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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:

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