The Bookery’s Cliff found himself with reader’s block in 2020 – how did he cure it?

Last year was not a normal year, I think we can all agree.

Amidst chaos and change, I found myself with…time on my hands. And, in common with many book lovers, I thought that a long fallow period would allow me to perhaps attack some of those long and difficult doorstops which had been stacking up on the pile just out of my eyeline. This surely was the year I tried James Joyce’s Ulysses, the perfect opportunity to plough through Knausgaard’s My Struggle 6-volume saga, perhaps I could tackle ALL of Dickens?

In truth though, circumstances being what they were, I found it very difficult to retain focus on anything. My mind was disjointed and easily distracted. Even watching a TV series proved difficult – my intention to binge-watch some classic serial quickly stymied by not being able to remember details from the previous episode…that I’d just watched.

Instead, I found solace in short stories and brief novellas. David Salazy’s two novels All That Man Is and Turbulence are both constructed as connected short stories, and they’re atmospheric and touching and clever and wan all at the same time. It’s an impressive achievement, and extremely satisfying. The indie publisher And Other Stories specialises in amazing translated novellas, and I eagerly read two of their most recent releases – Yuri Herrera’s A Silent Fury (the true tale of the El Bordo mine accident) and Sweet Days Of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (about boarding school life in postwar Switzerland).

My other big find during this time was Andre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. Back in the 1800s it was serialised in easy to swallow chunks, and found an eager audience who couldn’t get enough. For me this brilliant, action-packed novel similarly hit just the right spot – the clever and light-hearted plot engaged me immediately. The Richard Pevear translation had just the right tone to whisk me away to the swashbuckling world of Louis XIII’s France. Although not strictly speaking ‘short’ in size, the episodic nature makes books like this (and similarly Don Quixote, which is huge but where there are stories within stories!) lose their daunting heft.

Once out of my strict isolation and with the help of all these brilliant short tales, patience with longer books returned with a vengeance and I tore through some properly thick recent tomes like Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, The Blind Light by Stuart Evers and Charlie Kaufman’s massive book Antkind.

I had my appetite back.