It was quite the year.
The bushfires, the locusts, the pandemic, the isolation, I mean really the only groups that may have had something to celebrate were the Paint By Numbers folks and booksellers. Maybe the food delivery people and toilet paper makers. Anyhow, I have zilch to say about hopes for 2021. It will be, what it will be.
As far as reading goes, I got in a solid 100 books, with my initial goal being 70. Yes, I’m proud of this fact (the shortest being Warm Up with 15 pages and the longest was And the Band Played On with 630). The saddest part of this story is of course that I lost the will to read sometime in August and didn’t find it again until late November. Reading fatigue? Slump? Whatever it was, the dark hole that makes any reading feel too tedious struck and I couldn’t. I found myself again through re-reading old favourites (unearthed in the great attic unpack).
Without further blah-blah, here’s my list of 2020 picks – and some to avoid.
NB I read these books in 2020, they weren’t necessarily published in 2020.
- Best Adult fiction An American Marriage and Disappearing Earth
- Best Historical fiction The Stationery Shop of Tehran
- Best Mystery Verity
- Best Thriller Sadie
- Best Fantasy The Girl in the Tower series
- Best Romance The Wallflowers
- Best Adult series / sequels The Scholar (sequel to The Ruin)
- Best YA Contemporary Little Bee
- Best YA genre Maresi
- Best YA series Small Spaces (by the author of The Girl in the Tower)
- Best Short stories Lips Touch: Three Times
- Best Shorter-than-short Among the Thorns
- Best Non-fiction The Unwomanly Face of War
- Best Historical And the Band Played On: Politics, people and the AIDs epidemic
- Best Memoir OnWriting (Stephen King)
- Favourite Classic Ruth
- Weird but wonderful The Pursuit of William Abbey
- Tear-jerker of the year Past the Shallows
- Don’t bother White Teeth
- TV Show was better Normal People
- Worst ending ever The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
- 2020 Overall Favourite The Girl He Used to Know
Offprint 