2020 in Books
Believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2020: early February 2020, at the last-ever Silent Reading Party at the Bindery. I am toward the back, in brown jacket and striped shirt, caught in conversation with a local political candidate whose campaign imploded later that year over allegations of sexual harassment and misogyny. 2020!
Okay, only six months late this time. With 2021 half-over and the pandemic in abeyance for the time being, I finally feel stable enough and caught-up enough to post the list of books I read during the strangest year of all of our lives.
I’ve written before about how I felt incapable of reading anything during the early days of shelter-in-place, which in turn made me feel like I was losing my mind and my identity. (It didn’t help that so many other people were boasting about how they were using quarantine to hunker down and tackle their long TBR lists.) I have always been a steady, self-motivated reader, but quarantine really made me value reading as a social activity, a way to connect with other people even when so many means of connection were severed. You’ll see that there was a good chunk of the year where the only things I read were “assignments” for my two book clubs: the literary fiction book club I’d been in since late 2016, reconfigured to meet over Zoom; and the new “let’s read the complete works of Shakespeare” quarantine book club that started up during the pandemic spring. It’s fair to say that books helped get me through the pandemic; it’s even more fair to say that my book clubs did.
I’ve followed my usual protocols for my year-end book posts:
One list for plays, one list for everything else
I list only published works that are available to the general public, not friends’ unpublished or draft works
Rereads are marked with an asterisk
Books read for my literary fiction book club are marked with a dagger
You can also assume that every Shakespeare play on my “Plays” list is there due to my quarantine Shakespeare book club
I link to reviews if I’ve posted them on this blog — though there are some books on this list that I’ve reviewed on Goodreads but haven’t gotten around to blogging yet.
Non-Plays
* The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
* † My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdag Göknar - my thoughts
The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, by Daniel Mendelsohn
† A Woman of Independent Means, by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
† Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn
* Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie - my thoughts
Journey into the Mind’s Eye, by Lesley Blanch
† Indiana, by George Sand, translated by George Burnham Ives - my thoughts
† The Overstory, by Richard Powers - my thoughts
† Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann
* † The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
† The Marrow of Tradition, by Charles W. Chesnutt
† Normal People, by Sally Rooney
Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For), by Ella Risbridger
Drinking the Devil’s Acre: A Love Letter from San Francisco and Her Cocktails, by Duggan McDonnell - my thoughts
† A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
† * We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
* The American Girls’ Handy Book, by Lina Beard and Adelia Beard
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
These books, by the numbers:
13 American, 4 British, 1 Turkish, 1 Indian, 1 French, 1 Irish
12 books by 11 different male authors, 9 books by 9 different female authors
14 adult fiction, 2 kids’/YA fiction, 5 nonfiction
15 new reads, 6 rereads
Plays
Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp, by Caryl Churchill
Never the Sinner, by John Logan
Henry VIII, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
* Hernani, by Victor Hugo, translated and adapted by John Kenney - my thoughts
* The Winter’s Tale, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
* Hamlet, by Shakespeare
* Titus Andronicus, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
* Twelfth Night, by Shakespeare
* Henry IV, Part 1, by Shakespeare
Timon of Athens, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
* Richard II, by Shakespeare
* The Merchant of Venice, by Shakespeare
As You Like It, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
Henry IV, Part 2, by Shakespeare
* Life of Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willett
Henry V, by Shakespeare
* Othello, by Shakespeare
* Macbeth, by Shakespeare
King John, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
The Taming of the Shrew, by Shakespeare
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
* Antony and Cleopatra, by Shakespeare
Love’s Labor’s Lost, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
Henry VI, Part 1, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
Henry VI, Part 2, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
* Much Ado About Nothing, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
Henry VI, Part 3, by Shakespeare - my thoughts
* Romeo and Juliet, by Shakespeare
The Merry Wives of Windsor, by Shakespeare
* Pericles, by Shakespeare
* Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida, by Shakespeare
These plays, by the Shakespeare-skewed numbers:
29 British, 1 American, 1 French, 1 German
1 play by 1 different female author, 31 plays by 4 different male authors
15 new reads, 17 rereads
Previous Years in Reading lists (2017 and earlier are on my old blog): 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007