I'm looking forward to the TV adaptation of the Lewis trilogy, although it won't be on for ages (and to my holiday on Lewis and Skye). Watching this tonight has put me in the mood. I'm not sure I fancy the local delicacy - pickled guga and potatoes - it sounds like codliver oil on a plate - but the scenery is stunning.

Clearly there's several of you who enjoyed these books and will also be looking forward to the TV series. Perhaps I should have made it clear that it will be a good while yet before this hits our screens. Meanwhile, the programme I watched (see link above) is still on iPlayer - it's a documentary (part English, part Gaelic with subtitles) about the books and the people and places who inspired them. Sorry if I caused any confusion. Must not blog carelessly late at night!

So who made the rule that Books of the Year lists had to be published before New Year's Eve? I've been meaning to do this for weeks and thought it was too late to bother - but what the heck. I wouldn't say that 2014 was a vintage reading year; but that's not to say that there weren't days or weeks when I had my head stuck in a book and didn't want to surface. I still get through a book a week, although I used to read twice as much as I do now, up until a couple of years ago ... so what am I doing instead? Don't ask me! Maybe I'm reading fatter books. Or frittering reading time by blogging and making lists!

Anyway, here's my round-up, in no particular order.

Rather to my surprise, two of my strongest contenders for Book of the Year were actually published last year. In fact, I'll get off the fence and say that my 2014 award for contemporary fiction goes to Ann  Weisgarber for The Promise. Runner-up is Sarah Waters for The Paying Guests.

Looks like it's going to be 2016 before we get the third instalment of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, which is in a league of its own. But in the meantime, I was completely gripped by Robert Harris's novel about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy - which gets my double award for best historical fiction and best thriller.

Shall we award Mrs Miniver's Rosebowl for best vintage fiction? What a difficult category in which to select an outright winner because these are my long, enjoyable wallow books. First up is EH Young for Chatterton Square and William. Could I possibly choose between them? Between delightful William and disagreeable Mr Blackett? (There are plenty of copies of Chatterton Square for 1p on Amazon.)

I didn't get round to posting about The Three Sisters by May Sinclair but this novel from 1914 was definitely another contender for the Rosebowl, a heartbreaking story of repressed women.  I'm Not Complaining by Ruth Adam was a novel that I'd really love to adapt for TV and I was casting it in my mind as I was reading.

It didn't quite make Mrs Miniver's Rosebowl, but I'll give an honourable mention to Madame Solario, originally published anonymously (in the 1950s, but you'd think it was from another, earlier era). Again, this was one I didn't get round to posting about - sorry. But Madame Solario lingered in my mind as such an entrancing, mysterious character and there's an excellent review here. This was 1p well spent on Amazon, too. For some reason, I thought it was a forthcoming Persephone title; but maybe I'm wrong.

Oh, and another honourable mention to Betty Miller for On the Side of the Angels as it reminded me of  Elizabeth Taylor and At Mrs Lippincote's.


Shall I round it off with an award for non-fiction? I thoroughly enjoyed Lynn Barber's A Curious Career. I seem to have had a midsummer blogging slump and again, I can't find a post for the gripping, but very gruelling Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, now republished by Persephone. I found it a compelling read about Stalinist Russia (but I chose it for our bookgroup and none of the other members would agree with me!) A much easier read was Mollie Panter-Downes' London War Notes, fascinating and quirky, and coming soon as a Persephone title.

Most disappointing read of the year? Hilary Mantel's book of short stories was a big letdown. I wish she'd cracked on with Wolf Hall III instead of rattling the cage of Daily Mail columnists.  I didn't care about it being tasteless, it was just a bit ... boring.

A catchier title would be The Taste of Wolf Hall. I devoured this fascinating book over a few days last week and, as it's full of relatively easy-to-recreate recipes, I have grand plans for sweet potato pie and biscuits baked in mussel shells, then boiled in a sugar glaze (alas, only discovered after I had mussels for supper  and chucked all the shells!)
There was lots of food in Hilary Mantel's novels and I seem to remember that Thomas Cromwell (at least, the fictional Cromwell) took a keen interest in sauces.
So I'm keeping an eye on the television series to see what they're dishing up ... only herrings and salad last night, but it was Lent!

Delicious shivers ... I'm not sure why I was so pleased to see all of the horrid novels from Northanger Abbey when I caught the last day of this excellent exhibition about the Gothic imagination at the British Library. I was going to say it had everything from Austen to Zombies. But, actually, there was a Zombie Pride and Prejudice. Has anyone read it?
I hardly ever watch horror films - but when I got home I couldn't resist watching this.

Happiness, Emily Carr, 1939

It was the tree paintings that bowled me over ... you could almost smell the damp earthiness of the forest floor, feel the pine needles, hear the rustling branches ...

Sketching in the big woods is wonderful. You go, find a space wide enough to sit in and clear enough so that the undergrowth is not drowning you. Then, being elderly, you spread your camp stool and sit and look round. 'Don't see much here.' 'Wait.' Out comes a cigarette. The mosquitoes back away from the smoke. Everything is green. Everything is waiting and still. Slowly things begin to move, to slip into their places. Groups and masses and lines tie themselves together. Colours you had not noticed come out, timidly or boldly. In and out, in and out your eye passes ... Sunlight plays and dances. Nothing is still now. Life is sweeping through the spaces. Everything is alive. The air is alive. The silence is full of sound. The green is full of colour ...

I own up. I'd never heard of Emily Carr - who is a household name in Canada - and my excuse is that there is very little opportunity to see Canadian art here.

So I didn't know what to expect from this show at Dulwich, except that it had very good reviews. It turns out that Emily Carr was also a very engaging writer; that extract is from her diary in 1935, when she was 63. She was born in 1871 and, after the early death of both her parents, she took off to Europe to learn to be an artist, then returned to paint the forests and skies and document the legacy of the indigenous peoples of British Columbia.

Self-Portrait, 1938-39

There was a 15 year gap in her career when she more or less gave up on art, when she couldn't make a living from it and became a boarding house landlady instead.

I don't fit anywhere, so I'm out of everything, and I ache and ache. I don't fit in the family and I don't fit in the church and I don't fit in my own house as a landlady. It's dreadful - like a game of musical chairs - I'm always out, never get a seat in time, the music always stops first.

Yet look at the titles of her paintings ... Sunshine - Happiness - Tumult - Windswept Trees.

I loved the illustrated sketchbook of her 1907 holiday in Alaska with her sister, Alice - full of wit and fun about the ups and downs of what must have been quite a gruelling trip.

Eric Ravilious, The Waterwheel, 1938

Eric Ravilious, Belle Tout Interior, 1939

A date for my diary. I'm really looking forward to this.

I started this over Christmas, not the most festive choice of reading but fascinating. It tells the story of a  cluster of remote villages, on an inaccessible plateau of the Massif Central, that saved hundreds of Jewish children from deportation during the Nazi occupation. It was a heavily Protestant area, with a long tradition of discretion and silence. It was also, since long before the war, well known for its children's homes and pensions catering for needy and abandoned children in the clean mountain air.
The beginning chapters are particularly shocking, chronicling the appalling collaboration of the Vichy regime; more than collaboration, it was wholehearted participation that went over and beyond the demands of the Germans. This is the story - a story with many grey areas, of course - of ordinary, decent, courageous people who wanted no part of it.

First film of the year and a stellar performance - surely an Oscar-winner - from Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Much, much better than The Imitation Game, I thought. Redmayne is utterly convincing as Hawking's physical condition deteriorates from shambling, clumsy PhD student as motor neurone disease takes hold. It is deeply moving. For me, all the more so, as my mother died from this horrible disease.
It is a love story and the story of a marriage. (Its troubled later years, admittedly, rather glossed over.) If I have a criticism, it's that I wish there had been a bit more of an attempt to explain the science. It baffles me. If physicists come up with the equation that explains everything ... I can't for the life of me see where that gets you, how a natty bit of mathematics can prove that x actually happened. Is God an equation?
Oh well, I gave up physics when I was 13 - boring stuff about gases - and I don't think the interesting physics had even been invented then. But a few years ago I was able to spend a couple of hours, completely alone, in this fascinating garden which gave me a glimmer of understanding of what it's all about.


On the way home, I went for a late afternoon stroll around Richmond Green, past Maids of Honour Row, through what remains of Richmond Palace  - how wonderful to live in what was once Queen Elizabeth I's Wardrobe - and on past the Trumpeters' House and Stables. And thought of all the bustle and comings and goings there must have been, all the boxes of finery that must have arrived by river boat. And how extraordinary it is to be able to wander through all of this history as a two minute diversion from picking up my groceries from Waitrose. It was such a warm afternoon. And so heartening to see the first camellias and early blossom on the trees.

Is there such a thing as blog-blight? Well, there's definitely been a slump here lately and it's because I've hardly left the house, trying to keep a sternly encouraging eye on builders who were supposed to be finished at the start of December.
I'm hoping the end is in sight ...
Meanwhile, it perked me up enormously to settle down last night with yet another ready meal, a bottle of wine and episode one of Wolf Hall.
I've read the book twice, seen both of the stage plays, so you'd think I might have reached Wolf Hall saturation point. Absolutely not ... it's brilliant. I've had a bit of a girl-crush (okay, a hot flush grande passion) for Thomas Cromwell since I first read the book and Mark Rylance is just right.
The historical detail is stunning. The period settings are superb. I wasn't perturbed by the over-dainty codpieces, supposedly there to placate timorous American audiences. (I doubt I'd even have noticed.) But I had a beady eye on table napkins and what they were eating ... I'm sure whoever made that grand sallet would like to know that I played it back three times squinting at the ingredients. (I'm definitely up for a Thomas Cromwell cookbook.)
Now I'm itching like a Tudor flea to see episode two.

Today's the day ... As we all know, I love a day out by train especially on a bargain ticket. The seat sale has just started but tickets go fast. I've just booked a £10 return trip to York. By which time I'm hoping that the daffodils will be fluttering and dancing on the city walls. It's one of my fondest memories of when I was a student there.

My New Year resolutions are the half-hearted, boring ones that I make - and break - every year.
But I like the style of my colleague who is approaching her 70th birthday and walks with a stick - and whose present to herself is a new sports car. The disabled sticker gives it extra dash, we agreed.
She says her New Year resolution is to say, 'Yes.'
I think she's a role model!

Happy New Year to all readers and thank you for all your lovely, friendly comments during 2014. I can't believe that it's nearly five years since I made my first tentative posts, wondering if anybody out there would read them - and it has been a delight to make so many new friendships.