My 20 Favorite Books of 2020
After falling off the reading wagon in 2019 (they should really put seatbelts on that thing), I set a 2020 goal to read 52 books in 52 weeks.
I ended up reading 111 books.
You can see everything I read on my Goodreads page.
Below are my top 20 favorite books, conveniently organized into complimentary pairs.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a hilarious, sad, and painfully self-aware account of a therapist who ends up in therapy. Easily my favorite non-fiction book of the year. An absolute winner.
Tiny Beautiful Things are selections from Cheryl Strayed’s advice column, like Dear Abby with much more adult themes. Strayed is better known for Wild (another favorite from this year), her account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail while being woefully unprepared (later made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon).
Eleanor Oliphant is Complete Fine by Gail Honeyman
The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman
Two wonderful stories in the genre of “Quirky introverts who would rather be curled up with a good book but accidentally find love.” Eleanor Oliphant and Nina Hill are heroes I can’t stop thinking about. Both books are delights.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2016 with The Underground Railroad, then dropped the mic this year by winning it again with The Nickel Boys. Both books are shocking, sobering page-turners, and beautifully written. Whitehead is an amazing storyteller.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
The Midnight Library has made a lot of best-of-2020 lists, but I loved How to Stop Time just as much. I’m a sucker for novels that play with time travel and exploring multiple universes. (See also The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, which didn’t quite make my top-20 list, and Recursion by Blake Crouch, which would have made my list last year if I’d had a list).
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
If you like your mysteries light-hearted and cozy, The Thursday Murder Club is for you. Set in a British retirement home, it’s a hoot on every page (and a tricky whodunit). For a grittier dose of mystery/horror, The Changeling is creeeeepy.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
Daisy Jones and Vivian Morris are the polar opposites of Eleanor Oliphant and Nina Hill. Wonderful stories evoking specific times and places with engaging heroes.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves by James Nestor
Yes, an entire book about breathing. It’s mind-blowing. Really. Although not even as mind-blowing as Nestor’s previous book, about the sport of freediving and the mysteries of the ocean. My gob was smacked by both of these.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays by Damon Young
Chiang’s book of short stories are a sci-fi/philosophy hybrid like nothing I’ve read before. One of the stories was turned into the movie Arrival, not starring Reese Witherspoon. Incredibly inventive storytelling.
Young’s book, a laugh-out-loud funny, profane, brilliant set of essays about being a black man in America, is wonderfully written.
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Two novels about journeys. American Dirt follows a woman and her son as they desperately try to escape from narcos in Mexico. Station Eleven follow a band of musicians and actors as they travel across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Island of the Lost: An Extraordinary Story of Survival at the Edge of the World by Joan Druett
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
An incredible true shipwreck-on-a-deserted-island story (in 1865, before cell phones, airplanes or Survivor). And the true story of the US Olympic rowing team in 1936. Two riveting non-fiction seafaring tales.
That’s my top 20. I read a LOT of other great books. Check out my list everything I read in 2020.
