12 Favorite Reads of 2020 — To Make Much of Time

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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How many among us add “Read more books” to our New Year’s Resolutions? Every year, I set a personal goal in my Goodreads app, not so much to ensure I read a certain number of books, though that is certainly the surface goal, but to keep focused on my goal of reading and exploring new authors and new ideas. Some years I hit my goal, some years I don’t. Some books are really heavy and long and others are quicker reads. Regardless, every year certain books stick with me for different reasons. Sometimes I am enraptured by beautiful, lyrical language, other times a new perspective or new window into history or a subject changes forever the way I think.

If you are looking for some books to add to your reading list, I recommend you check these out. While these are my personal favorite reads that I read in 2020 (okay, I am cheating a bit by including one that I finished up on New Year’s Eve 2019), they were not all written in 2020. These books span 120 years of publishing, with the newest fresh off the presses and the oldest free to read in the public domain and originally published in 1900.

Below, I will briefly describe each book and for those that I wrote a longer, dedicated book review, I will also link to that if you want to read more. Without further ado, and in no particular order . . .

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
Death's End by Liu Cixin

I’m starting off the list with the only series that made the cut. The Three-Body Problem Trilogy by Liu Cixin is one of the most creative, imaginative works of science fiction I have probably ever read. While the trilogy is split into three separate books, the narrative is continuous so if you start this, be prepared for a total of 1,568 pages. The novels are highly engaging, though, and so the length does not feel like a slog. There are many aspects to this story that keep the reader interested in the various characters and their tales while also building the overarching concept. At its foundation, this trilogy takes the idea of humans becoming aware of another intelligent species, the Trisolarians, relatively nearby in terms of the vast distances of space, and then explores what happens to human society over the centuries that follow. The Trisolarians pose an existential risk to humans since the they have a dysfunctional planetary system and are looking for a stable planet to survive. This book is being made into a Netflix show, though there is currently no estimated release date, so now might be just the time to start reading this lengthy series!

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

An Anglo-Nigerian writer, Bernardine Evaristo was the first Black woman to win The Booker Prize, which she won in 2019 for this novel. (The win was a tie with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which I also enjoyed reading this year.) Girl, Woman, Other is a work that must be read to be truly understood; no summary can do it justice. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll also find it to be a life-altering book that gives voice to characters less likely to grace the pages of novels to date.

At its core, this novel explores the experiences and lives of twelve female characters, most of whom are Black and British. The varied voices bring to life women across the chronology of womanhood - from teens to the elderly - who are often contending with intergenerational ideas and experiences. Evaristo is able to provide multiple vantage points in how she presents each of her characters, which challenges each person’s self-perception and how each is perceived by others.

Read our review of Girl, Woman, Other here.

Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

After a cancelled return trip to Iceland this year (uh, thanks COVID), I went in search of ways to travel to Iceland through literature and happened upon this author. I quickly read all of her books available in English translation and loved them all for different reasons.

Miss Iceland stood out in particular, though. In it, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir paints an authentic picture of Iceland as it was in the early 1960s. A comparison of Iceland in the ‘60s would be America in the ‘50s: a place where the role each person played was tantamount; women were to be wives falling in step behind their husband’s successes, and to be gay was to struggle to find a place in an unfriendly world, best managed through a loveless marriage to the opposite sex. Miss Iceland’s main character, Hekla, and her best friend, Jon John, each represent one half of those populations.

Read our full review of Miss Iceland here.

And check out the other books we have read by this author: Butterflies in November, The Greenhouse, and Hotel Silence.

A Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks

A work of historical fiction, Year of Wonders is based on the true story of Eyam, a small town in England, which was visited by the plague in 1666. Led by a charismatic preacher, the town makes the sacrificial decision to close itself off from the outside world to avoid further spread of the disease and finds itself confronting a whole host of expected and unexpected consequences. For anyone living in this time of COVID, now is as good of a time as any to explore what earlier generations experienced living through the pandemics of their eras before even basic science (such as germ theory) was understood.

We have also enjoyed several other books by this author, so consider checking out: People of the Book and March, a novel about the absent father of the March family in Little Women.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Set on an isolated island in Japan, the characters in this dystopian novel are confronted by a world in which the government ‘disappears’ things in their lives. One day, for example, flowers are the objects disappeared, and so their physical forms leave the society as well as the memories associated with them. The world ‘flower’ holds no meaning anymore. Except, there are a small number of people immune to this control and who struggle to survive and stay under the radar of the authorities who in one way or another seek to remove them from the island. I read this novel right at the start of the expansion of COVID-19 and was struck by how relevant it felt as it feels like things previously very much a part of our lives started disappearing in a way practically overnight. Add to the mix a character immune to the control who is being hidden in a tiny space in a house, and you will experience an incredibly creative and original novel.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

For those considering the future to come with climate change, this may be a good novel for you. The format of The Overstory is built around nature and trees and, secondarily, humankind’s intersection with them as told through a revolving door of characters. If you have never read a novel where trees are - in essence - characters, you will find Powers’ approach to evoke a sense of wonder and a new-found appreciation of everything from the blighted American chestnut to the gargantuan Redwoods. You will never look at a tree the same way again.

Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Kintu, with the K pronounced like Ch, is a mythological figure in Uganda and is part of the country’s creation story (Kintu is similar to the Biblical Adam to draw a parallel more known to Western readers), and it is not random chance that led the author to select the name of the original person to serve as the family name for her novel.

Years of colonization and strife have overshadowed much of Uganda’s history and usurped it with a Western voice and story. In many ways, this novel is the Ugandan search for the true past, and where it can be difficult to suss out myth from truth; or, as the novel asks, how much of modern myth is actually founded in true events passed along through oral tradition across generations?

At its core, this novel tells the interwoven stories of four generations of the Kintu family, starting in the year 1750, when the part of the country was the Bugandan Empire, and moving through to 2004. This novel made me realize how many voices and stories are still absent from the public sphere.

Read our full review of Kintu here.

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

When Booker T. Washington wrote Up from Slavery in about 1900, he was still only 44 years old. He had fully filled those years, gained widespread acclaim within the United States and internationally, and made a personal impact on so many thousands of individuals and communities. Washington wrote this auto-biographical account to document and share his journey to that point.

The auto-biography moves chronologically from Washington's earliest memories and experiences on the Burroughs farm as an enslaved child and his family's relocation to West Virginia upon receipt of their freedom. Washington's first-person account of life of an enslaved and, then, formerly enslaved child seeking to gain an education while working long, hard, scary hours in the coal mine is itself a fascinating window into the past.

To me, one of the most important elements of this auto-biography is gaining a real-life view into the world in 1900. So many of Washington's anecdotes can seem both familiar and foreign to a modern reader. They are also telling insights into the years just after slavery was dissolved.

Read our full review of Up From Slavery here.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Like many others in the United States, this year provided me with a unique urgency to better understand the matter of race in this country. It is an issue that for too long white citizens have been able to turn a blind eye to since so much of it is endemic to daily life through systemic racism and not obviously visible in white communities. I read a handful of books on this topic and am currently in the middle of one that I suspect will be on my best books read in 2021 list next year, and of all of them, the one that most resonated with me was Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Beautiful and stunning are two words that come to mind after finishing this novel in less than 24-hours. The world it portrays is all-encompassing and fully absorbed me. But this novel is not about sunny beauty, rather the beauty that can be found in life's darkest recesses, in its losses, in its pain, and and its determination to keep moving forward in spite of it all.

This novel is about the immigrant experience and circling that core is the main character’s experience as a gay teenager. Dysfunctional families and various forms of domestic violence ooze out of this novel, creating a tangible outlet for the pain the characters have experienced through both personal and multi-generational trauma.

The novel is essentially written as a letter from the main character, a Vietnamese-American called Little Dog, to his mother but with the honesty and self-reflection that appears more diary-like in nature. The novel is also a work of auto-fiction, highly representative of the author’s real life experiences.

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