Books I read in 2020

I went from reading multiple books a week to reading almost none. That's the way it was, with the first half of the year being essentially a prolonged break for me (interview season, quarantine) and the second half being work.

1. The Subtle Knife - Phillip Pullman (RR) - 5
2. The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman (RR) - 5
3. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - Marie Kondo - 3
4. Sabriel - Garth Nix (RR) - 5
5. The Incendiaries - R.O. Kwon - 4
6. Sourdough - Robin Sloan  4
7. The Prince and the Dressmaker - Jen Wang - 5
8. A Mother's Reckoning - Sue Klebold - 5
9. Sea People: the Puzzle of Polynesia - Christina Thompson - 5
10. The Cabin at the End of the World - Paul Tremblay - 2
11. The Secret Commonwealth - Philip Pullman - 4
12. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail - Cheryl Strayed - 3
13. Educated - Tara Westover - 5
14. Severance - Ling Ma - 4
15. Pretty Girls - Karin Slaughter - 5 ** look up content warnings
16. The Night Tiger - Yangsze Choo - 4
17. The Long Walk - Stephen King - 3
18. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens - 5
19. Dear Girls - Ali Wong - 4
20. The Familiars - Stacey Hall - 2
21. The Family Trust - Kathy Wang - 4
22. My Twenty-Five Years in Provence - Peter Mayle - 3
23. Upstream - Mary Oliver - 5
24. Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn - 5
25. Dark Places - Gillian Flynn - 2
26. The Woman in the Window - AJ Finn - 3
27. In Real Life - Cory Doctorow, Jen Wang - 2
28. 172 Hours on the Moon - Johan Harstad (tr. Tara F. Chase) - 2
29. The Feather Thief - Kirk W. Johnson - 4
30. The Deep - Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Huston, Jonathan Snipes - 3
31. Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo - 5 ** look up content warnings
32. Jaws - Peter Benchley - 4
33. Trick Mirror - Jia Tolentino - 5
34. What Doctors Feel - Danielle Ofri, MD - 4
35. In the Heart of the Sea - Nathaniel Philbrick - 5
36. The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm - Christopher Paolini - 2
37. Wave - Sonali Deraniyagala
38. Wild Ones - Jon Mooallem - 3
39. Spin the Dawn - Elizabeth Lim - 3
40. The Unhoneymooners - Christina Lauren -  4
41. Pachinko - Min Jin Lee - 5
42. Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong - 4
43. The Miniaturist - Jessie Burton - 2
44. In a Dark, Dark Wood - Ruth Ware - 1
45. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Iain Reed - 3
46. Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi - 5
47. The Plant Messiah - Carlos Magdalena - 5
48. The Overstory - Richard Powers - 4

I think this year was lot more about exploration, with a lot of homeruns and a lot of really awful books too. I don't have a lot to say about the books I felt meh about, but looking at my 5 star and highlights of the year, there's a couple of common threads:

- all were un-putdownable for me

- if non-fiction, involved some dark subject matter that was dissected in a very meticulous and compelling way - A Mother's Reckoning, In the Heart of the Sea, Educated

- if fiction, regardless of genre, involved intelligent and well-executed characters

-- if fantasy, expansive and logical and lush worldbuilding was a must - His Dark Materials, Sabriel, Ninth House

-- if thriller, the pacing was perfect - Pretty Girls, Sharp Objects

-- and rounding out the pack, interestingly Pachinko and Homegoing were both multi-generational family sagas surrounding race

I don't know if I have anything more to say about my year of increased recreational reading. I'm happy with how much I got to read in the beginning of the year, and how Goodreads had such a resurgence among the people that I knew from college and med school. I'm just nosy about what kind of things other people read.