Xan brooks biography sample
If you'd told me at the start of year that I'd hardly leave the house for nine months, barely see a friend during that time, and get to read whenever I wanted, I'd have said, "OK cool, do we start now, or...?"
My attention span actually evaporated for the first two months of lockdown, a period I spent either working obsessively on the Royal Albert Hall's livestream programme (70 sets, including shows from Emilie Nicolas, Lucy Dacus and Richard Thompson) or watching only disposable Glenda Farrellvehicles. But since May I've been reading a lot and also writing a lot, firstly for the Guardian, and then for places like Sight & Sound, NMEand the Independent. Freelancing had taken a back seat for a few years as I worked obsessively on fiction, and untangled some mental knots that were getting in the way, so it's been so nice to be read again, to reach a big audience, and to respond almost in real-time to art and politics and the enduring and shifting strangeness of 2020. Thanks so much to everyone who's supported my writing this year. Doing something creative has made me really happy.
Though I also have three full-time jobs – going on Twitter, managing the Albert Hall press office, and managing Derby County on Championship Manager 2000-01– I've kept up with the reading, which for me is many things: a way to calm my brain, an education an escape. Mine is the kind of brain that likes a goal, and so the goal is always the same: a book a week across the year. And despite it taking me most of the first lockdown to read Dick Goodwin's interminable memoir, Remembering America, we got there in the end. So here's a meander through everything I read in 2020. Regular readers will notice some old favourites, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Robert Caro's biographies of LBJ, and books about football in the 1990s. I told you my brain liked goals.
BOOKS
Fiction
My favourite novel of the year was...
Penelope Fitzgerald is just
Book: My Antonia
Date; 1918
Author; Willa Cather
Style; modernist
Summary; orphan Jim Burden comes to live in rural Nebraska with his grandparents at age 10. He settles into life on the farm and in that prairies and befriends the Shimerda family where he meets Antonia. They have come to America for a better life, he teaches Antonia english but her dad struggles to cope after the death of a friend and develops depression. Winter arrives and the Shimerdas have too little food or clothing, Jim’s grandparents try to help but snow soon gets too thick. Once it melts the Shimerdas are invited over for dinner but it goes poorly leaving mrs S angry and mr S even sadder as he later commits suicide in the family barn. In spring Antonia must work in the fields with her brothers while Jim goes to school, they grow apart and Jim mourns the loss of a childhood friendship. At 13 Jim and his family move into the town to be closer to the school but their neighbours hire Antonia s a housekeeper.. she makes friends but is fried for being too friendly with the local boys so goes onto work for a money lender and Jims grandmother stops him sneaking out to the dances. Jim longs for his childhood on the prairie and wants to date Antonia but she views him as a brother. The money lender tires to rape Antonia and she quits her job and Jim graduates and moves to lincoln for college. Jim tries to date other but he still love Antonia, he moves back in with his grandparents shortly before law school and tries to convince Antonia once last time to date him. They meet up after 20 years, he is successful, and she is marries with a farm and 11 children.
Key themes; immigration, nature, humanity, change, the past
Key quotes;
‘ there was nothing but land: not a country at all. But the material out of which countries are made’
‘As Antonia said, the whole world was changed by the snow’
‘ as i went back alone over that familiar road, i could almost believe that a boy and a girl ran along b When I read a debut author whose writing I love there is always a mixture of feelings when their second book arrives. As a rule I am both ridiculously excited as their new work could be even better than its predecessor and also really nervous because it might not be. Tricky. It was with this mixed bag of emotions that I met A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman, whose debut novel When God Was a Rabbit I absolutely loved when I read and also had the pleasure of raving to everyone about at my first (short lived, weeps) literary salon in Manchester ‘Bookmarked’ and beyond. I finally read it on holiday, aptly in a desolate cove. Tinder Press, paperback, 2015, fiction, 336 pages, kindly sent by the publisher Marvellous Ways is waiting for something, she doesn’t know what on earth it might be, she just knows she has to wait. Well, she was told to wait by one of the three loves of her life, albeit from beyond the grave in a dream. (This might all sound bonkers, it is, stay with me.) What she is waiting for turns out to be Francis Drake who, on a mission after the Second World War to pass a letter from a soldier to his father, ends up washed up on the shore of the cove where Marvellous spends much of her time. Drake it seems has given up on life and had it not been to keep a promise to a dying man might have ended it all, Marvellous realises her mission is to bring back to him a passion for life and a life yet to live whilst being close to the end of her own. My initial summation actually makes the novel sound both a little too simple and also much more linear than it is to read. Whilst it has a beginning, middle and end (as all books do) it also has a fluidity and magical element to it that means it all flows and interlinks, if that makes sense? The first thirty pages tell of how Marvellous lives, waiting, by the sea in Cornwall in her late eighties and creates a wonderful image of an eccentric character who .A Year of Marvellous Ways – Sarah Winman