I was really hoping I would beat my past reading record (90 books!) this year, but alas, it was not meant to be. I made it to 88 books, which makes 2020 the new second-place for my competition with myself to read the most books. Looking at past books of the year posts, I saw I had written this in 2017, “I made it through 62 books in 2017, which feels like a success considering the madness this year wrought.” All I can say is, wow, she didn’t know a damn thing.
- Page count: 32,996 pages, based on the page numbers recorded in LibraryThing. When I read 90 books in 2014, the page count was 35,177 pages. So maybe I wouldn’t have beat my record anyway, were I to count pages.
- Library use: 49 library books, 39 of my own books. Shout out to the library for keeping reading from being prohibitively expensive.
- Female/male authors: 77 women authors, 10 men authors, 1 with a mix (from an anthology). This means about 88 percent of the books I read were by women. Come through, matriarchy.
- Digital and analog: 47 digital, 41 paper. This stat doesn’t mean much, since I’m an equal-opportunity reader, but it is fun to see how things shake out each year.
- Fiction and non-fiction: 56 fiction, 32 non-fiction. About one-third of this year’s books were non-fiction, which seems to be my new trend. Earth is full of interesting things.
- Books in other languages: I read 8 books in Spanish, which I think is the most I’ve read in one year. It’s finally starting to feel more natural. It only took -checks notes- 10 years.
- Favorites:
- The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk for witchcraft and taking down the patriarchy
- The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow, also for witchcraft and taking down the patriarchy but in a totally different way
- The Daevabad Trilogy by S. A. Chakraborty for middle eastern-themed fantasy
- The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy by Caroline Dooner for going into the science of diets and why they are pointless
- The Night Watchman by Louise Erdich for historical fiction about Native people set in the not-so-distant past
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky for the spider kingdom sci-fi you didn’t know you needed
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett for a haunting perspective on race
- Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen because it documents why millennials are having such a hard time and shows that it’s not an individual problem
- Miracle Country: A Memoir by Kendra Atleework for the inland California environmentalist perspective
And now, the list!
| Date Finished | Title | Author |
| 1/3 | The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History | Kassia St. Clair |
| 1/4 | Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement | Shelly Oria (editor) |
| 1/5 | Rogue Protocol | Martha Wells |
| 1/10 | Exit Strategy | Martha Wells |
| 1/12 | Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China | Leta Hong Fincher |
| 1/19 | The Mirror Empire | Kameron Hurley |
| 1/30 | Empire Ascendant | Kameron Hurley |
| 2/3 | La fruta del borrachero: Una novela | Ingrid Rojas Contreras |
| 2/4 | The Broken Heavens | Kameron Hurley |
| 2/8 | Nine Pints: A Journey through Time, Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood | Rose George |
| 2/12 | The Sisters of the Winter Wood | Rena Rossner |
| 2/16 | The Secret Lives of Glaciers | M Johnson |
| 2/18 | Stormsong | C. L. Polk |
| 2/21 | The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy | Caroline Dooner |
| 2/24 | The Secret Chapter | Genevieve Cogman |
| 3/2 | The Luminous Dead | Caitlin Starling |
| 3/10 | Autonomous | Annalee Newitz |
| 3/12 | The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | Shosana Zuboff |
| 3/18 | Mostly Dead Things | Kristen Arnett |
| 3/21 | Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China | Leta Hong Fincher |
| 3/23 | Docile | K. M. Szpara |
| 4/1 | The Starless Sea | Erin Morgenstern |
| 4/2 | Umami | Laia Jufresa |
| 4/13 | Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America | Sarah Kendzior |
| 4/13 | Little Gods | Meng Jin |
| 4/17 | The City We Became | N. K. Jemisin |
| 4/19 | Women Talking | Miriam Toews |
| 4/24 | How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse | K. Eason |
| 4/28 | The Glass Hotel | Emily St. John Mandel |
| 5/2 | Caramelo | Sandra Cisneros |
| 5/4 | The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper | A. J. Fitzwater |
| 5/8 | Gingerbread | Helen Oyeyemi |
| 5/14 | Network Effect | Martha Wells |
| 5/16 | Los hombres me explican cosas | Rebecca Solnit |
| 5/17 | The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race | Jesmyn Ward (ed.) |
| 5/20 | Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot | Mikki Kendall |
| 5/24 | Ancestral Night | Elizabeth Bear |
| 6/1 | The Night Watchman | Louise Erdrich |
| 6/7 | American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power | Andrea Bernstein |
| 6/12 | Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle | Emily Nagoski, Amelia Nagoski |
| 6/15 | The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter | Theodora Goss |
| 6/25 | European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman | Theodora Goss |
| 6/28 | Children of Time | Adrian Tchaikovsky |
| 7/1 | El reino del dragón de oro | Isabel Allende |
| 7/5 | The Vanishing Half | Brit Bennett |
| 7/8 | They Were Her Property: White Woman as Slave Owners in the American South | Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers |
| 7/10 | The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet | Becky Chambers |
| 7/16 | Gods of Jade and Shadow | Silvia Moreno-Garcia |
| 7/21 | The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl | Theodora Goss |
| 7/24 | Goldilocks | Laura Lam |
| 7/25 | A Closed and Common Orbit | Becky Chambers |
| 7/29 | Record of a Spaceborn Few | Becky Chambers |
| 8/4 | Children of Ruin | Adrian Tchaikovsky |
| 8/8 | American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment | Shane Bauer |
| 8/16 | Harrow the Ninth | Tamsyn Muir |
| 8/24 | A Burning | Megha Majumdar |
| 9/1 | How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States | Daniel Immerwahr |
| 9/1 | Technical Communication Today, 6th Edition | Richard Johnson-Sheehan |
| 9/6 | Empress of Forever | Max Gladstone |
| 9/6 | Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism | Safiya Umoja Noble |
| 9/11 | The First Sister | Linden Lewis |
| 9/16 | Miracle Country: A Memoir | Kendra Atleework |
| 9/20 | Sistema nervioso | Lina Meruane |
| 9/25 | Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism | Seyward Darby |
| 10/1 | Feminismos: Miradas desde la diversidad | ed. Pikara |
| 10/1 | Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation | Anne Helen Petersen |
| 10/6 | A Witch in Time | Constance Sayers |
| 10/16 | Machine | Elizabeth Bear |
| 10/19 | The Midnight Bargain | C. L. Polk |
| 10/19 | Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void | Mary Roach |
| 10/25 | Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains | Kerri Arsenault |
| 10/30 | The Once and Future Witches | Alix E. Harrow |
| 10/31 | Beowulf: A New Translation | Maria Dahvana Headley |
| 11/2 | Piranesi | Susanna Clarke |
| 11/5 | The Space Between Worlds | Micaiah Johnson |
| 11/6 | Sombras de Reikiavik | Anthony Adeane |
| 11/8 | Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power | Anna Merlan |
| 11/12 | Transcendent Kingdom | Yaa Gyasi |
| 11/20 | The Language Hoax: The World Looks the Same in Any Language | John H. McWhorter |
| 11/22 | The City of Brass | S. A. Chakraborty |
| 11/27 | The Kingdom of Copper | S. A. Chakraborty |
| 12/4 | The Empire of Gold | S. A. Chakraborty |
| 12/9 | Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest | Zeynep Tufekci |
| 12/11 | Thick: And Other Essays | Tressie McMillan Cottom |
| 12/13 | The Empress of Salt and Fortune | Nghi Vo |
| 12/22 | The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays | Elisa Gabbert |
| 12/27 | Escaping Exodus | Nicky Drayden |
| 12/29 | What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat | Aubrey Gordon |
