A certain amount of escapism through books would have been more than understandable in 2020. (And by “a certain amount” we mean “a lot.”) You’d be forgiven for favoring the comfort food of a reread or a beach read. Or for not reading at all. Because for every person who was able to forget themselves in literature, who found books to be a refuge in this year where the news of the day and the light of our screens was oppressive and inescapable, there was another, if not several others, who was too bleary-eyed to even pick one up. So what’s perhaps most unusual about this year’s list of favorite books is just how usual it is. These selections—represented as individual favorites, rather than consensus picks for the year’s best—feel like the books we would have chosen regardless of all that was going on outside our windows. They’re a pair of dark, violent novels in translation. Incisive nonfiction that examines the powerful (and not so powerful) people working within the startup industry. Books that interrogate broad societal concerns like climate change, immigration, and right-wing extremism, and those that examine grief, nostalgia, and personhood within single individuals. These are books that look at difficult things, rather than turn away (but don’t worry, there’s some fun in here too). 2020 sucked, these books don’t. Thanks for reading.
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I’m only halfway through it but I can recommend The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. Apparently he’s already sold the film rights to Spielberg (yes, yes, I know). It’s just a great lightweight, fun murder mystery. But very, very funny.
That’s good to hear – I bought it for my mother for Christmas. She likes murder mysteries and Pointless so it seemed worth the risk of buying something I hadn’t read myself.
It’s got a Midsummer Murders/Rosemary and Thyme vibe but much funnier than either.
I enjoyed that one quite a bit. I told one of my coworkers he needed to read it, too, but I don’t know if he has yet. I see that it’s checked in now, so I think I’m going to put it face out on the display. Someone is bound to like it.
About the only 2020 book I read this year was Woodward’s Rage about Trump which was a good read, if not clearly originally a totally different project which got co-opted into being about COVID and then rushed at the end to get it published before the election.I spent a lot of this year writing a book which I’m still working on. Hoping to finish it in the new year once I get the two remaining interviews I need.
I read Rucker & Leonnig’s A Very Stable Genius early this year. In retrospect, it’s wild to think that future readers will wade through that entire book and get to the end realizing it ends before COVID was even a thing. (Good luck on your book, too!)
thanks, i have been looking forward to this list for books to add for reading. i don’t need light-hearted books, just diverting ones to counter-balance the reading of academic treatises and pandemic lockdowns.
I’ve only read two books which were published this year, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which was lightweight but very enjoyable, and Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, he’s a writer I normally love to pieces but I though this was cringeworthy stuff, and one of the worst things I’ve ever read, I’m still in a little bit of shock as to how bad it was.
Yeah, I want to know how married life with Victoria is treating him. He should do a sequel to Back Story! (Just kidding, I’m a big Cloud Atlas fan).
I loved having Piranese to read this year. It was wonderful and almost healing to be in the narrator’s head. I loved that she was able to write a character who had attained a kind of spiritual enlightenment while also maintaining his humanity.
I feel the same way. It felt like a curative after such a brutal year. Clarke being able to shift from something as lore and detail-heavy as Strange and Norrell to something deeply empathetic as this just reaffirmed how impressed I am with her writing.
Piranesi took me a bit to get into (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a top-five book for me, so I think I was expecting something a bit more in that vein) but then about a third of the way through I adored it. By the time I hit “Outsider, fan fiction, page {whatever it was}” I was a goner.
Did you read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? I enjoyed that, but I’ve always found that one lighter than its reputation and bulk suggested, so I’m curious what made this new one so for you. The praise for the former has sometimes made me want to reread it to see what I was missing, but the praise for this one seems even fuller.
I really loved Jonathan Strange, I agree with you that it’s lighter than it’s reputation and bulk suggest but it’s an extremely enjoyable romp with a sense of imagination that impressed me an enormous amount. Whereas this is just quite good, very readable but it plays out in a mostly predictable manner.
I mean, what’s remarkable to me about Piranese is how it’s completely different from Jonathan Strange. Like, if you go in hoping for that, you’ll be disappointed. Piranese is a deeply internal book in which you live in the mind of a person in a very unique fantastical situation. I really enjoyed it and read it in about a day.If you ever played the game Myst? I feel like that’s the closest analogy I can find for the experience of reading the book, except you get to ride around in the head of a very vivid character instead of a blank slate…
I just finished Piranesi, which funny enough was the only book I read this year that was published this year (I read a lot, I just tend to find the hit and miss factor for newer novels is really high so I favour titles that have withstood a little time). It was very well done, I wish more writers of high concept work realized their books don’t gain anything by being 400-500 pages.
My top 20 published this year – I guess my favorite was ‘Entangled Life’. On this site’s list I only read Billion Dollar Loser which was OK, but ‘Something that May Shock…’ was pretty bad IMO. 1. Unmaking the Presidency: Donald
Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin
Wittes2. Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran,
and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective
Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas3. Tightrope: Americans Reaching
for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn4. The Bomb: Presidents, Generals,
and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan5. Supreme Inequality: The Supreme
Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America by Adam Cohen6. Capital and Ideology by Thomas
Piketty7. America for Americans: A
History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee8. The Velvet Rope Economy: How
Inequality Became Big Business by Nelson D. Schwartz9. Hidden Valley Road: Inside the
Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker10. The Broken Heart of America
Lib/E: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson11. Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How
Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis12. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make
Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake13. The Price of Peace: Money,
Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter14. The King of Confidence: A Tale
of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the
Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey15. Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our
Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money by Zephyr Teachout16. Calling Bullshit: The Art of
Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West17. The Art of Resistance: My Four
Years in the French Underground (A Memoir) by Justus Rosenberg18. Time of the Magicians:
Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented
Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger19. Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a
Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife by Ariel Sabar20. Kindred: Neanderthal Life,
Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
And you were doing so well avoiding slideshows…
If you’re on desktop and scale down the size of your browser window it will automatically format slideshow articles into a single page list.
I’m going to say that for my money, the best 2020 release I read was The Vanishing Half. I approached it thinking it was probably going to be overblown (because it was on so many best of lists) but man, it really did get me right in the gut.It was published last year on Dec 31st so it technically doesn’t count, but Such a Fun Age was great too.And we were talking about it in another thread but Tana French’s The Searcher was great. It’s not a Dublin Murder Squad book but it does the same work in digging underneath the idyllic Irish countryside myth and is a total heartbreaker.
here to second The Searcher! I was worried about the Murder Squad departure following The Witch Elm (uggggh) but The Searcher was thrilling
I don’t know if it’s just because 2020 sucked, but it also was just so sad at the end!
I’ll recommend Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf. Sometimes (as with Seamus Heaney’s translation) it gets a bit carried away with its semi-ironic use of modern vernacular, but it brings the energy back to a poem that’s always been translated badly. Beowulf is *fun* and this version never forgets that. Here’s hoping the trend of ‘women translating classic work’ continues.Also, though I haven’t read much of it yet, Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland, the latest (last?) in his series of books on the rise of the American conservative movement. There books are all essential reading for progressives who want to understand how America got itself into this mess.
While this is not quite the same thing, have you read Renault’s The King Must Die? It’s an interpretation of the story of Theseus told in a realistic way. It’s a very well done book.
I am almost done with Nixonland and completely agree. It definitely helped me understand what is happening in now.
Oooh, I didn’t know someone had written a book about Adam Neuman/WeWork. I tend to get really obsessed with imploded tech companies (ask me anything about Theranos because I’ve read everything ever published and seen all the documetaries and listened to all the podcasts), so I’ll add this to the list.The only one of these books I’ve read is Hurricane Season, which I agree was excellent. I read Jones’ first book, Mapping the Interior, a couple months ago and The Only Good Indians is on my list but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
I had an unusual paucity of new books catch my attention this year. Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War was about it.
My two best from this year were Problems and Other Solutions and Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick.This was a year for lighter fare, for me, and those two certainly fit the bill.
Cool to see Stephen Graham Jones getting so much attention for this novel. I’ve only recently discovered him and his style really speaks to me. Only wish I could’ve found him out sooner. At least I have a lot of his books to go back and read. He’s quite prolific.
I only read two of these, The Only Good Indian which was just great, right up there with Stephen King if you like horror, but with some psychological twists to it (especially the first long section), plus not all the characters are white guys from Maine. I also read A Deadly Education which was pretty fun, kind of like really good Harry Potter fanfic meets Cthulhu and, I don’t know, some kind of thing where the school wants to kill you.
The first section was my favorite part! As much as I love the book as a whole, that first section (basically everything up to the manhunt in the woods) could work on its own as a novella/short story. It’s so unsettling and strange and disturbing that the rest of the book is a bit of a come-down.
100% agree. I don’t think the book captured the highs of the first section afterward, and one sequence in particular had me scratching my head, as it read a bit silly to me.
Yes, it was definitely very distinct and the flavour was a bit different — I absolutely thought it could be a standalone. I still liked the rest of the book, but it was like an 8.5/10 and the first part was a 10+/10.
Book cover designs have gotten so good. The bar is set really high now.
I read a lot fewer books this year than in most previous years, solely listening to audiobooks while driving has been a lot less productive when working from home since April and never seeing my family.
I’ve ready ~30 books this year, but only one from 2020, Michael Connelly’s The Law of Innocence (the latest Lincoln Lawyer novel – good!).
Books published earlier that I read and thoroughly enjoyed this year: foremost How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell; In the Distance by Hernan Diaz; But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman; and Norwood + The Dog of The South by Charles Portis, who died in February.
How to do Nothing was my first book of 2020, and now it’s a christmas present to nearly everyone I know!
A Deadly Education is so good! Even already loving Novik, it was a high point. I read it pre-pub and the minute I finished I was bummed at how long I would have to wait for more. Still, when someone asked me yesterday what the best new book I’d read this year was, my mind went straight to The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin.
Now that I think about it, that seems to be a pattern. I only read The Fifth Season initially because I was upset that it beat Novik’s Uprooted to the Hugo Award. After reading it, I knew they made the right choice and I was grateful to have been introduced to Jemisin. Seems I have just repeated myself.
My new years wish for 2021 is that slideshows end.
I managed to read 71 books this year but only one on this list, The Only Good Indians which was excellent. My book of the year is probably Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a fungi scientist who is exactly as delightful as his name suggests. Also highly recommend Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs for soul-expanding non-fiction.
Fiction-wise, Piranesi and Death In Her Hands are definite standouts. Leave the World Behind was pretty good, though it works better as a pulpy thriller than deep social commentary. Weather by Jenny Offill and The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave are great too, the latter especially for a reprieve from anthropocene musings.
Weather was terrifying and lovely. I think about the tinned tuna candle a lot.
I think Weather would feel like a book of the year if the pandemic hadn’t distracted us all from the terror of climate change for a minute.
“FedEx delivers an unexpected package at your doorstep in Washington, D.C. You open it to find a stuffed aardvark that you last saw in the bedroom of your clandestine lover. You are a closeted Republican congressman with a Reagan fetish, currently gobsmacked by the “gigantic taxidermied beast” in your living room, and you are about to receive word that your lover is dead.”Can I be a lesbian in this scenario? Because that’s how I’d like to play it out.
Considering how things go for the Congressman in that story, I’d suggest you could be a lesbian, but you might just want to be a whole different character, or in a different story, entirely.
My favorite 2020 publications are:
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (hilarious and terrifying look at Grafton, NH and their war against taxes, bears, and the fire department)
The Butchers’ Blessing by Ruth Gilligan (brutal Irish drama, pre-Celtic Tiger)
Weather by Jenny Offill (climate change anxiety!)
The Searcher by Tana French (rip roaring Western, but in rural Ireland)
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (lesbian necromancers IN SPAAAACE)
Luster by Raven Leilani (debut novel of the CENTURY)
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (second-place debut!)
Writers & Lovers by Lily King (the newest from the author of Euporia, my favorite novel of 2010-2020)
Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro (Incredible piece of American political and theatrical history. Will make you feel better about our current timeline)
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (Duh)
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel (It’s a story you already know, but Mantel shocks none the less!)I’ve been doing The Cannonball Read challenge for the last two years: pledge to read 13,26, 52, or MORE books- then write about them all. We are “sticking it to cancer, one book at a time”. I’m especially grateful this year for the structure and community, and reading has been the only thing to keep me sane. I’m currently up to 141, but the year is far from over!
So now my choices are either be forced to look at an awful slideshow or not be able to have any of the pictures load in narrowed-window format.
Tragically pathetic.
The 2020 standouts for me were:The Vanished Birds by Simon JiminezPiranesi by Susanna ClarkeCleanness by Garth GreenwellI also liked Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime a lot.
This has not been my best year for reading. I’m struggling to get through some 18-year-old book from the Tuesday Next series, which is just a giant circle jerk for people who like reading and think the world would be a better place if more people read instead of watching TV. It’s like four parts “Look! It’s set in a world where people read!” and one part “Oh, and then some mysteries happened, and the heroine fixed it all while saying some witty things about the state of the British subway system because she’s very heroic and smart.” “(because she reads)”I previously read something else by Jasper Fforde called Shades of Grey (no relation), which was this smartly satirical dystopian novel from 2009. I was excited to see how many other books he’d written, thought I’d found another author that I was just going to read anything and everything from, but if his big, persistent book series is this proud of how dull it is, I guess Shades of Grey was just an anomaly, an aberration. Gonna finish the dumb book, just to tick it off the list for the year, but God is it a disappointment.
Very
good info. Lucky me I came across your site by accident (stumbleupon). I’ve
book marked it for later!
Here feels like as good a place as any to admit that I 1) have a PhD in English (this isn’t meant to be a covert brag, as you’ll soon see), and 2) I only 2 books from cover to cover this year. And they both consisted mostly of drawings.1) Persepolis. I think I had a bit of a meltdown at the start of the year and my partner told me that I’d have an easier time reading this than the various ‘I plan to write an article/book on this someday’ books that I’d brought with me into lockdown. It was good. I’m looking forward to seeing the film.
2) Henry and Glenn Forever and Ever. A birthday present by a dear friend. (My birthday is at the end of November, which shows you how much my idea of ‘I’ll get so much reading done during lockdown’ as a crock of shit.) Easily the best book I’ve read this year, and possibly for many years before that. I wish there was a film of this that I could look forward to seeing.