Strange to reflect, as we say farewell to the past year, on how many iconic "futuristic" years I've lived through: 1984, 2001 and...
...if short-lived '70s-era Hanna-Barbera cartoon show titles count as iconic, 2020. I doubt I'll make it to The Year 2525 of which Zager and Evans so memorably sang, at least in my current incarnation.
Anyway, here's one more list for January; my books for 2020. Even granting that it doesn't count short stories, articles, blog posts, poems, comic books, shopping lists, factory warranties, skywriting, banners towed behind airplanes etc etc, it's disgracefully short; I'm a ploddingly slow reader, and there are a couple of longish ones on there, at least by my standards, like Death's End, part three of Cixin Liu's astonishing Three-Body trilogy, and David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue.
Friday the Rabbi
Slept Late by Harry Kemelman
Wild Wives by
Charles Willeford
The Iron Dream by
Norman Spinrad
Catch and Kill by
Ronan Farrow
Becoming by
Michelle Obama
Apropos of
Nothing by Woody Allen
Barry Sonnenfeld,
Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld
Death Comes as
the End by Agatha Christie
Death’s End by
Cixin Lui
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
I didn't include it on this list, because I was only about halfway through it on New Year's Eve, but in December I also finally cracked a book I've put off for a long time, Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, his 1722 chronicle of the 1665 Great Plague of London.
As you might guess, there's plenty about 1665 that's perfectly recognizable in 2020, although the response of the city's government, as described by Defoe, puts this country's federal response utterly to shame. But it's also instructive reading for anyone who thinks that 2020 was the worst possible year.
