I shall be rather sad to see 2018 go. While the world had its problems, for me 2018 was a wonderful year. I spent lots of time with loved ones, travelled to some beautiful places, and started a new job that makes me happy every day to go to work. Everyone I love is well and content and I am being supplied with almost daily photos of my one-year old niece – life is good.
My busy year cut into my reading time but I still managed to read (if not always review) some wonderful books this year. Here are my ten favourites:
10. Green Money (1939) – D.E. Stevenson
After reading more than three dozen books by Stevenson, I thought I’d read everything worth reading. Happily, I was wrong. I loved this Heyer-esque comedy about a young man suddenly saddled with a beautiful and dangerously ignorant ward. This is Stevenson at her most sparkling and confident, full of humour and warmth.
9. Anne of Green Gables (1908) – L.M. Montgomery
Is it fair to put a book I’ve read twenty or more times on this list? Possibly not (and sorry to Sword of Bone by Anthony Rhodes, which almost made my top ten but was bumped in order to include this) but I’ll do it regardless. Anne of Green Gables is perfect.
8. A Positively Final Appearance (1999) – Alec Guinness
Who knew an actor could write so well? This was Guinness’ third book but it is the first I have read (though certainly not that last). Covering the period from 1996 to 1998, his diaries are marvellously free of celebrity gossip and are filled instead with sharp observations about the world around him, a fond portrait of his family, and, best of all, insightful comments on the books he is reading.
7. Lands of Lost Borders (2018) – Kate Harris
After overdosing on travel memoirs last year, I restricted my intake in 2018 but thankfully still made room to enjoy this beautifully-told tale of a great adventure. Harris’s memoir of cycling along the Silk Road, from Istanbul to India, was a wonderful reminder of the joy of exploration.
6. Bookworm (2018) – Lucy Mangan
Mangan’s memoir of childhood reading was warm, funny, and stirred up wonderful memories of my own early reading. Intriguingly, there was very little overlap between the books Mangan loved and the ones I read as a child but that made no difference to my enjoyment. Mangan captures how it feels to be a child who makes sense of the world through what she can find in the pages of books and that is definitely something I can understand (as I suspect can most of you).
5. When I Was a Little Boy (1957) – Erich Kästner
A beautifully written – and illustrated – memoir of growing up in Dresden before the First World War, I adored this Slightly Foxed reissue.
4. The Fear and the Freedom (2017) – Keith Lowe
A superb look at how the legacies of the Second World War shaped the second half of the twentieth century. Lowe looks at so many things, including the inventions and institutions that were created as a result of the war, but I was most fascinated by the less tangible changes it wrought, the mythological, philosophical, and psychological shifts across the countries impacted. I found the chapter on Israel especially memorable, where the Holocaust survivors were initially treated harshly since their victim-status did not fit with the young country’s view of itself as a nation of heroes and fighters. The way the nation’s identity changed as survivors began telling their stories in the 1960s, from a nation of heroes to “a nation of martyrs”, is fascinating.
3. The Flowering Thorn (1933) – Margery Sharp
After a few hit-or-miss encounters with Sharp, this was the year she became one of my favourite authors. And that all started with this tale of a sharp young society woman whose life changes when she adopts a small boy and goes to live in the country. In another author’s hands, this could have turned into something unbearably twee. Instead, it is sharp and marvellously unsentimental yet still full of warmth. I adored it and am already looking forward to rereading it.
2. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996) – edited by Charlotte Mosley
Great wits and writers, Mitford and Waugh’s letters cover decades of occasionally hostile friendship, stretching from World War Two until Waugh’s death in 1966. Both rather competitive by nature, they saved some of their best material for this correspondence – sloppiness (like bad spelling) was called out. Full of fascinating tidbits about their own books as well as their famous friends, I was utterly absorbed by this book (and by Waugh’s awfulness).
1. The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) – Svetlana Alexievich
Without question, Alexievich’s ground-breaking oral history of Soviet women’s experiences of the Second World War was my book of the year. More than one million Soviet women served in the military during the war (half of them in active combat roles) and Alexievich captures the full and fascinating range of their experiences in their own words. It is a powerful and upsetting book and one I will not soon forget.
I seem to make a habit of reading memoirs by famous authors before I ever read any of the books that made them famous. And you know what? I like it. It’s an interesting way to approach a new author, learning first about them and then their works. And it can make you so, so much more eager to read their other books than you would otherwise have been. At least, that was the case for me when I read When I Was a Little Boy by Erich Kästner. Kästner won fame for his many successful children’s novels (most notably, Emil and the Detectives and Lottie and Lisa, the inspiration for The Parent Trap) and it is for children that he wrote this beautiful memoir of his own childhood in Dresden. Recently reissued as a beautiful 
With a mother like Ida, it is no surprise that Erich had a carefully planned life: he studied hard and was to become a teacher, inspired by the teachers who had boarded with the Kästner family. But when he actually stood in front of a class for the first time in his mid-teens, he (and they) realised he had no aptitude for it. And so a new and rather extraordinary plan was hatched: he, the son of a saddlemaker and a maid, would go to the university. And, after serving in the First World War, he did. To his mother’s extreme pride, naturally.
The Captive Reader 