2020 Books
Dec. 30th, 2020 09:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pen_gruntAt the beginning of 2020 I set a goal to read 12 books.
Because in 2019 I had read 0 books.
That was very unusual for me, I wasn't comfortable with it. It reflected something about the state of my life and what I prioritized that I didn't like. Some of it was outside of my control (Simone was born in late 2018 and was--and still is--a poor sleeper...so every time I would try to read I would fall asleep) and some of it was me (defaulting, in spare moments, to the endless & seductive scroll of social media because I convinced myself that it wasn't enough time to do anything REALLY productive).
Note: I'm not here to judge how much anyone else reads or doesn't read. But reading *a lot* had/has always been a part of my identity and seeing that slip away was a piece of the greater puzzle of losing one's self in becoming a parent and, ultimately, not feeling like a real, whole person.
So a goal of 12 seemed like a good way to ease into things without going nuts. 1 book a month I could do, and if that was all I did I would be pretty satisfied.
I ended up reading 88 books. Which is, I grant you, a lot more than 12.
I fit reading into spare moments; if I had a book on my kindle app on the phone I could read while nursing Simone to sleep or in the middle of the night. I could have an audiobook for driving. I could have another book on the kindle device for longer reading times. I could have a paper book just in case (I haven't been able to read much in paper books because my children lose my place...one that I started in March is still unread...whoops). Instead of playing candy crush (or whatever) before bed I could use that time to read and wind down. I could listen to an audiobook while making or waiting for dinner or while doing embroidery.
Then there was grief and pandemic; and my anxiety was such that shoving someone else's words into my brain made a great substitute for my own thoughts (which were...unpleasant). As far as coping mechanisms go--it wasn't a bad one. I could have started doing drugs or something!
I got EXCITED about books again. There is so much to read and so many different genres. Discovering audiobooks was satisfying, and 99% of my reads were library downloads. I discovered a system of putting popular stuff on hold and having a list of things that seemed to usually be available so I never had to wait to read SOMETHING.
So here is my 2020 list. I've put ratings (some I modified as I went through and thought about the book again) and I'll call out a few stand-out books, too. Ask me about anything...mostly I have reasons for why particular things weren't higher or lower.
1. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, Deepa Anappara, AB, 4/5
2. A Madness of Angels, Kate Griffin, 3/5
3. Bunny, Mona Awad, 4/5
4. Stony the Road, Henry Louis Gates Jr., 4/5
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie, 3/5
6. Let’s Pretend this Never Happened, Jenny Lawson, 4/5
7. Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantero, 3/5
8. The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas, AB, 4/5
9. Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, Lindy West, 5/5
10. Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan, AB, 3/5
11. I Am the Clay, Chaim Potok, 4/5
12. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins, AB, 4/5
13. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, 4/5
14. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman, 4/5
15. Becoming, Michelle Obama, AB, 4/5
16. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara, 3/5
17. Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen, AB, 3/5 (Bad reading, good book…maybe 4/5)
18. Hunger, Roxane Gay, AB, 4/5
19. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi, 4/5
20. The Hatchback of Notre Dame, Ray Magliozzi, AB, 4/5
21. The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Amy Schumer, AB, 3/5
22. The Lager Queen of Minnesota, Ryan Stradal, 4/5
23. Visions and Revisions, Dale Peck, AB, 2/5
24. Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, 4/5
25. Educated, Tara Westover, AB, 5/5
26. Don’t Try This at Home, Andrew Friedman, 3/5
27. The Last Black Unicorn, Tiffany Haddish, AB, 3/5
28. A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut, AB, 5/5
29. Legendary Children, Tom Fitzgerald, 4/5
30. Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham, 4/5
31. Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn, AB, 4/5
32. Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance, AB, 1/5, WILL NOT FINISH WHAT A TERRIBLE BOOK
33. Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell, 4/5
34. Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, Louis Sachar, 3/5
35. Based on a True Story, Norm Macdonald, 2/5
36. Dark Places, Gillian Flynn, AB, 4/5
37. Notes from a Young Black Chef, Kwame Onwuachi, 4/5
38. Into the Water, Paula Hawkins, AB, 3/5
39. Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen Kilgariff, 3/5
40. Wicked River: The Mississippi When it Last Ran Wild, Lee Sandlin, 4/5
41. My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite, AB, 4/5
42. The Witches are Coming, Lindy West, 4/5
43. On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, Andrew Peterson, 2/5
44. The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, Olivia Waite, 4/5
45. Locke & Key Vol 1: Welcome to Lovecraft, Joe Hill, 4/5
46. The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 4/5
47. Black Girl Unlimited, Echo Brown, 5/5
48. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, AB, 4/5
49. Catfishing on the CatNet, Naomi Kritzer, 4/5
50. Will my Cat Eat my Eyeballs, Caitlin Doughty, 4/5
51. Juliet Takes a Breath, Gabby Rivera, 3/5
52. What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah, 5/5
53. Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi, AB, 4/5
54. In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado, 4/5
55. Blood of Elves, Andrzej Sapkowski, 2/5 –Will not finish.
56. The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui, 5/5
57. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser, AB, 5/5
58. The Fireman, Joe Hill, 3/5
59. Come as you Are, Emily Nagoski, 4/5
60. The Lost Daughter of Liverpool, Pam Howes, AB, 2/5
61. Saga, Volume 1, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
62. The Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward, 4/5
63. Saga, Volume 2, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
64. The Good Daughter, Karen Slaughter, 4/5
65. Tenth of December, George Saunders, 3/5
66. Saga, Volume 3, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
67. Saga, Volume 4, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
68. The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, AB, 5/5
69. Saga, Volume 5, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
70. The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell, Kamau Bell, 3/5
71. Saga, Volume 6, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
72. Kitchens of the Great Midwest, Ryan J. Stradal, 2/5 (This one made me mad because of Honeycrisp apples. I got reeeeal tetchy about it.)
73. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern, AB 3/5
74. So You Want to Talk About Race?, Ijeomo Oluo, AB, 5/5
75. Yes, Chef, Marcus Samuelsson, 3/5
76. A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles, AB, 5/5
77. Crosstalk, Connie Willis, AB, 4/5
78. Circe, Madeline Miller, AB, 5/5
79. An American Marriage, Tayari Jones, AB, 4/5
80. The Leavers, Lisa Ko, AB, 4/5
81. The Water DancerTa-Nehisi Coates, AB, 3/5
82. Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker, 4/5
83. The Black Flamingo, Dean Atta, 4/5
84. Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens, AB, 4/5
85. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel, 3/5
86. The Guest List, Lucy Foley, AB, 4/5
87. The Girls, Emma Cline, AB, 4/5
88. Strange Weather, Joe Hill, 3/5
This is me on Goodreads. I will probably "steal" all the books you like and mark them as "want to read" if friended. I'm a shameless book-stalker.
Hey, TLDR: what are the 6 I'd call out that I enjoyed or made me think the most and are also different from each other?
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, Lindy West, 5/5 : I like Lindy West's easy, funny, to-the-point writing. Her arguments are satisfying in their brevity and cohesive tightness.
What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah, 5/5 : This really stuck with me, upon reviewing the list. It's a collection of short stories set in Africa, has doses of magical realism, and can be both wonderful and deeply weird.
The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui, 5/5 : This is a multi-generational coming-of-age graphic novel that is an immigrant story, a refugee story, a first-generation story...all woven together with the complexities of coming to terms with being a daughter in the way you do when you have a child yourself.
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser, AB, 5/5 : This is a fascinating look at the whole myth and mythology of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Spoiler: Rose Wilder is a TERRIBLE person, and most of their bootstraps libertarianism is a fabrication. (Heeeey, guess what? "We did everything for ourselves and no one gave us handouts" literally means "we were given stolen land for free!" and "sometimes we lied to get free land claims!" with an extra side of "we're racist as f*ck" and "sometimes Nazis had good ides!" and "why be a journalist who researches stuff when you can make it up and pass it off as true!")
The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, AB, 5/5 : This is about a group of friends/lovers living through the AIDS crisis in the 80s (and also some during more recent times). It says a lot of really poignant things about love and loss without being pretentious or obnoxious about it.
Black Girl Unlimited, Echo Brown, 5/5 : This one stuck with me a while as well; it has some magical realism, but primarily it's metaphorical magic--what happens when girls and women are abused and how do the shrouds of sadness settle over them forever.
Because in 2019 I had read 0 books.
That was very unusual for me, I wasn't comfortable with it. It reflected something about the state of my life and what I prioritized that I didn't like. Some of it was outside of my control (Simone was born in late 2018 and was--and still is--a poor sleeper...so every time I would try to read I would fall asleep) and some of it was me (defaulting, in spare moments, to the endless & seductive scroll of social media because I convinced myself that it wasn't enough time to do anything REALLY productive).
Note: I'm not here to judge how much anyone else reads or doesn't read. But reading *a lot* had/has always been a part of my identity and seeing that slip away was a piece of the greater puzzle of losing one's self in becoming a parent and, ultimately, not feeling like a real, whole person.
So a goal of 12 seemed like a good way to ease into things without going nuts. 1 book a month I could do, and if that was all I did I would be pretty satisfied.
I ended up reading 88 books. Which is, I grant you, a lot more than 12.
I fit reading into spare moments; if I had a book on my kindle app on the phone I could read while nursing Simone to sleep or in the middle of the night. I could have an audiobook for driving. I could have another book on the kindle device for longer reading times. I could have a paper book just in case (I haven't been able to read much in paper books because my children lose my place...one that I started in March is still unread...whoops). Instead of playing candy crush (or whatever) before bed I could use that time to read and wind down. I could listen to an audiobook while making or waiting for dinner or while doing embroidery.
Then there was grief and pandemic; and my anxiety was such that shoving someone else's words into my brain made a great substitute for my own thoughts (which were...unpleasant). As far as coping mechanisms go--it wasn't a bad one. I could have started doing drugs or something!
I got EXCITED about books again. There is so much to read and so many different genres. Discovering audiobooks was satisfying, and 99% of my reads were library downloads. I discovered a system of putting popular stuff on hold and having a list of things that seemed to usually be available so I never had to wait to read SOMETHING.
So here is my 2020 list. I've put ratings (some I modified as I went through and thought about the book again) and I'll call out a few stand-out books, too. Ask me about anything...mostly I have reasons for why particular things weren't higher or lower.
1. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, Deepa Anappara, AB, 4/5
2. A Madness of Angels, Kate Griffin, 3/5
3. Bunny, Mona Awad, 4/5
4. Stony the Road, Henry Louis Gates Jr., 4/5
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie, 3/5
6. Let’s Pretend this Never Happened, Jenny Lawson, 4/5
7. Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantero, 3/5
8. The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas, AB, 4/5
9. Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, Lindy West, 5/5
10. Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan, AB, 3/5
11. I Am the Clay, Chaim Potok, 4/5
12. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins, AB, 4/5
13. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, 4/5
14. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman, 4/5
15. Becoming, Michelle Obama, AB, 4/5
16. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara, 3/5
17. Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen, AB, 3/5 (Bad reading, good book…maybe 4/5)
18. Hunger, Roxane Gay, AB, 4/5
19. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi, 4/5
20. The Hatchback of Notre Dame, Ray Magliozzi, AB, 4/5
21. The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Amy Schumer, AB, 3/5
22. The Lager Queen of Minnesota, Ryan Stradal, 4/5
23. Visions and Revisions, Dale Peck, AB, 2/5
24. Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, 4/5
25. Educated, Tara Westover, AB, 5/5
26. Don’t Try This at Home, Andrew Friedman, 3/5
27. The Last Black Unicorn, Tiffany Haddish, AB, 3/5
28. A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut, AB, 5/5
29. Legendary Children, Tom Fitzgerald, 4/5
30. Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham, 4/5
31. Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn, AB, 4/5
32. Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance, AB, 1/5, WILL NOT FINISH WHAT A TERRIBLE BOOK
33. Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell, 4/5
34. Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, Louis Sachar, 3/5
35. Based on a True Story, Norm Macdonald, 2/5
36. Dark Places, Gillian Flynn, AB, 4/5
37. Notes from a Young Black Chef, Kwame Onwuachi, 4/5
38. Into the Water, Paula Hawkins, AB, 3/5
39. Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen Kilgariff, 3/5
40. Wicked River: The Mississippi When it Last Ran Wild, Lee Sandlin, 4/5
41. My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite, AB, 4/5
42. The Witches are Coming, Lindy West, 4/5
43. On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, Andrew Peterson, 2/5
44. The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, Olivia Waite, 4/5
45. Locke & Key Vol 1: Welcome to Lovecraft, Joe Hill, 4/5
46. The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 4/5
47. Black Girl Unlimited, Echo Brown, 5/5
48. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, AB, 4/5
49. Catfishing on the CatNet, Naomi Kritzer, 4/5
50. Will my Cat Eat my Eyeballs, Caitlin Doughty, 4/5
51. Juliet Takes a Breath, Gabby Rivera, 3/5
52. What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah, 5/5
53. Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi, AB, 4/5
54. In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado, 4/5
55. Blood of Elves, Andrzej Sapkowski, 2/5 –Will not finish.
56. The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui, 5/5
57. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser, AB, 5/5
58. The Fireman, Joe Hill, 3/5
59. Come as you Are, Emily Nagoski, 4/5
60. The Lost Daughter of Liverpool, Pam Howes, AB, 2/5
61. Saga, Volume 1, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
62. The Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward, 4/5
63. Saga, Volume 2, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
64. The Good Daughter, Karen Slaughter, 4/5
65. Tenth of December, George Saunders, 3/5
66. Saga, Volume 3, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
67. Saga, Volume 4, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
68. The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, AB, 5/5
69. Saga, Volume 5, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
70. The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell, Kamau Bell, 3/5
71. Saga, Volume 6, Brian Vaughan, 4/5
72. Kitchens of the Great Midwest, Ryan J. Stradal, 2/5 (This one made me mad because of Honeycrisp apples. I got reeeeal tetchy about it.)
73. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern, AB 3/5
74. So You Want to Talk About Race?, Ijeomo Oluo, AB, 5/5
75. Yes, Chef, Marcus Samuelsson, 3/5
76. A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles, AB, 5/5
77. Crosstalk, Connie Willis, AB, 4/5
78. Circe, Madeline Miller, AB, 5/5
79. An American Marriage, Tayari Jones, AB, 4/5
80. The Leavers, Lisa Ko, AB, 4/5
81. The Water DancerTa-Nehisi Coates, AB, 3/5
82. Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker, 4/5
83. The Black Flamingo, Dean Atta, 4/5
84. Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens, AB, 4/5
85. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel, 3/5
86. The Guest List, Lucy Foley, AB, 4/5
87. The Girls, Emma Cline, AB, 4/5
88. Strange Weather, Joe Hill, 3/5
This is me on Goodreads. I will probably "steal" all the books you like and mark them as "want to read" if friended. I'm a shameless book-stalker.
Hey, TLDR: what are the 6 I'd call out that I enjoyed or made me think the most and are also different from each other?
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, Lindy West, 5/5 : I like Lindy West's easy, funny, to-the-point writing. Her arguments are satisfying in their brevity and cohesive tightness.
What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah, 5/5 : This really stuck with me, upon reviewing the list. It's a collection of short stories set in Africa, has doses of magical realism, and can be both wonderful and deeply weird.
The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui, 5/5 : This is a multi-generational coming-of-age graphic novel that is an immigrant story, a refugee story, a first-generation story...all woven together with the complexities of coming to terms with being a daughter in the way you do when you have a child yourself.
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser, AB, 5/5 : This is a fascinating look at the whole myth and mythology of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Spoiler: Rose Wilder is a TERRIBLE person, and most of their bootstraps libertarianism is a fabrication. (Heeeey, guess what? "We did everything for ourselves and no one gave us handouts" literally means "we were given stolen land for free!" and "sometimes we lied to get free land claims!" with an extra side of "we're racist as f*ck" and "sometimes Nazis had good ides!" and "why be a journalist who researches stuff when you can make it up and pass it off as true!")
The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, AB, 5/5 : This is about a group of friends/lovers living through the AIDS crisis in the 80s (and also some during more recent times). It says a lot of really poignant things about love and loss without being pretentious or obnoxious about it.
Black Girl Unlimited, Echo Brown, 5/5 : This one stuck with me a while as well; it has some magical realism, but primarily it's metaphorical magic--what happens when girls and women are abused and how do the shrouds of sadness settle over them forever.
