2020 Wrapup: Books

 I've been challenged to name my best book of 2020. I had already been working on this post, recapping what I read, and so I'm going to work it in here. But you have to read to the bottom.

It was a very wordy year! I read in the neighborhood of 171 books - that is an awful lot. Or a wonderful lot, I guess. The library was an incredible lifeline to me. A rough count shows about 80% of these I got from the library. It is so easy, when I see something I want, to just click over and check if the library has it. Then a couple more clicks, and it's either borrowed or on hold. As I have a tendency to really like to read a whole series by an author, this works well. In my experience, the library is likely to have either everything or nothing from a given series. And the kindle is my preferred format for books that are primarily text. I only prefer hard copies when they are gorgeous big books, like gardening or cooking books.

Also, about a third of my books this year were listened to. I have had an Audible subscription for years, and had settled on mostly non-fiction, or literary or challenging fiction, as my preferred listening books. I read about three times faster than a typical read-out-loud pace, and I found certain types of books actually benefit from my having to slow down and take in every single word. Until this year, I never sat still to listen - I'd put on the headset for a walk or to do chores, inside or out. And a problem with listening to more exciting easy fiction is that typically, you stop listening when time for the chore or walk has run out. That's not always convenient of our hero is left hanging on a cliff. But this year, I learned sometimes the recorded form of popular books was much more available from the library than the ebook version. So I started listening to mystery and science fiction books and sometimes, in the evening with all but bedtime chores done, I would even sit down in the living room to listen, in preference to TV or visually reading. I couldn't just sit there, however, so I do some idle easy games on the ipad, or color in ipad coloring books (using the apple pencil), or, I just started this week, do jigsaw puzzles on the ipad, while listening through a speaker in the living room. Something occupying a corner of my brain while I also follow the story.

Because I log my books in Goodreads, I was able to export them into a spreadsheet, which allowed me to summarize and categorize them. The list isn't perfect, but me being me, I had to make a chart! So here is a visual summary, by genre:

The blue books are non-fiction - I only read 13 of those. They were gardening and natural history, and civics (my term for items of topical or political or social import) and history. Self-improvement and sailing each popped up with just a couple.

The brown ones are fiction, and you can see the big enchiladas labeled clearly. I went big time for escapism, and many of these were series. The smaller slices represent (in descending order) plain novels (no other category), romance ( a new escapist genre for me), young adult novels, historical novels, and spy novels. 

So, what were the best books?  So hard to pick, and January seems so very long ago! I found as I became voracious, I also became a harsher critic. It takes something special to earn four stars from me, and only the very very best get five (unless it's written by a friend of mine, in which case it automatically gets the five to boost it).

One individual novel stuck with me, read back in January: When We Were Vikings, by Andrew MacDonald. I think it was a debut. It's narrator is a damaged young woman, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, and further abused, and living a precarious and dangerous life. But it's uplifting! She chooses to live her life like a Viking, and it's wonderful.

The best non-fiction book I read was How to be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi. I listened to it, because it falls into the type that needs slowing down. Kendi reads it himself, and it changed my thinking almost from the first page. Well worth it.

Far and away the best series is Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series, beginning with Still Life. He is head of homicide for the Surete de Quebec and the characters, the plots, and the settings are all terrific. I listened to them all, the whole sixteen of them. Some I liked better than others, but the worst was still good. After a while, the characters seem like friends, the same way you can feel when binge-watching a TV series. It would be good to read in order, as people evolve and change. (I went with what I could get quickly from the library, and sometimes found myself saying "oh that's why he is like that".)

And, for those who stuck with me this far, a bit of fluff and sugar for you: One to Watch, by Kate Stayman-London. A feminist plus-sized contestant on a Bachelor-type show. Goes down easy!