Nobody's Taken Your Spectacles, Richard
People (I mean critics who are not me) keep talking up the best books of 2020 with their antic dispositions on and the high hectic color in their cheeks, and I believe they mean it but the year’s harvest seems a little sad and sober compared with the Best of the Decade just past. Will anything ever equal Achitophel Achitophel Achitophel Achitophel? but enough of that, I see it isn’t fair.
These were the best books of 2020:
Nobody’s Taken Your Spectacles, Richard, Calm Down Can’t You
Orleton, Yarpole, Bircher & Eye
The Miserable Divorce
Anne of Seven Gables
The Sunken Society of the Daughters of Men: A Sea-Voyage Through a Secret Landscape of Great Power; or, How the Old Family Woke by the New Standard
I Will Go To Davenport, Or Else (No Thanks, No Thanks, No Thanks)
All These Ears Ago (The Man Who Rocks My Helmet)
Anthony Bede, From Cambridge
The Wendyard
Vile Child! Jack-Sharp-Nails Lies by the Wall
An Old-Fashioned Egg in an Old-Fashioned Hat
Mother Down a Dark Hole and There’s Rats in the Pantry (Company’s Coming)
I am a Wolf! And I am a Fox! And O! My Little Paws! My Little Paws!
Quarrelsome Toby’s Been Hanged, And Who’s To Tell ‘Himself’? Well, I Wouldn’t Do It, Not For Half a Crown
The Handsome Woman of Bristol
My Good Old Father’s Cat Has Got the Perpetual