It's the annual book blog! Here's a visual graphic of the books I read in 2020 (thanks Goodreads!). Scroll down to read my favorites.
First, a few thoughts on this particular year in reading --
How my reading life was different in 2020
The first thing that was different for me was that I got caught up on a lot of backlist titles. In a normal year, the vast majority of my reading is new releases. I rely heavily on the library for this content, and then, thanks to library due dates, I fail to get to titles that we own. This year, due to the pandemic, our local library did not loan out physical books for about half the year, so it "forced" me to get to many of these backlist titles that I sincerely wanted to read, but had been gathering dust on the nightstand table. So there was less fiction, more heavy stuff, and less new releases in all genres. (It felt really good to get through much of the backlist, but I am SUPER looking forward to the library opening back up. I currently have 86 titles on hold, and if the pandemic spike lasts much longer, I'm going to have to rent a U-Haul to pick up all the waiting books :)
The second thing that was different was that there was a LOT of time at home with the kids, so many of the books on this list are middle grade. With travel and activities all canceled, and with school looking different (particularly in the spring), we had a lot more home based family togetherness than usual. One of the ways we used this time was to read several middle grade chapter books together. I read a book a few years ago called "The Read Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with your Kids" by Sarah Mackenzie (highly recommend!), and she shifted my mind frame about when and how to read to kids. Instead of trying to herd them all in when they're happily playing something else, it works really well to read at times when they are already having to sit still. So we do a lot of read alouds during meals / snacks, and during bath. Again, this is aided by pandemic life - if dinner was our only time together, we would just use that time to catch up - but when you're eating together six times a day and conversation topics include things like "what's your 4th favorite color", it's nice to sometimes have something else to fill the time. As life returns to normal, it will be harder to do this as much - but it can still work well on breaks and vacations. It had never occurred to me to combine eating and read aloud - I hope this tip works well for others!
Without further ado, here are my favorite reads of the past year:
Favorite Fiction (in random order)
1. "Jack" by Marilynne Robinson
2. "Rodham" by Curtis Sittenfeld
3 & 4. "Plainsong" and "Eventide" by Kent Haruf
5. "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu
6. "Such a Fun Age" by Kiley Reid
7. "Long Bright River" by Liz Moore
8. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" by J.K. Rowling
9. "The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennet
10. "The Brutal Telling" by Louise Penny
Favorite Other
Memoir - "Born a Crime" by Trevor Noah
Christian Living - "New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional" by Paul David Tripp
Poetry - "Why I Wake Early" by Mary Oliver
Humor - "Wow, No Thank You" by Samantha Irby
Other Non-fiction - "Hidden Valley Road" by Robert Kolker
My favorite thing about this particular annual blog is the conversation it produces, so I would love to hear from you!!:
1. How was your reading life different this year?
2. What was your favorite book (or books) you read this year?
3. If you read any of these same books, what did you think?
