The world can best be seen at 5 or 6 in the morning, with a cup of coffee at hand and a book just closed in my lap. Staring ahead without focus, as words and ideas float about the waters, bumping against the vessel of the coming day. It is a private time for me, before the work on the farm begins, not to be found at any other.

With Old Man 2020 now limping off the stage, it is hard to go back to that moment in January when the year ahead seemed fixed in a mold much like any other, with the steady march of months and a ritual rhythm of farm and career. I voyaged with Adam Nicolson those first few days, around the wild coasts of the British Isles, in Seamanship. Then Wendell Berry kept me company with Andy Catlett: Early Travels, A World Lost, and a perennial rereading of The Farm. I joined Sacha Carnegie as he discovered the pleasures of learning to keep pigs in post-war Scotland, in Pigs I Have Known, and Shaun Bythell was my guide to being a rude, obnoxious, and downright funny Wigtown, Scotland, bookstore owner in Confessions of a Bookseller.

As the year picked up steam and “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” became part of the daily lexicon, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hines, in Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, provided a flicker of light — “[T]ogether, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us” — even if it had to be got by striking flint to steel. More Berry followed, as did the fun fare of John Sandford and the embarrassingly addictive S. M. Stirling.

When the lockdown began to imprison the land, I retreated into reading A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana, a nostalgic treat. (His Between Meals essays of dining in France in the 1930s also fueled some mighty and heroic meals for our table.) I read, loved, and suggested to all who could hear me shout from the front porch String Too Short to Be Saved by Donald Hall. Add it to your own must-read list and seek out a copy, if you haven’t already.

The summer months opened with false optimism that the curve had flattened and the worst was behind. The COVID Victory Garden provided for our table, and then provided some more, and the farm phone rang with pleas to be put on the schedule for meat. Meanwhile, my 5 a.m. readings turned toward the classics. I worked my way through Robert Fagles’s translations of both “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” epic poems that inspire humility, forgiveness, love, and, most important, a renewed belief in kicking ass where needed.

When the summer neared its end, I nursed a sneaking suspicion that we had been snookered in a game for which the rules had yet to be written: mask or no mask; transmission by surface, sneeze, or stare, for seconds, minutes, or weeks; devoted follower of the Ministry of Silly Bombast or of the Judge Advocate for Fearful Cowering.

As the world beyond the farm devolved into juvenile bickering, I retreated a century into the past and gained fundamental lessons in neighborliness by reading The Country of the Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett), before then plunging Into the Heart of Borneo jungles (Redmond O’Hanlon) and learning how to remove leeches from uncomfortable, most-private places.

October and November, truly the months of greatest change and of dying on the farm, were perfect for another go-round with The Lessons of History (Will and Ariel Durant) and a meditative reading of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Thankfully, before slicing open a vein after hearing yet one more tweet inspired by Q-Anon or seeing one more monument toppled by iPhone-toting Talibanistas, I discovered Jason Peters’s The Culinary Plagiarist. It’s the kind of book that had me writing a fan letter and taking the much-needed opportunity to shout “Comrade!” into the chill fall air.

Which brings this reading year almost full circle, to early December, where once again we are in retreat, each of us standing masked, silent, isolated from family and friends when we need them most, and where what and whom we’ve lost is still being tallied.

Time to close any news browser remaining open and pick up another book. For me, I think it will be the Library of America’s collection of stories by Ambrose Bierce, with one more chance to stand on the bridge overlooking Owl Creek, hoping for a different outcome. Which, some say, is the definition of insanity and which I proclaim is just the opposite.

The Complete List of 2020 Readings

• Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles (Nicolson)
• Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Berry)
• A World Lost (Berry)
• The Farm (Berry)
• Pigs I Have Known (Carnegie)
• The Third Plate (Barber)
• How to Burn a Goat (Moore)
• Confessions of a Bookseller (Bythell)
• A Place on Earth (Berry)
• Farmer’s Glory (Street)
• Killing for the Republic (Brand)
• Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (Kingsnorth and Hine)
• Masked Prey (Sandford)
• The Sky-Blue Wolves (Stirling)
• The Drowned World (Ballard)
• Think Little (Berry)
• The Earl of Louisiana (Liebling)
• Between Meals (Liebling)
• Living in the Long Emergency (Kunstler)
• String Too Short to Be Saved (Hall)
• Giving Up the Gun (Perrin)
• Lycurgus & Pompilius (Plutarch)
• Seasons at Eagle Pond (Hall)
• “The Iliad” (Homer)
• “The Odyssey” (Homer)
• Into the Heart of Borneo (O’Hanlon)
• The Shooting at Chateau Rock (Walker)
• The Lessons of History (Durant)
• The Country of the Pointed Firs (Jewett)
• Corduroy (Bell)
• Silver Ley (Bell)
• Breaking Bread with the Dead (Jacobs)
• English Pastoral: An Inheritance (Rebanks)
• The Culinary Plagiarist (Peters)
• What’s Wrong With the World (Chesterton)
• The Moviegoer (Percy)
• The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd (Rebanks)
• The Night Fire (Connelly)
• J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth (Grotta)
• The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Kotkin)
• Eastern Approaches (Maclean)
• Stop Reading the News (Dobelli)
• The Long Tomorrow (Brackett)