2020 Book List
Having more time to read was one of the bright spots in the madness of 2020. In fact, I read more books last year than any other year of my adult life (64), though still more fiction than nonfiction (53/11). Here’s a few of my favorites for the year:
(Thank you to Roshan Paul for letting me copy and paste all your good ideas and adding almost all of these to my list in the first place)
I discovered David Mitchell (thanks to Roshan Paul and Alex Tyers) and loved both The Bone Clocks and Ghostwritten. For anyone who likes intricate plots and mind-blowing storytelling, these are musts. I continued on my Michael Ondaatje binge with Anil’s Ghost and The English Patient. Everything I've read of his has the beautiful prose and heart wrenching characters.
I enjoyed the diversity of geographies my reading took on this year (across Africa, India, Eastern Europe, Korea, the DR, etc.). At the top of the list were Philip Caputo’s Acts of Faith, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao.
Many of these were by incredible female author’s that I was reading for the first time, including Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, Madeline Miller’s Circe, and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (if you can finish this 1,000 page, single sentence, stream of consciousness, you deserve a medal!).
A majority of the nonfiction I read this year focused on race in America. The best of which were James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (one of my all-time favorite authors), Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Outside of these, I thoroughly enjoyed Lawrence Anthony’s The Last Rhinos (about conservation in Africa), and of course, Obama’s A Promised Land, which was as long-winded as it was wonderful to read.
Looking forward to trying to beat this record in 2021, so all recommendations are welcome!