As I have mentioned here before, one of my biggest downtime pleasures is watching Booktube videos. Sharing in the expression of love and knowledgeable enthusiasm for books is a joy in itself, and I have particularly come to enjoy the way the cyclical recurrence of certain tags and list videos have come to take the form of a literary calendar, mapping out the bookish year with reactions to book prize longlists, anticipated releases and what progress – if any – has been made in the meeting of reading goals.

Let me say from the outset that my own reading goals have been shot to shit. There is a genuine reason for this – the house move – but I still feel disappointed that my Cloak and Dagger reading challenge, so carefully curated, is now so far off schedule that there is little hope of my catching up, especially as I have taken on a couple of extra non-fiction side-projects in the meantime.

Rather than despair over this – because come on – and because I like the challenge so much I have decided to defer it to 2023, when I will begin the whole thing again from scratch. So far as this year is concerned, I intend to read whatever the hell takes my fancy. Given that I have so much research reading to do on top of my other commitments, I know I will have to keep my expectations in check. But it does lift my heart to think that we are only halfway through the year, and that there are more books yet to be read that I don’t yet know about.

In anticipation of that, I thought I would post my own responses to the mid-year book freakout tag, because I have been freaking out, just a bit, and because it’s an interesting way of taking the literary temperature of my year to date.

  1. BEST BOOK YOU’VE READ SO FAR IN 2022 would have to be Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza. This book was exactly what I needed to read at the particular moment I read it, and I will be following Gainza’s literary journey from here on in.
  2. BEST SEQUEL YOU’VE READ SO FAR IN 2022. I’ll have to cheat a little with this one, as I don’t think the author would necessarily want to see this book described as a sequel, but if we can include in that category books with characters we first met in an earlier novel then it’s definitely Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. Those who read and adored The Glass Hotel, as I did, will enjoy hunting down those Easter eggs. But there’s no need for you to have read Mandel’s previous novel to enjoy this one, which is searching, original, moving and gorgeously achieved. I loved it from the first page.
  3. NEW RELEASE YOU HAVEN’T READ YET, BUT WANT TO. Oh my goodness, there are so many – some languishing here on my desk. For the sake of keeping this short, I shall confine myself to two. John Darnielle’s Devil House is a must for me, firstly because I have loved his previous two books and secondly because I am excited to see what he’s done with a fake-true-crime narrative. And then I have been hearing very good things about Hernan Diaz’s Trust. I have read the preview and found it irresistible, and the metafictional ‘found document’ format is very much my bag.
  4. MOST ANTICIPATED RELEASE FOR THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR. Once again, I shall confine myself to two. The first is Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates. I’m a huge Oates fan in any case, and here she is with an imaginative retelling of a true crime story. Cannot miss it. And secondly there’s The Furrows, from Namwali Serpell. Her Clarke-winning debut The Old Drift is a book I still think about a lot, both for its astounding writing and its treatment of time. The Furrows sounds every bit as intriguing.
  5. BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT. I have been lucky this year in that the books I have actively sought out have been sustaining and each in their own way worthwhile. My experience with review assignments has been more mixed. Shall I just say that I think I am burned out on what I shall loosely term the ‘soft dystopia’? It is fascinating, how many books in this genre are debuts. There are conclusions to be drawn there, no doubt.
  6. BIGGEST SURPRISE. The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. I very much enjoyed Sarah Phelps’s BBC adaptation and what with Laura Thompson’s lovely biography Agatha Christie: An English Mystery acting as my sanity blanket through the book-packing process, I thought I would try out the novel, a late work by Christie and one I had never even heard of before seeing the TV series. I was surprised and delighted by how solidly crafted it is, how modern it feels. In terms of her sentence-level achievement, Christie often gets a bad press, one I found myself feeling – as I have on previous occasions – is undeserved.
  7. FAVOURITE NEW AUTHOR – DEBUT OR NEW TO YOU. Once again, that would have to be Maria Gainza.
  8. BOOK THAT MADE YOU CRY. To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara. Given the discomfiting and unstable nature of the year to date, it already seems like ages since I read this, but I thought it was magnificent – a powerful and fearless examination of the problems we face as a society and as individuals, written by an author one-hundred percent in control of her material. I would definitely read it again. Ysnagihara has quickly become the kind of author that makes you insatiably curious about where she will go next.
  9. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK YOU’VE BOUGHT SO FAR THIS YEAR would also count as the most expensive! I am not going to name it, because it is the key primary source text for my novel-in-progress, but I will say that it dates from the 1950s, and is signed and dated by the author. Its beauty is tied up in its provenance, and the way it brings the events it described so vividly to life.
  10. WHAT BOOKS DO YOU NEED TO READ BY THE END OF THE YEAR? Many, many books. For reasons similar to those that prompted my Golding binge last year, I will be re-immersing myself in J.G. Ballard’s three key disaster novels. Off at only a slight tangent, I am lucky enough to have in my possession an ARC of Martin MacInnes’s new novel In Ascension, which I absolutely intend to get to before the year is out. One of my most anticipated reads of last year was Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s investigative biography of W. G. Sebald. I actually began reading this the week before we moved out of our previous house and was instantly smitten. I had the book with me all the time we were in temporary accommodation, but was too tired and preoccupied to give it the full attention it so obviously deserves. I expect to be back in Sebald’s world before the end of summer.