A Year in Reading (and Blogging)

2019: A Year in Reading (and Blogging)

It seems that all bookbloggers worth their salt are publishing end-of-year posts with “best-of” and “2019-in-reading” lists.  I honestly wasn’t going to do anything of the sort, but having woken up unexpectedly early on the last day of the year, despite being on holiday and therefore affording to sleep in, I thought I might as well join the club and plug my blog.

Gothic and supernatural fiction have consistently enjoyed a warm (or should that be chilling?) welcome at Endsoftheword.  That, of course, is a reflection of my reading tastes. However, it seems this also strikes a chord with my blog’s readers – I review many genres of books but, proportionally, spooky titles attract a surprisingly large share of blog visits.  This year, a particularly popular post was my review of “A Dedicated Friend”, the third horror novella in the brilliant ongoing "Eden Book Society" series published by Dead Ink Books.  Purportedly penned by a forgotten 70s author named Shirley Longford, like other novellas in the set, this is actually written by a contemporary writer whose identity is kept hidden. I'm not sure, but I've got a strong hunch as to who this could be (hint: think of a Booker-shortlisted female author).  In the case of another of the Eden Book Society titles, the identity of the writer was subsequently very publicly revealed.  "Jonathan Buckley", the obscure author of "Starve Acre", turned out to be none other than folk horror master Andrew Michael Hurley. After its debut on Dead Ink, the novella (in a slightly amended version) was released by Jonathan Murray to great critical acclaim.  I reviewed both of the novella's incarnations.  Folk horror is very much the "in thing" in dark fiction circles right now.  Anyone wanting an introduction to the genre should check out the anthology This Dreaming Isle edited by Dan Coxon, which I featured back in March.

Another popular read on my blog was my review of Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver.  Readers who had enjoyed her ghost novels Dark Matter and Thin Air were probably surprised to notice a subtle changed in style - the supernatural being which haunts the pages of this book is less of an ethereal spirit and more of an M.R.Jamesean demon.  

I am happy to note in the year's "top five" two blogposts I really enjoyed writing.  The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is a well-crafted and intelligently paced thriller with a poetic heart.  It is written by Australian author Felicity McLean, which gave me the perfect excuse to feature, alongside my review, a selection of classical music by Australian composers.  Indeed, the mixture of books and music is one of the distinguishing features I try to include in my blog, as I did with "Holy Week, Unholy Murders", a 'musical review' of Santiago Roncagliolo's cult dark thriller Red April.  

Some other blogposts, despite not garnering as many hits as I might have wished, are dear to me because they refer to newly-published books which, each in its own way, brought me immense pleasure.  Here they are, in date order:

"The Wolf and the Watchman" by Niklas Natt och Dag

"Once Upon a River" by Diane Setterfield

"Confession with Blue Horses" by Sophie Hardach

"The Warlow Experiment" by Alix Nathan

"Fandango and other stories" by Alexander Grin

"The Country Will Bring Us No Peace" by Matthieu Simard

"Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country" by Edward Parnell

On a final note, how can I not reserve a word of praise for the amazing publisher Fairlight Books.  Not only did it provide us with the brilliant novel A Matter of Interpretation, a fictional reimagining of the life of medieval scholar Michael Scot by Elizabeth Mac Donald but, through its series of novellas Fairlight Moderns, it is doing much to promote the novella form as a vibrant medium for contemporary writers.

I wish you all a happy new (reading) year!