of our ears, Peter Szendy, about listening to music, with some intriguing opening ideas - what does it mean to feel a responsibility to the music you listen to, what does it mean to want others to listen as you listen, or to listen to your listening, as he puts it? and I like the word Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, ascoltando, listeningly, as a musical imperative, or direction, but somehow the whole book amounted to less and less the more I read; Denis Donogue, Ferocious Alphabets, not about the alphabet at all and not arranged alphabetically! just a collection of talks about language and literature, some of them interesting - I liked the distinction he drew between readers who read text as the transcription of sound, and those who read writing as the primary medium, and how this applies to writers too and different ideas of what writing is and how it works;  Namwali Serpell, The Furrows, absolutely riveting to begin with, but it lost me as it got more metafictional with variant stories in place of the one powerful scenario it started with; The Modern, Anna Kate Blair, about sexuality and identity, being queer and being straight, what marriage means, and what it is to be modern - I liked it; Jane Smemilt, The Patient, enjoyable but forgettable, sort of a thriller; Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed? : When the Truth Isn't Enough, a brilliant study of the systems in place to discredit the stories of, for instance, asylum seekers, but also sufferers in a mental health crisis; and equally good on the belief given to, for instance, young trainee consultants at McKinsey, based on a set of behaviours and cues that have nothing to do with whatever expertise they may or may not have.