You can tell it's December when the Books of the Year lists start appearing in newspapers and in bookshelves, and on this blog.

I don't know about you, but my usual reading habits have been a bit all over the shop this year, with the result that a full 46% of my book list was made up of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's Chalet School novels and I definitely did not push myself as hard to read as diversely as I might usually try to do. Also, I could not go to the London Review of Books shop, which did not help here.

So, with the usual disclaimer that these are the books I have most enjoyed this year, not just my favourite books published this year, here goes, in no particular order: my top twelve books of the year (and two bonuses, just because).

Fiction
Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin. The list of novels about Ancient Rome that I will recommend is short. This is on it. It's a wonderful story about one of the key female figures of early Rome, and also a musing on how stories are told and history and myth are created. Feat. a cameo by Vergil.

Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates is just such a good writer and his imagination is so rich. I loved the way this story managed to both find and bruise the hope of hope within the brutal reality of slavery in the United States. It managed to be both magically real and real.

Tyll, by Daniel Kehlmann. I am here for your picarasque, slightly mythological novels that turn a comedic eye to the horrendous mess that was the Thirty Years War. It pokes at religion and politics and dynastic monarchy in particular, and it delighted me.

To Calais in Ordinary Time, by James Meek. I'd been waiting to read this for a while, and it has really stayed with me. I love what it does with ideas of romance and nobility and gender and class. The language is wonderful if you just roll with it, and it's plague setting is très, très, appropriate to thinking about the dysfunctionalities of society.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Clarke's previous, Strange and Norrell, is one of the most magical, atmospheric, lingering books I've ever read, and Piranesi, while completely different in story and form, has that same magic. The house and its beloved child are completely captivating, in a way that makes the everyday world feel cold and cruel, and you want the energy to bleed the other way.

Real Life, by Brandon Taylor. This one is on lots of year end lists and for good reason. You guys, it is really darned good. It's a story of daily life and the way that small tensions and micro-aggressions pile up and pile up until they cannot help but make themselves known in every widening cracks in a community. Everyone in this novel is a bit of a mess and no one is perfect, but some are significantly less aware of the damage they do than others.

(plus one lot of short stories)
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang. I don't read a lot of short stories. I will read all Ted Chiang short stories. I'm not sure that anything in here was quite as perspective-shifting as some of those in Stories of Your Life and Others (Tower of Babylon, Hell is the Absence of God) but I just really enjoy his perspective and storytelling.

Non-Fiction
(aka, the 'hello, I am interested in British rural life and the countryside' section)

Dark, Salt, Clear, by Lamorna Ash. For someone who grew up in west Cornwall, I know very little about the fishing industry, and this book was illuminating and written with such care and affection. It describes a world which is not mine, but which is adjacent to a massive part of mine, and which affects us all - especially right now.

Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape, by Patrick Laurie. I came to this via a recommendation by James Rebanks, and I so enjoyed it. It's the story of Laurie and his wife getting into small-scale sustainable farming in Galloway; about his cows and the landscape, and its life. It's a lovely little glimpse of a world and a way of trying to live life.

Book of Trespass, by Nick Hayes. A brilliant book about the state of the English landscape (specifically English, because a lot of this book is about law, which is different in England than in Scotland and Wales) and how we engage with it. It tells a story about how much of the England has been privitised and capitalised, and how little we're aware of it and how hard it is to fight it.

English Pastoral: An Inheritance, by James Rebanks. Oh, this book is beautiful. It is properly lyrical. It's about the complexities of how to farm in ways that let you make a living and live in your land well. It's gloriously idealistic and pragmatic all at the same time, and it's written with such love for its subject.

East West Street, by Philippe Sands. In the year of the British landscape, this book about the development of international law about genocide and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials mad the cut. It's written through the lens of four men connected to one small city that changed nations multiple times across the first half of the twentieth century, one of them the author's grandfather, and it is completely absorbing. I've just started his new book, Ratline, and it's looking like being just as good.

Bonuses
The Christian Imagination, by Willie James Jennings
Ghost Ship, by Azariah France-Williams
Like many people, I picked up a pile of things to read this summer in relation to Black Lives Matter. Two that I read from cove to cover and that have really stayed with me, as I've started training for ordination, have been these.

I started reading The Christian Imagination a few years ago for a piece of work, but I went back to the beginning and read it over. It's deep and complex and absolutely repays re-reading as you get to grips with what Jennings is talking about in the book. It's had and will continue to have a massive impact on how I think about and approach theology and empire and race in my life and work. Ghost Ship, I think, will really come to fruition for me as I go on training and experience more of working in churches. It's delightfully different in structure and style and storytelling, which really works for getting you thinking. It's not shy of the bleakness of the sitution in the Church of England when it comes to racism, but I really appreciate its commitment to both that honesty and to wanting things to be different.