Books, 2020

I read more this year than in any year since college, for reasons nobody needs explained. Some of these I read alone at the kitchen table. A lot of them I read with my mother, three chapters a day, and talked over at seven her time. Here are the ones I'd hand to you, in the order I read them:

• The Galton Case, Ross Macdonald. Jonah told me in the comments last New Year's that this was the one to read after The Chill. He was right. A lost son, a claim of identity, and a detective who keeps finding that the past is closer than anyone admits.
• The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel. The end of the Cromwell books. I read it in March, the week the studio sent us home, and it was a strange comfort to spend those days with someone whose troubles were so much worse than mine.
• Peril at End House, Agatha Christie. The first book my mother and I read together on the phone. She had the murderer by chapter nine.
• Five Little Pigs, Agatha Christie. The second, and better. Five people remember the same afternoon, and none of them quite right.
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym. Ruth Ann mentioned Pym in the comments here in April, and I'm grateful. A clergyman's daughter in postwar London watches everybody else's lives with a dry eye and a kettle always on. I laughed out loud on the couch at nine in the morning.
• Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell. A plague, a family, a child. I didn't expect to read about an epidemic this year and find it a consolation, but I did.
• In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes. Los Angeles after the war, and the whole book is told from inside the murderer's head. Colder than Chandler and very nearly as good.
• Piranesi, Susanna Clarke. A man lives almost alone in an endless house full of statues, and keeps a careful journal, and is happy. I read it in two sittings in October and haven't stopped thinking about it. Short, strange, kind.
• The Moving Toyshop, Edmund Crispin. Jonah's recommendation, from the comments in October. A poet finds a body in an Oxford toyshop at night, and in the morning the toyshop is a grocery. The silliest good mystery I've ever read, and it fooled me anyway.
• The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman. Four people in a retirement village solve murders. My mother read it at the same time and declared it "nonsense, but the right kind."

And one more I won't name, the one that fooled us both in October. Some of you have guessed. I'm not telling.

If I had to keep only one from this year, it's Piranesi. What's yours?