Books of 2020
2020 was not a great year for reading, as many people have been pointing out for months now. For me, I managed to finish a fair number of books, but am horrifyingly behind in writing them up.
I had a couple of different themes to my reading this year. On my trip to India (late Feb-early March), I focused on books set in or written by people from the specific cities I visited. After the pandemic set in and quarantine became mandatory, I decided to tackle the massive pile of books that I own but haven't read, also known as Mount TBR. And "Mount" is really the right word, given that I'm now eight months into that task and it's still at an intimidating size. On the one hand, my girlfriend is extremely happy to have fewer stacks of books in our apartment. But on the other hand, this focus means I did very poorly at my goal of reading books by authors of color - I'm kind of stuck with what I purchased years before or was given as gifts. I also pick up a decent number of books from stoops (in my neighborhood, it's extremely common for people to leave books out on the sidewalk/in a cardboard box/some other public location as a signal that they're done with them and the books are looking for a new home. It's common enough that I easily acquire several books a month this way). A free book is hard to resist, but the selection does tend to lean toward white authors.
I also read plenty for research related to my work. I generally don't include those on my official "books read" list, both because I frequently don't actually read them cover-to-cover but skim for relevant information and because it always seems so pointless to write up reviews of academic texts or PhD theses; I mean, no one's checking out “The Decision to Hire German Troops in the War of American Independence: Reactions in Britain and North America, 1774-1776” for its readability anyway. And if I include my research books, what do I do about articles or chapters? See, it just all gets very complicated.
Ah, well. My reading goals going forward are about the same as always: continue to diminish Mount TBR, read more by people of color, read more by women. Hey, they're good goals!
My Statistics
Total Read: 76 books
By women: 48 books, 63% of the total
By People of Color: 16, 21%
Mount TBR: 37, 49%
Reviews written: 24, 32%
January
Trading in Danger - Elizabeth Moon
The Crown Jewels - Walter Jon Williams
Empress of Forever - Max Gladstone
February
The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Flood of Fire - Amitav Ghosh
Mistress - Anita Nair
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - Kiran Desai
A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives - Richard Eaton
Vikram Rana Investigates: Tales of Murder and Deception in Hyderabad - Sharmishtha Shenoy
March
The Portuguese in India - M. N. Pearson
Man-Eaters of Kumaon - Jim Corbett
The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000 Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community - Edna Fernandes
The Case of the Reincarnated Client - Tarquin Hall
The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism - Shashi Tharoor
An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj - Benjamin B. Cohen
The Floating World - Michelle Lovric
April
The Kingdom of Little Wounds - Susann Cokal
Year Zero - Rob Reid
Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love - Dava Sobel
Bad Monkey - Carl Hiaasen
May
Vagina: A New Biography - Naomi Wolf
Life Mask - Emma Donoghue
Metropolis - Elizabeth Gaffney
June
Mistress of My Fate - Hallie Rubenhold
Sworn to Silence - Linda Castillo
Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy - John Gross
The Just City - Jo Walton
The Philosopher Kings - Jo Walton
Necessity - Jo Walton
Pray for Silence - Linda Castillo
Medea and Her Children - Lyudmila Ulitskaya, trans Arch Tait
July
The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily - Nancy Goldstone
Wolf Winter - Cecilia Ekbäck
Courtesans - Katie Hickman
The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation - Ben A. Minteer
The Pale Blue Eye - Louis Bayard
Rustication - Charles Palliser
Vienna - William S. Kirby
August
An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
The Bird King - G. Willow Wilson
Star of the Sea - Joseph O’Connor
The Blood of Flowers - Anita Amirrezvani
September
Nell Gwyn: A Biography - Charles Beauclerk
Grunts - Mary Gentle
The Anatomist’s Wife - Anna Lee Huber
The Harem of Aman Akbar - Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky - N.K. Jemisin
Solutions and Other Problems - Allie Brosh
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller - Carlo Ginzburg, translated from Italian by John and Anne Tedeschi
October
The White Road - Sarah Lotz
The Only Good Indians - Stephen Graham-Jones
The Fisherman - John Langan
Motherless Child - Glen Hirshberg
Wylding Hall - Elizabeth Hand
The Hollow Places - T. Kingfisher
Remina - Junji Ito
The Elementals - Michael McDowell
The Guest List - Lucy Foley
Experimental Film - Gemma Files
November
The Lost Village - Camilla Sten, translated by Alex Fleming
A Cosmology of Monsters - Shaun Hamill
The Moon and the Sun - Vonda McIntyre
The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London - Sarah Wise
An Inheritance of Ashes - Leah Bobet
Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III - Flora Fraser
Midnight Robber - Nalo Hopkinson
December
The City of Palaces - Michael Nava
The Duke Who Didn’t - Courtney Milan
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins
Unconfessed - Yvette Christiansë
The Doctor’s Discretion - EE Ottoman
The Duke and I - Julia Quinn
The Viscount Who Loved Me - Julia Quinn
An Offer from a Gentleman - Julia Quinn
Romancing Mister Bridgerton - Julia Quinn
I think it would be overly optimistic to promise that I'll write a review of everything from 2020; it's probably more reasonable to start with a clean slate going forward in 2021 and try to review everything from here on out. But that said, if any of these titles look interesting to you, please let me know and I'll give you a brief review based on my months-old memories! This entry was originally posted at https://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/590957.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
I had a couple of different themes to my reading this year. On my trip to India (late Feb-early March), I focused on books set in or written by people from the specific cities I visited. After the pandemic set in and quarantine became mandatory, I decided to tackle the massive pile of books that I own but haven't read, also known as Mount TBR. And "Mount" is really the right word, given that I'm now eight months into that task and it's still at an intimidating size. On the one hand, my girlfriend is extremely happy to have fewer stacks of books in our apartment. But on the other hand, this focus means I did very poorly at my goal of reading books by authors of color - I'm kind of stuck with what I purchased years before or was given as gifts. I also pick up a decent number of books from stoops (in my neighborhood, it's extremely common for people to leave books out on the sidewalk/in a cardboard box/some other public location as a signal that they're done with them and the books are looking for a new home. It's common enough that I easily acquire several books a month this way). A free book is hard to resist, but the selection does tend to lean toward white authors.
I also read plenty for research related to my work. I generally don't include those on my official "books read" list, both because I frequently don't actually read them cover-to-cover but skim for relevant information and because it always seems so pointless to write up reviews of academic texts or PhD theses; I mean, no one's checking out “The Decision to Hire German Troops in the War of American Independence: Reactions in Britain and North America, 1774-1776” for its readability anyway. And if I include my research books, what do I do about articles or chapters? See, it just all gets very complicated.
Ah, well. My reading goals going forward are about the same as always: continue to diminish Mount TBR, read more by people of color, read more by women. Hey, they're good goals!
My Statistics
Total Read: 76 books
By women: 48 books, 63% of the total
By People of Color: 16, 21%
Mount TBR: 37, 49%
Reviews written: 24, 32%
January
Trading in Danger - Elizabeth Moon
The Crown Jewels - Walter Jon Williams
Empress of Forever - Max Gladstone
February
The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Flood of Fire - Amitav Ghosh
Mistress - Anita Nair
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - Kiran Desai
A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives - Richard Eaton
Vikram Rana Investigates: Tales of Murder and Deception in Hyderabad - Sharmishtha Shenoy
March
The Portuguese in India - M. N. Pearson
Man-Eaters of Kumaon - Jim Corbett
The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000 Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community - Edna Fernandes
The Case of the Reincarnated Client - Tarquin Hall
The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism - Shashi Tharoor
An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj - Benjamin B. Cohen
The Floating World - Michelle Lovric
April
The Kingdom of Little Wounds - Susann Cokal
Year Zero - Rob Reid
Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love - Dava Sobel
Bad Monkey - Carl Hiaasen
May
Vagina: A New Biography - Naomi Wolf
Life Mask - Emma Donoghue
Metropolis - Elizabeth Gaffney
June
Mistress of My Fate - Hallie Rubenhold
Sworn to Silence - Linda Castillo
Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy - John Gross
The Just City - Jo Walton
The Philosopher Kings - Jo Walton
Necessity - Jo Walton
Pray for Silence - Linda Castillo
Medea and Her Children - Lyudmila Ulitskaya, trans Arch Tait
July
The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily - Nancy Goldstone
Wolf Winter - Cecilia Ekbäck
Courtesans - Katie Hickman
The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation - Ben A. Minteer
The Pale Blue Eye - Louis Bayard
Rustication - Charles Palliser
Vienna - William S. Kirby
August
An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
The Bird King - G. Willow Wilson
Star of the Sea - Joseph O’Connor
The Blood of Flowers - Anita Amirrezvani
September
Nell Gwyn: A Biography - Charles Beauclerk
Grunts - Mary Gentle
The Anatomist’s Wife - Anna Lee Huber
The Harem of Aman Akbar - Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky - N.K. Jemisin
Solutions and Other Problems - Allie Brosh
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller - Carlo Ginzburg, translated from Italian by John and Anne Tedeschi
October
The White Road - Sarah Lotz
The Only Good Indians - Stephen Graham-Jones
The Fisherman - John Langan
Motherless Child - Glen Hirshberg
Wylding Hall - Elizabeth Hand
The Hollow Places - T. Kingfisher
Remina - Junji Ito
The Elementals - Michael McDowell
The Guest List - Lucy Foley
Experimental Film - Gemma Files
November
The Lost Village - Camilla Sten, translated by Alex Fleming
A Cosmology of Monsters - Shaun Hamill
The Moon and the Sun - Vonda McIntyre
The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London - Sarah Wise
An Inheritance of Ashes - Leah Bobet
Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III - Flora Fraser
Midnight Robber - Nalo Hopkinson
December
The City of Palaces - Michael Nava
The Duke Who Didn’t - Courtney Milan
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins
Unconfessed - Yvette Christiansë
The Doctor’s Discretion - EE Ottoman
The Duke and I - Julia Quinn
The Viscount Who Loved Me - Julia Quinn
An Offer from a Gentleman - Julia Quinn
Romancing Mister Bridgerton - Julia Quinn
I think it would be overly optimistic to promise that I'll write a review of everything from 2020; it's probably more reasonable to start with a clean slate going forward in 2021 and try to review everything from here on out. But that said, if any of these titles look interesting to you, please let me know and I'll give you a brief review based on my months-old memories! This entry was originally posted at https://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/590957.html. Please comment there using OpenID.