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:

1. Nobody’s Taken Your Spectacles, Richard, Calm Down Can’t You

2. Orleton, Yarpole, Bircher & Eye

3. The Miserable Divorce

4. Anne of Seven Gables

5. 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

6. I Will Go To Davenport, Or Else (No Thanks, No Thanks, No Thanks)

7. All These Ears Ago (The Man Who Rocks My Helmet)

8. Anthony Bede, From Cambridge

9. The Wendyard

10. Vile Child! Jack-Sharp-Nails Lies by the Wall

11. An Old-Fashioned Egg in an Old-Fashioned Hat

12. Mother Down a Dark Hole and There’s Rats in the Pantry (Company’s Coming)

13. I am a Wolf! And I am a Fox! And O! My Little Paws! My Little Paws!

14. Quarrelsome Toby’s Been Hanged, And Who’s To Tell ‘Himself’? Well, I Wouldn’t Do It, Not For Half a Crown

15. The Handsome Woman of Bristol

16. My Good Old Father’s Cat Has Got the Perpetual