Reading in 2020

Given the lockdown and the increased amount of time we all spent at home in 2020, I would have expected my reading to soar. I feel like I read a lot, and I did!, but I didn’t really read that much more than I did in 2019. I read 60 books in 2019 and 65 in 2020, and I feel like 2019’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace pretty much make up those extra five books.

My reading life was rich this year, though. It was the first year in six years that I was no longer working on my Andrea Reads America project, so I had complete freedom to read whatever I wanted: no goals, no rules. The shining star of 2020 for me was being introduced to Elizabeth Acevedo‘s work. The Poet X was phenomenal, a perfect book for me. I immediately put her novel With the Fire on High on hold at the library when I finished The Poet X. The book that probably had the biggest impact on me in 2020, that I think about often, and that opened my eyes to the experience of being a Black woman in America, is Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays. It is powerful. And if any year needed laughter, 2020 did, so I found some heart-warming and funny reads, like Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, Gail Honeymoon’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and James McBride’s Deacon King Kong.

My other favorite thing about reading in 2020 was the Tumblr blog for my reading life: Books & Drinks. It’s been really fun to capture quotes and to document reading with the cats, in swim practice parking lots, in the garden, on my lunch break. Changes of scenery were more nuanced in 2020 than those pre-pandemic days when we had the luxury of traveling and restaurants and entering other buildings besides our homes and grocery stores, so my book blog helped me pay attention to those subtle changes.

Okay, enough blabbing. Here’s my 2020 book list, in chronological order:

• Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott
• City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout ♥
• Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
• Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian
• The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce ♥
• Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
• The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
• The Rogue Not Taken by Sarah MacLean
• Calypso by David Sedaris
• The Idiot by Elif Batuman
• The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett ♥
• The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel ♥ (immersive pandemic reading)
• The Overstory by Richard Powers ♥
• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman ♥
• Quest and Crew by David Beaupre
• The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon
• The Pearl by John Steinbeck
• A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates ♥
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ♥
• Citizen by Claudia Rankine
• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• I’m Not Dying With You Tonight by Kimberly Jones ♥
• Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
• Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom ♥
• The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal
• The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo ♥
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson ♥
• Paradise by Toni Morrison
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway ♥
• The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon ♥
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The City We Became by N.K Jemisin ♥
• With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo ♥
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
• Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay
• Deacon King Kong by James McBride ♥
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng ♥
• The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown ♥
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë ♥
• For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan
• Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
• Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas ♥
• The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells
• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
• Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett ♥
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens ♥
• Swell: Sailing the Pacific in Search of Surf and Self by Liz Clark