2020 was very many things, but it was mostly staying inside my house and looking at my bookshelf. It was waking up and being unable to tell what day it was, and only attaching myself to any one week or moment by the book I was reading, what I had last read, and what I planned to read next.
It was a year of gratitude. I was grateful for local libraries when they were finally able to open – I could reserve books online and collect them from the suitably hand sanitised staff member. I was grateful for the local bookshops who organised delivery programs and remained open. I was quite pleased with my past self for buying books that I planned to read sometime because that sometime became 2020.
I hope that this year, as the world continues to change and reveals new plot twists, I am able to make time for reading like I did in 2020. I read 61 books, many from authors I’d never read before.
Here is my list on GoodReads where you can sign up for your own reading challenge.
- Scarlett Thomas – Oligarchy (Fiction / YA)
- Phillip Roth – American Pastoral (Fiction)
- Mary Robinson – Climate Justice (Non-fiction)
- Julia Cameron – The Artist’s Way (Creative Practice Workbook)
- Karin Schimke – Navigate (Poetry)
- Lesley Nneka Arimah – What it Means When A Man Falls From the Sky (Short Stories)
- Scaachi Koul – One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter (Personal Essays)
- Miram Toews – Women Talking (Fiction)
- Kerry Hammerton – Secret Keeper (Poetry)
- Carmen Maria Marchado – Her Body and Other Parties (Short Stories)
- Ann Patchett – This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (Essays)
- Ann Patchett – State of Wonder (Fiction)
- Stephen Koch – The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop (Non-fiction)
- David Sedaris – Theft By Finding. Diaries 1977 – 2002 (Non-fiction)
- Jen Thorpe (ed) – Living While Feminist (Essays)
- Hiro Arikawa – The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Fiction)
- André Aciman – Call Me By Your Name (Fiction)
- André Aciman – Find Me (Fiction)
- Naomi Alderman – The Lessons (Fiction)
- James Wood – How Fiction Works (Non-fiction)
- Colson Whitehead – Zone One (Fiction)
- Elizabeth Day – How To Fail (Essays)
- Sarah Lotz – Missing Person (Fiction)
- Margaret Atwood – In Other Worlds (Essays)
- Sally Rooney – Conversations With Friends (Fiction)
- Lauren Beukes – Afterland (Fiction)
- Zadie Smith – Grand Union (Short Stories)
- Michael Pollan – How to Change Your Mind (Non-fiction)
- Ben Lerner – Leaving the Atocha Station (Fiction)
- Sheila Heti – Motherhood (Fiction)
- Glennon Doyle – Untamed (Memoir / Essays)
- Frank Owen – South (Fiction)
- Lemn Sissay – My Name Is Why (Memoir)
- Ali Land – Good Me Bad Me (Fiction)
- Natalie Goldberg – Writing Down the Bones (Non-fiction)
- Rebecca Solnit – Men Explain Things to Me (Essays)
- Amitav Ghosh – Gun Island (Fiction)
- Naoise Dolan – Exciting Times (Fiction)
- Marian Keyes – Grown Ups (Fiction)
- Eimear McBride – The Lesser Bohemians (Fiction)
- Anna Burns – Milkman (Fiction)
- Yaa Gyasi – Homegoing (Fiction)
- Dawn Garisch – Eloquent Body (Non-fiction / Memoir)
- Gail Honeyman – Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Fiction)
- Mohale Mashigo – Intruders (Short Stories)
- Malcolm Gladwell – Talking to Strangers (Non-fiction)
- Susannah Cahallan – Brain on Fire (Memoir)
- David Sedaris – Me Talk Pretty One Day (Essays)
- Karen Jennings – Upturned Earth (Fiction)
- Bernadine Evaristo – Girl Woman Other (Fiction)
- Anton Harber – So For the Record (Non-fiction)
- Arundhati Roy – Public Power in the Age of Empire (Essay)
- Francine Prose – Reading Like a Writer (Non-fiction)
- Cheryl Strayed – Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (Essays)
- Emily St John Mandel – Station Eleven (Fiction)
- Delia Owens – Where the Crawdads Sing (Fiction)
- Sophie McKintosh – Blue Ticket (Fiction)
- Ursula K Le Guin – Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Essays)
- Tayari Jones – An American Marriage (Fiction)
- Colson Whitehead – The Underground Railroad (Fiction)
- Jacqueline Woodson – Red at the Bone (Fiction)
Jen Thorpe 