2020 second year tracking the books I’d read over the course of a year (if you want to look back at the 55 books I read in 2019, I reviewed them here). Book reading went well for the first 8 weeks or so in 2020, and then the world ground to a halt when COVID arrived.

I found that I almost entirely stopped reading books for months because I simply couldn’t focus on them. I eventually figured out I could at least listen to books in audiobook format, but even those were mostly re-reads. As of November, I’ve started to read more again, and it feels good to be back at it.

Counting audiobooks (and the books we read at night to the kiddo at bedtime), I finished 57 books in 2020, but the type and content looked different than 2019. I checked out a stack of hard copy books from the library back in March in preparation for lockdown (thinking more like snow days), but then they just sat in our bedroom for months gathering dust. I’ve since gotten to a few of those books, but most are just going back to the library unread.

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Nonfiction

1. The Joy of Doing Nothing by Rachel Jonat

This was a pre-COVID read. Ha. It was quite an enjoyable (short) read, but it would definitely read different these days. I don’t think I need practice on slowing down and doing less after this past year…..

2. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (reread)

This is a re-re-re-read for me, and one I love each time I read it. Barbara Kingsolver has a beautiful way with words, and a book all about living and eating locally for a year? Clearly my jam. I ended up reading a good part of this book out loud on our week long camping trip back in July, which was so much fun. Read alouds are probably a regular part of our camping trips going forward.

This was also the only nonfiction book I physically read (I listened to a couple on audiobook) after COVID began until I read Sapiens…in December. Like I said above, my brain was just not in a place where I could focus on reading, and this was especially true for nonfiction content.

3. Blessing the Hands That Feed Us by Vicki Robin (audiobook)

I first learned that Vicki Robin (author of the famous FIRE book Your Money or Your Life) from Kristine when she wrote a review over on our shared site Ecofrugals. Since then, I’ve been recommending it to everyone I can think of. It’s absolutely one of my favorite new reads for 2020, and I purchased a physical copy after listening to it on audiobook because I wanted to be able to have a copy to lend out.

4. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (audiobook)

Another Ecofrugal review from Kristine, and another book I absolutely adored listening to on audiobook. I bought my mother in law a copy for Christmas as well, so clearly this is also a top read for the year. Really, at this point, I should just get my booklists from Kristine because she doesn’t steer me wrong.

5. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Again, I had planned to read more nonfiction over the past year, but thanks to COVID and everything else that happened meant that my brain just wasn’t in the right place for it for a long time. After the election, I finally picked up Sapiens and sped through the first third of the book or so. I’m not sure why, but my interest waned a bit after that; while it was a good book still, it didn’t capture my imagination quite the same as the first chapters.

Fiction

1. The Jump-Off Creek by Molly Gloss

This was a recommendation from someone years ago, but I can’t remember who at this point (simply a “to read” book on my ever-neglected Goodreads list). I wanted to love it, but I just didn’t. Honestly, I’d have a hard time even recapping the story even though I just read it a year ago.

2 – 7. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth’s Children Series) by Jean Aumel

This series was recommended my quite a few people, and unlike The Jump-Off Creek, it was one I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s an historical fiction take of early humans and I especially loved the detailed descriptions of the landscapes and the flora and fauna. These are long books, but ones I see myself returning to in the future.

8. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

My favorite part of this book was the descriptions of the Lowcountry, since it took me back to my time as a naturalist in South Carolina. There are definitely quite a few parts of the book where I needed to “suspend belief,” but as long as I let myself get swept up into the story, it was very enjoyable. One of those odd books that I enjoyed during the reading more than looking back at it after I finished.

9. Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine (reread)

This was the first time I reread this book since I was a child, but I read my childhood copy so many times that it started to fall apart. It was a shorter, quicker story than I remembered, but considering I was probably not yet fourteen the last time I read it, that makes sense. Still, it was so, so good. One of my favorite young adult books for sure.

10. Falling Into Magic by Elizabeth Pantley

This book was written by my mom! She’s been a parenting author for pretty much my whole life, but she’s been considering writing a novel for years now. I’m so thrilled that she finally published her first one! Her second one is out soon, and I’m looking forward to reading it as well.

Falling Into Magic was the book that knocked me out of my no-reading funk I was in for much of 2020 by making me realize I just needed some lighthearted “cozy” novels. After reading this book, I dove back into reading in a big way for the rest of the year.

11 – 13. The Amish of Apple Grove by Lori Copeland

I stumbled onto these Amish historical fiction novels set in the late 1800s. They were light, easy reads, with predictable endings, which were exactly what I realized I needed after reading my mom’s book. Let 2020 and beyond be the years that we no longer care about the highbrow nature of what we’re reading and simply read what we need at that time in our lives.

12 – 22. Laiden’s Daughter (and 10 more in this series) by Suzan Tisdale

After The Amish of Apple Grove series concluded, I searched for some similar “light” novels, but with more books in the series so I could lose myself in them for a while. While the tropes are quite similar in a number of these books, and there were some issues with them, ultimately they were the perfect easy read for me and my only complaint is that there aren’t another ten books for me to continue reading in this world.

23 – 26. Twilight saga by Stephanie Meyer (reread, audiobooks)

Like I said above, I refuse to call these my “guilty pleasures.” I have no guilt in knowing that the Twilight saga is one of my “comfort series,” much like comfort food. When life seems especially hard, I find myself drawn back into these books for the lack of death, real strife, and a legitimate happy ending.

Whatever you might say about these books (many of them valid complaints), I enjoy them utterly and will re-read them every year or two for as long as I don’t get tired of them.

27 – 38. The Vampire Academy & Bloodlines series by Richelle Mead (reread, audiobooks)

These two series are much like the Twilight saga: a return to old friends and the comfort of knowing and enjoying the story well. Unlike Twilight, however, I will legitimately recommend these as top quality Young Adult novels, especially the Bloodlines series that follows the Vampire Academy books. There are twelve books between the two series, which makes it even better.

39 – 41. The Glittering Court trilogy by Richelle Mead (reread, audiobook)

Richelle Mead is simply one of my favorite authors. The Glittering Court is her newest trilogy of books, and I’ve read them through four times in two years. (Is it time to read them again soon? Perhaps). I enjoy her adult novels, but her clear calling is in the YA realm.

42. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (audiobook)

After so many years of planning to someday read Pride and Prejudice all the way through, I finally got through it in 2020. April, who writes over at Minivan Adventures, and I share a love of many of the same books (including sharing our favorite Jane Eyre), so I finally decided to give Jane Austen another try. I have to say, though, for how much I love Jane Eyre, I didn’t love Pride and Prejudice. But hey, I finally finished it.

43 & 44. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler (audiobook)

A Twitter friend recommended these books, and I’m so glad she did. They are so fabulous though a bit eerie in her preternatural ability to write dystopian fiction that has entirely too many parallels to our modern time, including a populist president with the promise to “Make America Great Again.” Perhaps, though, it shouldn’t be surprising that a Black woman in the United States had a clearer view of where we could be headed than most of us.

45. Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson (audiobook)

This book was suggested at the end of Parable of the Talents so I decided to give it a try. It’s written in a very different manner than many of the books I read/listen to, and it was a bit trippy, but it was one of those books that gets under your skin and keeps you thinking about it long after the story concludes. Not one I likely would have found on my own, so I appreciated the end of book recommendation that landed me at this story.

46. The Boxcar Children 1-3 by Gertrude Chandler Warner

The kiddo is old enough now that we’ve started reading longer chapter books at bedtime, which has been so fun for the husband and for me. We started earlier on with The Magic Treehouse series, among others, and The Boxcar Children was the start of stretching the length of those books. I read them when I was young, but it had been long enough the stories were more or less new for me as well.

49 – 50. Harry Potter (Sorcerer’s Stone & Chamber of Secrets) by JK Rowling

Book three is too scary for the kiddo yet (based on a partial watch of the third book), so we stopped after book two for now. The author of these books is a TERF and pretty awful though, so I won’t be putting up a link to purchase these. Nothing wrong with loving the series, but consider buying them used or checking them out from the library, as she really doesn’t need – nor deserve – any more money.

51-52. Mossflower and Redwall by Gary Jacques

My husband and I both read quite a few Redwall books when we were children, but they were a bigger part of his childhood and we are currently reading copies that he kept from when he was young. Into 2021, we are onto our fourth book, and the kiddo is loving them still (as are we), so I’m hopeful we stick to this series for a while yet.

Did you read very much in 2020? What was your favorite book of the year?

14 thoughts on “My 2020 Book List

  1. So interesting to read what other people have been reading:) I definitely found a ton of relaxation through books in 2020, and there is nothing wrong with escaping for awhile through fiction. I was super-thankful to have a Kindle and the ability to borrow e-books while our library was closed, and went through a ton of great books that way. I even still have access to the public library where we used to live (3.5 years ago)! I’ve been very impressed since the local library opened back up in the summer; they get so many great new releases that I feel completely spoiled with books. My kiddo also likes the Boxcar Children and we’ve picked up quite a few of those lately. I plan to check out your #2 and #3 eventually.

    I also loved “Where the Crawdads Sing” and have recently enjoyed fiction by Jojo Moyes. Her “The Giver of Stars” was just fabulous, exploring the lives of female horseback librarians in rural Kentucky, which was extra fun for me since I live in that region and could picture the scenery so vividly.

    1. I love when a book is set in an area you know so well. It makes a story so much more fun when the backdrop is so real.

  2. I actually had Brown Girl in the Ring assigned to me in a class I took my final semester of college called “Visionary Medicine: Racial Justice, Health, and Science Fiction.” It was a dope class. We also read Bloodchild by Octavia Butler and I went on to read Parable of the Sower myself later that year. I actually found it to be one of the most terrifying books I had ever read, but my brother found it one of the most hopeful books he had ever read. I wonder if I’d have a somewhat brighter opinion re-reading it two years later, since I’ve changed a lot in that time. I also haven’t read Parable of the Talents yet…

    I am still working through Braiding Sweetgrass. I have found it’s not a book I can rush through; I can only do one or two essays a day because they are so powerful. It’s profoundly affecting my life and I want everyone to read it and then talk about it with me.

    1. Braiding Sweetgrass is so dang good. It felt like a balm for my soul in 2020. The author reads the audiobook and she does it so beautifully.

  3. I had to comment because I love the idea of not buying anything HP-related new! I think when I got rid of my old DVD player (which had stopped working), my copy of the 8th movie may have been inside it (I did an HP marathon for Christmas and was taken aback when I opened the last DVD case and found it empty), so I’ve been pondering how to replace the darn thing, and honestly, buying it used hadn’t even crossed my mind! So thank you for that idea!

  4. I love reading!! I cannot do audiobooks as my mind wanders away for some reason, but Kindle or physical books, yes!!! Nothing better! So I am always looking for more inspiration on what to read. I have read quite a few from your list, though not all. I love Barbara Kingsolver’s books, it looks like Vicky’s in much in the same vein. My current reads are “Hillbilly Elegy” and “I am Fine and Neither are You”. I love all sorts of books.

    1. I find audiobooks either need to be super gripping or re reads. They’re great for on runs 🙂

  5. I also struggled with reading during parts of 2020, which felt odd to me. I mean, heaven knows I had the time. But I think it’s exactly what you said — couldn’t focus. I didn’t really get into a groove with reading in 2020 until the fall, either.

    That’s so cool that your mother in an author! Will have to check out her novel — it sounds really good! Also, I feel the same way re: Harry Potter. I actually just read the series over the last few years and I did the audiobooks from the library. It was a cool way to experience the books for the first time.

    As far as books I loved from 2020…non-fiction was probably Honest Advent by Scott Erickson. Fiction: Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman comes to mind ( I love all his books, though, so this is not a surprise)

    1. She’s actually been a parenting author for most of my life! This was just her first fiction novel 🙂

  6. Wow, this is such a great list Angela. I haven’t heard of many of these so I’m happy to add them to my reading list. I have a guilty pleasure for the Harry Potter series so I was glad to see that too. Cheers to reading in 2021!

  7. Wow, looks like you recovered on the reading front! I had a huge lull reading last year too, with a small burst of reads over the summer and then at the very end for 26 books last year. I had similar thoughts on Crawdads – I kind of get why some folks loved it but it definitely didn’t stay with me. Good luck with 2021 reading!

    1. Another lull now, but that comes from lack of time and not from lack of brain space 🙂

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