2020 Reading Review
In 2020, I read 60 books, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, audio listens, and fairly thick tomes. My top 12 are listed below. I tried to focus in particular this year on Latin literature (x4) and novels translated into English (x8) — including two in each Italian, Persian, and Japanese, plus one in Chinese, and Spanish. I also leaned into Classics (x5), Baseball (x3), and Parenting (x3), among a large stack of novels and books on immigration, space, and medicine. Let me know what I should read in 2021!
While the world was upside down this year, there were a number of really beautifully written novels published, among which I’d highly recommend “The New Wilderness,” “Breast and Eggs,” “Then the Fish Swallowed Him,” “How Much of These Hills is Gold,” “Apeirogon,” and “The Memory Police.”
Long-time friends will recognize this format as my annual reading list post. You can follow Caroline and me on Instagram in real time during the year under the hashtag #caroninoreads (or on Goodreads).
Here are the 12 best books I read last year:
These Truths (Jill Lepore)
Say Nothing (Patrick Radden Keefe)
The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)
The New Wilderness (Diane Cook)
Apeirogon (Colum McCann)
The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
Ball Four (Jim Bouton)
The Guarded Gate (Daniel Okrent)
Home Much of These Hills is Gold (C Pam Zhang)
The Guns at Last Light (Rick Atkinson)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain)
The Sicilian (Mario Puzo)
Honorable mentions: The End of October (for a scary real pandemic novel), Inside Game (for baseball and social psychology blended together), The Leopard (for some classic Sicilian literature), Then The Fish Swallowed Him (for a realistic peak into Iran’s approach to political prisoners), Gut (for how your gut works), Deep Medicine (for a look at how medicine will blend with technology in the coming decades), The Memory Police (for an elegantly written 1994 Japanese dystopian novel).
