Ah, 2020. What a strange year for reading.

Once the pandemic hit, the local library became one of my most visited (and only) destinations, and I coveted my pile of loaned books like treasure whenever a new lockdown caused the library to close. I regularly scrolled Amazon’s kindle deal page, joined my first ever book club – which, three books later, has still only taken place on Zoom – and managed to publish my first book, The Adult Orphan Club.

The unsettled and uncertain mood of global events made some books harder than usual to engage with though. I stop-started often, put quite a few books aside, and often had three on the go at once so I could choose what I was most in the mood for. I went through phases of reading obsessively, only to find that particular books seeped into my subconscious in ways I didn’t like. Nevertheless, I still managed to spend most evenings falling asleep between pages. It did wonders for my sleep pattern, if not for the occasional bruise on my nose from a falling hardback.

Basically, I lost myself in books this year. And I also found myself as a result. So even though I barely blogged in 2020, it’s only right that I publish a paean to the literature which saw me through the weirdest of years.

---

Pin me for later!

---

My 2020 Reading List

Number of books you read: Forty eight.

Number of re-reads: Zero.

Number of books you stopped reading: Three. The pandemic made me abandon books I wasn’t enjoying with more decisiveness than usual – so although I gave them a try, this year I wasn’t captivated enough by the following:

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. Topic wise I really enjoyed it, and Lockwood’s imagery is undoubtedly impressive, but the density of language made it too hard to continue wading through. I wonder whether I’d prefer her writing in essay form, or perhaps even poetry?

Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. When the book began I thought this 18th century historical fiction about the deadly sugar trade would work for me, but I wasn’t compelled by the characters and the storyline didn’t seem to hook me in.

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. Stylistically, the book didn’t work for me, and I couldn’t engage with the lack of plot.

Genre you read the most from: lots of memoir, especially in my favoured topic of grief, and a healthy amount of fiction too. I developed something of a love for Victorian fiction as well.

Here’s the full list of everything I read in 2020:

• • Things in Jars – Jess Kidd
  • Shelf Life – Livia Franchini
  • The Last Act of Love – Cathy Retzenbrink
  • My Sister, the Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite
  • When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
  • The Doll Factory – Elizabeth Macneal
  • Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss
  • The Water Cure – Sophie Mackintosh
  • My Mad Dad – Robin Hollingworth
  • Homesick for Another World – Ottessa Moshfegh
  • Love – Hanne Ørstavik
  • All At Sea – Decca Aitkenhead
  • Blood & Sugar – Laura Shepherd-Robinson (DNF)
  • Instructions for a Heatwave – Maggie O’Farrell
  • Black River – Will Dean
  • How to Murder Your Life – Cat Marnell
  • Akin – Emma Donoghue
  • The Story Keeper – Anna Mazzola
  • Chase the Rainbow – Poorna Bell
  • Queenie – Candice Carty-Williams
  • Little Deaths – Emma Flint
  • Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog – Emily Dean
  • Small Island – Andrea Levy
  • The Babysitter – Phoebe Morgan
  • Case Histories – Kate Atkinson
  • Promising Young Women – Caroline O’Donoghue
  • A Half Baked Idea – Olivia Potts
  • The Mercies – Kiran Milwood Hargrave
  • Searching for Sylvie Lee – Jean Kwok
  • The Penguin Lessons – Tom Michell
  • Don’t Go Crazy Without Me – Deborah A. Lott
  • One Good Turn – Kate Atkinson
  • Olive, Again – Elizabeth Strout
  • Maid – Stephanie Land
  • The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
  • It’s Ok to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too) – Nora McInerny
  • Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood (DNF)
  • The Five – Hallie Rubenhold
  • The Binding – Bridget Collins
  • Rough Magic – Lara Prior-Palmer
  • Such a Fun Age – Kiley Reid
  • Wintering – Katherine May
  • Sweetbitter – Stephanie Danler (DNF)
  • The Rules of Inheritance – Claire Bidwell Smith
  • The Man Who Saw Everything – Deborah Levy
  • Glorious Rock Bottom – Bryony Gordon
  • Once Upon a River – Diane Setterfield
  • The Glass Castle – Jeannette Wells

---

1. Best book you read in 2020?

When it comes to books, 2020 felt like the longest year possible, so I’m answering this question with a three-way tie: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog by Emily Dean, and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid.

I read Ghost Wall early on in the year and wish I’d saved it for later. It’s stunning. Creepy. Ethereal. Transportive. Every careful word pulls you deeper into the world of an Iron-Age obsessed father, his family, and a group of re-enactment students. I promise you’ve read nothing else like it.

Quite aside from the fact that Emily Dean finds wonderful humour in a memoir about experiencing multiple deaths, Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog is simply a beautifully written story of someone’s turbulent, loving, dramatic family, in all its ups and downs. I also have quite a few parallels to Dean so often gasped and shouted out loud (we had the same breed of cat for crying out loud – not to mention the deaths of both our theatrical parents). I basically want to be friends with Emily now.

Such a Fun Age is one of those books which perfectly toes the line between easy-to-read and intelligent. I had such a strong sense of who these characters were and couldn’t wait to find out what happened to them – and though I spent much of the book cringing at Alix’s behaviour I loved the steady unspooling of her relationship with Emira.

2. Book you were excited about & thought you were going to love more but didn’t?

Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer. I first spotted this female-narrated memoir about racing horses across the Mongolian steppe in the bookshop at the Hay-On-Wye Festival, and filed it under ‘books I know I’ll love’. Unfortunately it felt very self-conscious – as if an editor had repeatedly asked for strange similes and metaphors to be added on every page. It didn’t read naturally at all and I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the narrator either!

3. Most surprising (in a good way or bad way) book you read?

In a good way: How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell. What makes this memoir about the fashion journalism industry in NYC so compelling is Marnell’s total lack of filter! She has no qualms about revealing her base desires, the seedy sides of her addictions, her distinct unlikeability – and this actually makes me like her all the more. It’s impossible to say how much of Marnell’s memoir is accurate or fabricated but there’s no denying she can tell a good story.

In a bad way: The Binding by Bridget Collins. I’m begrudgingly glad I stuck with this, but for the first 150 pages I was ridiculously close to stopping. In fact I only continued when I saw various reviewers mention how drastically the book changed later on. The three part structure segments the book in such an odd way, with each part containing totally different styles of writing, and I wish Collins’ editors had pushed for part one to mirror the same level of emotion and plot as the latter two.

4. Book you “pushed” the most people to read (and they did)?

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. This careful tracing of the lives of Jack the Ripper’s female victims was a pick for my new book club, and I adored it.

5. Best series you started in 2020?

The Jackson Brodie series by Kate Atkinson. A shelf in my dad’s study contains at least six of Atkinson’s books but for some reason I’d never considered reading them. Then someone on Instagram mentioned the Jackson Brodie mystery novels – and I fell head over heels for Atkinson’s astonishing ability to weave multiple satisfying storylines together. This year I read Case Histories and One Good Turn, and I’m saving the final three books in the series for a time when I really need them!

6. Favourite new author you discovered in 2020?

Kate Atkinson. The fact that she has a huge backlist makes the discovery even sweeter.

7. Best book from a genre you don’t typically read/was out of your comfort zone?

Probably The Five. I love non-fiction but it’s usually in the memoir/narrative genres. I’m so glad to learn that I enjoy well-researched historical books like this though.

8. Most action-packed/thrilling/unputdownable book of the year?

Little Deaths by Emma Flint. I can’t believe this is Flint’s debut; in theory it’s a crime novel but it reads like literary fiction, and while the pace is non-stop it also digs deep into the world of 1960s New York and the way anyone slightly different from the expected norm is treated.

9. Book you read in 2020 that you would be MOST likely to re-read next year?

I don’t tend to re-read books, but typically I’m most likely to pick up a grief memoir again. Towards the end of the year I read Claire Bidwell Smith’s The Rules of Inheritance and was immediately captivated by her spare, simple prose exploring the total devastation of losing both her parents in her twenties. Clearly I’m biased in finding infinite parallels within my own life, but I’m also awed that she managed to parse her emotions so carefully and eloquently.

10. Favourite cover of a book you read in 2020?

Wintering by Katherine May. I’m a sucker for an artistic cover.

11. Most memorable character of 2020?

Probably Jeannette from The Glass Castle – although that could be because I read it most recently!

12. Most beautifully written book you read in 2020?

Either Wintering or Once Upon a River.

13. Most thought-provoking/life-changing book of 2020?

Chase the Rainbow by Poorna Bell. This memoir opened my eyes to living alongside an addict, the confines of modern masculinity and how to come to terms with the aftermath of suicide.

14. Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2020 to finally read?

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. I gulped it down over a few days and finished it while sobbing quietly in a coffee shop in Clapham just before lockdown started.

15. Favourite passage/quote from a book you read In 2020? 

“Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” ― Katherine May, Wintering

16.Shortest & longest book you read in 2020?

Shortest: Love by Hanne Ørstavik at 111 pages.

Longest: Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield at 464 pages. That was a weighty paperback to hoist over the covers when I read in bed throughout December!

17. Book that shocked you the most?

Oof. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan. As part of my own writing, I was researching books which use homes and houses almost like concrete characters when Cement Garden came up and I got it from the library soon after. Bloody hell though. I was not expecting a concise novella about orphanhood, familial dysfunction and incest…

18. Favourite non-romantic relationship of the year?

In Last Act of Love, Cathy Rentzenbrink shares her relationship with her cheeky older teen brother who’s hit by a car and spends the remaining few years of his life bedridden and comatose. It’s an incredibly raw story told with love, warmth, and simplicity, and I hold Rentzenbrink in the highest regard because of it.

19. Favourite book you read in 2020 from an author you’ve read previously?

I was introduced to Maggie O’Farrell and Ottessa Moshfegh in 2019, and was already a keen fan of Will Dean and Ian McEwan. I didn’t love O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave as much as her other books so I think Will Dean’s Black River was probably my favourite.

20. Best Book You Read In 2020 That You Read Based SOLELY On A Recommendation From Somebody Else?

Plenty of this years reads were first spotted online but I actively borrowed Searching for Sylvie Lee from the library because a friend shared it in her IG Story!

21. Newest fictional crush from a book you read in 2020?

No idea!

22. Best 2020 debut you read?

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. Well deserving of the accolades, this book covers race, privilege, class and what it means to be ‘woke’ in the social media era.

23. Best worldbuilding/most vivid setting you read this year?

There are two: The Water Cure and The Mercies. Both focus almost exclusively on female characters; both are mysterious, almost mythical, and rather unsettling throughout.

I strangely loved The Water Cure. Sophie Mackintosh is really good at deliberately vague yet deeply evocative worlds and I’m intrigued to know whether her novels will be translated to film at some point.

I bought The Mercies as a 99p Kindle Deal and was swept away by Hargrave’s visceral descriptions of an Arctic whaling village where the men are wiped out by a rogue storm, leaving the women to reestablish themselves in a newly unstable world.

24. Book that put a smile on your face/was the most FUN to read?

The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell is a gorgeous little book – I laughed and cried!

25. Book that made you cry or nearly cry in 2020?

Ok. I cry at a lot of books. But the books which made me cry *the most* were memoirs by Emily Dean, Cathy Rentzenbrink, and Claire Bidwell Smith. All grief writers, all women, all extremely good at telling their personal stories.

But also The Penguin Lessons. I would never have thought a small Argentine penguin could reduce me to tears?!

26. Hidden gem of the year?

Shelf Life by Livia Franchini. This was my first or second read of the year so it feels like forever ago; it was an impulse borrow from the library and I was swept up in the strangely styled writing and this quiet pulse of desperation throughout.

27. Most unique book you read in 2020?

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy. This was our most recent book club read and certainly not something I’d ever have picked up on reading the blurb, but this book nonetheless blew me away! It starts out relatively tamely, flips a switch halfway through, and suddenly you’re frantically trying to assess what’s happening. The work Levy put into this deceivingly short novel is phenomenal. Highly recommend – especially if you’re a fan of hunting for Easter eggs in content.

28. Book that made you the most mad (doesn’t necessarily mean you didn’t like it)?

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wells. I was furious with her parents’ clear inability to care for their four children; mad at Jeannette for still caring about her parents; angry at myself for being so judgemental!

29. One book you didn’t get to in 2020 but will be your Number 1 priority in 2021?

My Goodreads ‘to-read’ list is absolutely heaving. I’ll be picking up Girl, Woman, Other, The Vanishing Half, and Hamnet as soon as I can.

30. A 2021 debut you are most anticipating?

The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean. It’s his first standalone novel and a review I spotted on Twitter said, “tension strung so tight it’s a surprise the pages don’t squeak as you turn them.” If that doesn’t make you want to read it I don’t know what will!

What books did you love in 2020? Is there anything you can’t wait to read in 2021? I’d love all your recommendations – it already looks like we’ll be reading a lot this year! 

---

NB: This article contains affiliate links, but it won’t cost you anything to click on them – it just helps me with the cost of running this site. Many thanks also to Perpetual Page Turner for these challenge questions.