Books of 2020

So this was a funny year. Enough has been said about that in many other places, but compiling the list of books I've read this year brought the message home again; the virus and the following lockdown had their effect on the books I've read this year too. Funny how you don't notice that when you're in the middle of things.
I read 29 books this year, which is slightly higher than my average of the past years. Some of these were pretty lengthy, but to compensate I read some really short ones too, so the overall page number should be comparable. The amount of rereads is much higher than it was in other years, and I think there you can see the corona effect; most of the year it was impossible to just wander into a bookshop and browse, so I had to make do with what was already on my bookshelves. 

Anyway, before I dive into the analysis, let's first look at the complete list:

1 Sweet Sorrow

2 Levels of Life

3 Koning van Katoren

4 Northanger Abbey

5 Girl, Woman, Other

6 Het wonder van Frieswijk

7 One Day

8 The Count of Monte Christo

9 Spring

10 Dune

11 The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying up

12 Leah on the Off Beat

13 How to be both

14 Pleidooi tegen enthousiasme

15 Het water komt

16 Piep

17 Wild

18 Eat pray love

19 The Accidental

20 Grote Verwachtingen

21 The Bone Clocks

22 The Testaments

23 Stoorzender

24 The Underground Railroad

25 Het recht van de snelste

26 Just like you

27 Pride & Prejudice and Misletoe

28 Me & Mr Darcy

29 The Rosie Project

Wow, I did not end on a high note, that's for sure. The stream of reread romantic novels stems from the illness I had in the beginning of December, which drove me to reading quick and easy novels. Not that one should make excuses for reading something light every now and then, but seeing three of them grouped together looks a bit sorry.

Anyway, more rereads than ever, as I said; Koning van Katoren, Northanger Abbey, One Day, Eat pray love, The Bone Clocks, and the final 3 romantic novels make 8 rereads in total. Only one 'classic' novel, The Count of Monte Christo, which in page number probably equals all the rereads. Unless you want to count Dune amongst the classics too, of course. Lots of Ali Smith (Spring, How to be both and The Accidental), which is probably no surprise since I put her as my best 'new' author of 2019. I was planning on ready more from Anna Burns too, but I didn't get her first novel until Christmas, so she will have to wait until 2021.

Best English novel

1 Spring

2 How to be both

3 Girl, Woman, Other

This category was pretty hard this year, mainly because I read so many rereads, non-fiction works and plainly bad books. But there were some great ones in there too. 

Spring is of course by the lovely Ali Smith, the third instalment of her seasonal novels. I am very much looking forward to the final novel (which is already out but not in the edition I need to complete my quartet), as I read an interview with her in which she states all the connections between the novels should become clear then (apart from some references to Shakespeare, classical musicians and contemporary artists that she already pointed out in the article and which I've missed so far anyway). How to be both is also by Ali Smith, making it the first time two novels from the same author find their way into my top 3. But Spring is definitely the better of the two. I read Girl, Woman, Other first of all these novels, which puts it in danger of slipping away in the mind, which it sort of did. It was one of the Man Booker prize winners of 2019 (look for the other one down below) so maybe it should have stuck with me more than it did. Anyway, it was still a great novel, a female view on contemporary Britain.

Honourable mention goes out to Just Like You by Nick Hornby, who just didn't make the cut.

I've just had a quick look back, and this is the first year that all novels in my top 3 were written by a woman. This may be a reflection of my changes in reading preferences, or it may be a reflection of me not buying books that have come out by male authors I usually love to read, such as Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes or State of the Union by Nick Hornby.

Best Dutch novel

The only Dutch novel I read that could go in this category is Koning van Katoren, which is a reread (Het Wonder van Frieswijk is also a Dutch children's book but it is so thin it is more a novella). All the other Dutch books I read this year were non-fiction.

Best classic

1 The Count of Monte Christo

If you only read one classic novel, the outcome is easily predicted. But I really liked this novel, as I've written before; despite the huge number of pages I flew through. Must really read more by Dumas in next year.

Best non-fiction

1 Grote Verwachtingen

2 Piep

3 Stoorzender

So these are all Dutch and wildly differing in their topic and size; Grote Verwachtingen is a pretty sizeable book on the years 2000-2019, which I started somewhere in 2019 and just finished this year. It is a nice read, a good follow-up to In Europa 1900-2000, but it took me a while to get through. Piep on the other hand is a really small collection of stories by biologist Midas Dekkers, in which he combines biology and (Dutch) literature; two of my favourite things. Stoorzender is an autobiography of one my favourite comedians (to name just one of the categories you can put him in) Arjen Lubach. Funnily enough, when the theatres were open, I heard several bits of this book spoken aloud by him without even knowing there was a book coming up. The bits he read out were the best bits of the book, it must be said. 

I have been reading three non-fiction books in English for the last couple of weeks, I put them down because of the illness but will probably finish them sometime early 2021, so next year this list will probably include more English titles.

Best short-story collection

I read no short story collections at all this year, something I just realised when putting in this category. I have several ready to read now, so this will be amended next year, but it is a sad realisation.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Dune

Again, if you only read one... But this novel too was better than expected; really one of the classics in terms of character/society/plot building.

Best 'new' author

1 Bernardine Evaristo

Again, this was not a good year for finding new novels or authors. But I really liked Girl, Woman, Other from Bernardine Evaristo and have bought several of her older novels. So she is still a good new addition to my literary perspective.

Most disappointing novel

1 The Testaments

2 Sweet Sorrow

3 The Underground Railroad

So this was a toss up between the first two. I've written about my disappointment with The Testaments and Sweet Sorrow before, so I won't repeat myself except to say that Atwood gets first place because I expected so much more from her novel. I've read not-so-great novels by David Nicholls before, but never a novel by Atwood that was this bad. It makes me sad, putting two authors I generally like in the disappointing pile, but I've done the same in 2018 and 2019, so maybe their writing styles and my tastes are starting to grow apart somewhat. The Underground Railroad makes third place not because it was so bad, but because it could have been so much better. Again, it is all to do with the expectations you have; The Nickel Boys was my favourite novel of 2019 and Whitehead was in my list of best 'new' authors.

Honourable mention goes out to Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, which I haven't written about, had actually forgotten I'd read until I started to compile this list and then had to look up for what it was about. This is not a good sign, for a novel and a novelist that I've enjoyed so much before.

Authors I read more than once

Ali Smith (3x)

David Nicholls (2x)

Spicy kletskoppen by Yvette

Kletskoppen are a typical Dutch biscuit, or rather a typical Dutch variety of the biscuit family that concerns itself with buttery/sugary biscuits. Think brandy snaps, only not rolled up. The name 'kletskop' literally means 'bald heads', not sure where that comes from; maybe 'fat belly' would have been a better name as these cookies are pretty fat and the type that you just have to keep on eating.

Anyway, I was in charge of the dessert for Christmas (again) this year and I'd decided to make cranberry/walnut brownies by Paul with ice cream. But since those are both 'soft' foods, I wanted to add something with a crunch. Hence the kletskoppen, which some restaurants also serve when you order brownies for dessert (better steal a good idea than think up a bad one, as we say in Dutch).
So, I looked up kletskoppen recipes and of course Yvette has one. It is one of the easiest recipes I've ever seen from her, perfect for a rainy afternoon where you don't know what to do with yourself. It needed a couple of things I didn't have, as I conceived of this plan in the early hours of Christmas day, but I made do with what I had. I'll put in the actual recipe and what I made of it.

Ingredients

250 g light muscovado sugar

75 g almonds, chopped (I did not have 75 grams, but I'm guessing 50 is the lowest you can go)

125 g flour

125 g butter

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon five-spice powder (I didn't have this, but I added some of the separate ingredients: cinnamon, nutmeg (should really be cloves, but they're close to the same thing), pepper and fennel, the only thing missing was star anise)

Preheat the oven to 200 C.

Line a baking tin with baking parchment. Yvette actually tells you to butter a baking tin, but as these things already emit loads of butter upon baking, I decided to use paper instead.

Quickly combine all the ingredients into a ball. Separate the big ball into smaller balls, about 25 in total.

Put the smaller balls in groups of 6 or 8 on your baking tin, leaving lots of space in between. 

Lots of space means lots of space.

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, keeping a constant watch. They're done when they're flat and brown.

Take the tin out of the oven, leave the biscuits to cool for a little while and then remove them with a pallet knife to cool and harden completely. 

Keep in an airtight tin, otherwise they'll become soft pretty quickly.

As you can see, these are the same six balls, only now they're kletskoppen.

I took them out after 8 minutes, which I think may have been a bit too soon; some were really nice and dark brown, with that characteristic caramel taste, but some of them were still a bit doughy or soft. But the taste was still really good, much more spicy then those you buy from the supermarket. And they worked really nice with the brownie and ice cream, too!

Christmas dessert combo.

Apple crumble pie by Yvette

When I was a student, I made lots of apple crumbles. Whenever we'd forgotten to buy desert, I'd just dice some apples, mix butter, flour and sugar into a somewhat lumpy mixture, stick it all in a pan and put in the oven. It always came out hot and tart and delicious. Somehow, I forgot about all that.
So when my birthday was coming up (the one for which I also made the ultimate chocolate birthday cake) and I saw an apple crumble recipe by Yvette van Boven, I knew this was one of the things I wanted to make. I always make an apple pie for my birthday, this year it would be something different. As with all Yvette recipes, this involved a little bit more work than I usually do, but the end result was amazing, as always.

Ingredients:
For the dough:

175 g butter

200 g flour

50 g icing sugar

pinch of salt

For the apple filling:

750 g apples, diced

75 g light muscovado sugar

zest and juice of half a lemon

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon ginger powder

3 bay leaves

pinch of salt

60 g butter

half a jar of blackberry jam (I could not find this, so I substituted with fruits of the forest jam instead)

For the crumble:

125 g light muscovado sugar

100 g butter, in small cubes

175 g flour

Yvette says to use a 25 x 33 cm baking tin; I have no idea what size mine is, but something close to this will do. Grease and line with baking parchment.

First, make the pastry, which is of the shortcrust variety (not one of my strengths).

Combine the flour, icing sugar and salt.

Using a mixer, whisk the butter until it is creamy. Quickly combine with the flour mixture. Push the mixture into the baking tin and leave to cool in the fridge for at least an hour (I had time on my hands, so I made this the evening before).

Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Bake the bottom the oven for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown.

In the meantime, combine the apples, sugar, lemon peel, lemon juice, cinnamon, ginger, bay leaves and salt.

Melt the butter in a pan. Pour in the apple mixture and add about 100 mL water. Bring to a boil, then turn down the fire and leave to simmer until the apples are done and most of the water is evaporated, around 15-20 minutes. Remove the bay leaves.

Now for the crumble; this part I knew. Combine the sugar, butter and flour until you have the characteristic crumble lumps. I usually start off by rubbing the ingredients together until they form the 'fine breadcrumbs' stage, then combine it into a crumbly ball which I then separate into smaller crumbles again. But whichever way works for you.

Spread a thin layer of jam on the doughy bottom. Pour the apple mixture on top and spread the crumble mixture on top of the apples. Bake (again at 180) for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown. Leave to cool completely before removing from the tin and/or slicing.

Forgot to take pictures of the process, but this was the end result.

I would never have thought to put bay leaves in an apple crumble, but that is Yvette for you. The pie was sweet, tangy, with a hint of acidity. It's probably even better with actual blackberry jam, so if you can find that, do use it. It was pretty heavy; the recipe stated 4 people but it was more like 14. It keeps for a long time in the fridge, so ideal for a birthday spread out over several days!

Ultimate chocolate birthday cake

So my birthday was almost two months ago, but I did some baking for it and since I haven't posted any baking recipes for a while now, I thought I'd add some more. 

Naturally my birthday was a bit different this year, spread out over several days with small groups of people coming to visit. Instead of my usual three cakes, I made two; an apple crumble by Yvette and what the recipe called 'the ultimate chocolate birthday cake'. This involved some washing up in the middle, as it requires three bowls and then some more. Also, it involves making a chocolate ganache, something I've seen on the Great British Bake-Off lots of times but hadn't actually made myself. It all came out pretty neat, in a massive amount of chocolate and frosting. I advise you to make the slices small; it's not as bad as the Icelandic devil's food cake, but it's pretty close.

Ingredients
For the cake:

100 g milk chocolate (in pieces)

200 g butter

200 g creme fraiche

200 g flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

1 tablespoon sault

4 eggs

200 g sugar

For the ganache:

400 g dark chocolate (in pieces)

250 ml cream

50 g icing sugar

Preheat the oven at 165 C.

Line your (24 cm) tin with baking parchment and butter.

Put the milk chocolate, butter and creme fraiche in a bowl a top a pan of simmering water. When everything is melted, take the bowl off the pan, stir to combine and leave to cool until lukewarm.

Put the flour, baking powder, cocoa, and salt in one bowl and mix together,

In another bowl, mix the eggs and sugar until they are a smooth, pale mixture.

The three bowl set; dry ingredients, egg mixture and chocolate.

Gently stir the molten chocolate mixture into the egg mixture. When it is all combined, add the flour mixture and combine again.

Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for about 50 minutes. Leave to cool in the tin for at least 20 minutes, then turn it out and cool completely. You can do this the day before; store the cake wrapped up in the fridge.

Next, make the ganache. Put the dark chocolate and cream in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water (sounds familiar?). When everything is combined, take off the pan and leave to cool completely.

Finally, add the icing sugar and whisk until combined. You can make the ganache one day earlier too, just put it in the fridge until you are going to finish the cake.

To assemble, cut the cake halfway. Spoon one third of the ganache on the bottom half and spread all over, careful not to let it run off the sides. Put the top half back on and spread the rest of the ganache over the top. You can decorate this in any way you like; nuts, chocolate swirls, et cetera. I chose to keep mine plain, partly because it is such a heavy cake already and partly because it was just so shiny.

Pretty pretty cake with an attempt at swirls on top.

It was rich and tasty, and making ganache is so much easier than it sounds! Not sure if this was the 'ultimate' birthday cake, but it was a pretty good one!

Just Like You

A new novel by Nick Hornby! Or rather; a second new novel by Nick Hornby, since I've somehow missed his State of the Union novel that came out last year. But I asked both that one and Just Like You, his 2020 novel, for my birthday and got the latter. Fate, it would seem, wants me to read the last novel first.
The title gave me a momentary flashback to Machines Like You, the Ian McEwan disappointment of 2019, but luckily this novel is also about something current but at the same time completely different; Brexit. This is strangely topical again, even though the novel is set mostly in 2016 (which only makes you realise how long that whole process has taken). However, Brexit is merely the background against which the novel plays out, so I can see why there isn't a play on that word in the title, which is of course a song reference (no Hornby novel is without music). 

The actual story is a romance between two people as unalike as possible; a twenty-something working class black guy and a forty-something middle class white woman. If that sounds like a hard pill to swallow, you don't know Nick Hornby; he has written novels about the most painful of subjects that are still light-hearted and fun while carrying a deeper message underneath.

Another apt title for this novel could have been Pride & Prejudice in the 21st Century. The combination of younger man and older woman is one I haven't read that often (the same can not be said for the other way around) and this novel brought home how ingrained class differences still are in the UK. Added to that, the racial stereotyping is far worse than I've ever experienced myself, going from this novel. But maybe that is just me speaking from my privileged bubble. Anyway, the characters themselves are not exempt from stereotyping, hard as they try not to give in to it (reading the title as "That is just like you!"). Lucy is disappointed that Joseph's church doesn't come with gospel singing and dancing. Joseph is sure Lucy's dinner party will be boring as he will have nothing in common with the people there. But it's mostly the people around them making a fuss, almost everybody has an opinion about the situation save Lucy's two sons, who are happy to just play FIFA with Joseph and not be bothered about his age, race or social class.

Lucy and Joseph fall in love without either of them really knowing it; Hornby is a master of the 'show, don't tell' craft. They encounter the predictable bumps in the road, some of which exist more in their own minds than in reality, but overall they see mainly the things that connect them (reading the title as "I feel just like you!"). This is the light-hearted, happy part of the novel.

Things go a bit sour when Hornby himself steps in some stereotyping traps; some characters are flat as a board, only existing to serve as contrast to others. Brexit is one such topic where everything is either black or white; all Josephs circle vote leave, while everybody Lucy knows is a Remainer. I cannot help but think that surely there were shades of grey in between there somewhere? Josephs solution, to vote both sides just to not disappoint anyone, is maybe one Nick Hornby himself could have taken on several occasions where he turns up the contrast a bit to high.

But in the end Brexit is merely a backdrop against which a unique and ultimately pretty believable romance plays out. This is the saving grace of the novel; how Lucy and Joseph feel like people you might actually meet, with all their insecurities and doubts, people you are rooting for to make it together.

ETA: I just discovered that the Dutch translation of the novel is called 'Op het eerste gezicht', which translates as 'At first sight'. Or if you want to be more poetical; 'First Impressions', which is the original title Jane Austen gave to Pride & Prejudice. And so it all comes full circle.

The Underground Railroad

 So with all that writing going on, I also actually did some reading. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, a novel I'd been looking forward to ever since I read and was amazed by The Nickel Boys. Both are Pulizer Prize winners, so I was hoping for an equally great read. As with the other novel, I'd left this one on the shelf for a while, afraid of the possible horrors within. The Underground Railroad is set during the time that slavery was still pretty common in the Southern US and I was not sure whether I actually wanted to read about all the horrors that happened. But after finally biting the bullet, The Nickel Boys was my favourite novel last year, so this one would probably also hold high rewards when I got through it.
Now the premise of the story is pretty good; not the slavery part, but the part where the underground railroad is an actual underground railroad, complete with stations, stationmasters, tracks and steam trains driving on those tracks. I loved that image, of this vast network of trains running underneath the slave owners, bringing people to safety. Sadly, that was just about all I loved about this novel.

The main character, Cora; I couldn't really be bothered about her. I mean; she just really doesn't have a personality. Her grandmother and mother, they have strong personalities, they make choices and stick by them. Cora impresses once, when she defends her plot of land against some guy who built his dog house on it, but we never really find out why, where she gets this strength from. We never really find out anything about her or her personality, not even why she decides to leave with Caesar when he asks her to flee with him. Sure, she's just had a bad experience, but we never find out her inner workings, because sadly, the novel is written in the third person. A first person perspective from Cora would really have helped.

They flee and get into all sorts of trouble, which somehow Cora doesn't seem to realise until it is upon her, at which point someone else has to take care of her again. She never seems to make any big decisions of her own. At one point, the plot is entirely stuck, with her hidden in a place she cannot get out of. The story wants this to be suspenseful, but you already know she will get caught; there is no realistic way for things to move on otherwise. Where The Nickel Boys was full of surprises, this story seemed pretty bland and uninspired. Also; no emotional investment. Like I said; the character never really came to life for me.

Enough about Cora; the 'in between' chapters focus on other characters in the novel, which means they are somehow more fleshed-out than the main character is. Especially the chapter on her mother was one that touched me somewhat; more of that kind of writing would have been nice.

The whole setting, of pre-Civil War America, didn't work for me because I didn't know what it was actually like back then. So when she finds herself in North Carolina, I had no clue whether this was the way North Carolina actually was during that time, or whether we were entering a metaphor. Turns out, this was a metaphor, but I had no clue. Given the number of (mainly American) awards this novel has won, knowing these extra layers probably makes you enjoy the novel more, but for me it was just plain strange.

So all in all; not a success for me. I really cannot see how you could award this novel the same prize as The Nickel Boys, which has so much more depth of character and such a wonderful plot. But, given all the positive critiques, this may be my lack of knowledge on the time period or the subject matter in general. Either way, this was not one for me.