Friday, December 11, 2020

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.

2 comments:

  1. Looks like you read a lot of great books! I read Wild a few years ago and couldn't believe that people actually hike like that - such a cool thing to do! I think the best book I read in 2020 was Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn - such a cool read!
    Jenna ♥
    Stay in touch? Life of an Earth Muffin

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  2. My ability to read for fun this year was a bit all over the place, I think because of worrying about the pandemic and then the election.

    I generally like all of the Karin Slaughter books I've picked up, though I haven't been able to read Pretty Girls yet. The mystery/police procedural series ones are generally all solid reads. (It's really hard to find good thrillers! Lots of the books sort of marketed as being "like Gone Girl" are really terrible, including Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10, blech.) Paul Tremblay's other novels are pretty good, I thought, but I also didn't like The Cabin at the End of the World.

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