Read and Dream: My Book Life: 2020

The Best Books I Read in 2020

2020 has been a wild ride of a year. Before anything, whether this year has grounded and lifted you or really deeply challenged you, I just want to say I'm so proud of all of us for making it through. For me, it's been a year filled with ups and downs, but one single constant has been reading. I read around 70 books total this year. The last time I read even close to that number was in 2016, 4 years ago. I'm always grateful to literature for being an escape and a comfort, but especially this year.

That being said, what were the incredible, mind-blowing, will read-again and treasure forever reads of this year? It was hard to narrow down, but here are (in the order that I read them) the BEST books I read in 2020:

What a year it's been, and it's not even over yet. I honestly can't believe we've made it to November, especially when all the days have blurred together since March. Funnily enough, I've realized that my activity on this blog largely reflects my quarantine state: a huge push in the beginning when I was all motivated to "make the most" of this time, and then little sporadic pushes before I lose any motivation again. I'm trying to be more forgiving of myself.

However, though I haven't been blogging or really doing anything "productive" that much, I've been reading like crazy. It's weird for me, tearing through books at a pace I haven't had since middle school, and not even trying to read the most "intellectual" or "important" books, but just books that pique my interest. Books have saved me time & time again, and they've really made this whole year bearable.

I have a whole list of books that I've read but haven't blogged about, and I wasn't sure how to deal with them. I decided that overall, they might reveal some cool patterns/habits of mine over the past few months; reading habits that I hope to take with me even after this period of the world is over.

Title: Lincoln in the Bardo

Author: George Saunders

Genre: Historical Fiction, Contemporary

Blurb: February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Me: After reading Saunders' short story collection Tenth of December, I didn't think I would feel inclined to read any of his other works. He was known primarily as a short story writer before this novel, and while his writing is undeniably fascinating and fresh, it didn't seem like my thing. This book changed my mind, and got me so excited that I get to experience a writer like this in real time.

Title: Human Acts
Author: Han Kang

Genre: Historical fiction

Blurb: In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho's best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.

Me: Han Kang is probably the most well-known contemporary Korean author, and it had bothered me for a while that I hadn't read any of her works, especially The Vegetarian (which won the Man Booker and is definitely on my next-to-read list!). I decided to read this first because it was directly related to a period of South Korean history, and I'm so glad I did. It was one of the most beautiful books I've read about any uprising or protest.

Title: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Author: Ottessa Moshfegh

Genre: Contemporary

Blurb: Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

Me: I've seen this incredible cover everywhere, and finally decided to see what the hype was about. Definitely nothing like I expected, but not too groundbreaking or even really that interesting.

Title: The Girls

Author: Emma Cline

Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb: Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

Me: One distinctive change from this summer has been that I've started to actively read more adult contemporary fiction, a genre that I mostly avoided unless books were critically acclaimed. It's been really nice, keeping me reading not just for education but for fun, and has also shown me some general flaws of popular "literary" or adult fiction. The Girls was one of those, where I found myself extremely interested in the story yet not entirely compelled by the writing, not intoxicated by the world of the book.

Title: Giovanni's Room
Author: James Baldwin

Genre: Fiction

Blurb: Baldwin's haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.

Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.

Me: I haven't read such beautiful fiction in a while. Baldwin's command of language is just absolutely mind-blowing, and creates the most stunning atmosphere of Paris, all the while capturing some of the most complex facets of love and desire with such clarity.

Title: Minor Feelings

Author: Cathy Park Hong

Genre: Nonfiction

Blurb: Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.

Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Me: The greatest reading surprise of this summer has been just the incredible Asian American literature I have read. These books are, quite literally, the books I've been waiting for my entire life. Throughout my reading experience, there have been many books that have put into words feelings that I couldn't fully understand before. But none of them have made me feel as real and as seen as this one.

Title: Severance
Author: Ling Ma
Blurb: Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.

Me: Eerily relevant and beautifully poignant, Severance was one I absolutely tore through. Such an incredible exploration of what we value in our contemporary world and what we need to be aware of going forward.

Title: The Hours
Author: Michael Cunningham
Genre: Contemporary, Fiction
Blurb: In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.

The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the worlds of three unforgettable women.

Me: After reading Mrs. Dalloway for the second time and being even more blown away, I decided to pick up The Hours and see how Cunningham's interpretation/inspiration from the book would be. For what initially seemed like a glorified fanfiction, it was the closest to a real homage to Woolf I think anyone could have written. But nothing comes close to the real thing.

This past week, I've been thinking a lot of what I can do to contribute to not only this current moment, but also to combat racism and anti-Black violence in my daily life. It's such a crucial and significant topic that I want to make sure I'm doing the most I can, while not overstepping any boundaries when it comes to performative activism/insufficient allyship.

One thing I've seen circulating a lot is lists of books to read to educate ourselves on racism and its pervasive effects in our country and our world. I still truly believe that literature and stories can be one of the greatest catalysts for change, where we take a moment to really understand someone else. For me personally, literature was fundamental in my understanding of racism/police brutality/inequity in our society, and I want to do what I can so others can learn from these incredible books too.

So without further ado, books for an anti-racist bookshelf.

Title: The Underground Railroad
Author: Colson Whitehead
Genre: Historical Fiction
Blurb: From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor- engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil.Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Me: Winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, this book has become a part of every list of essential books to read from the past few years. I was really excited and intrigued by the premise and had very high expectations going in - perhaps too high, because it felt mostly underwhelming and not entirely memorable.

Title: Normal People
Author: Sally Rooney
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary
Blurb: At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

Me: She finally did it, gals. After having seen Sally Rooney's name in every bookshop for the past two years, I watched the trailer for the new Hulu series and decided I needed to bite the bullet and try the books. And AHHHHH (coming from the excitement of binging the show right now)- I'm so glad I did.

Title: Girl, Woman, Other
Author: Bernadine Evaristo
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary
Blurb: Joint Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2019

Teeming with life and crackling with energy — a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

Me: I'd casually heard the name of this book everywhere for the past few months, but it took me a while to realize it was a recent book (one that won the Man Booker Prize in 2019!). I'm so glad I decided to finally read it - probably one of the best reads of 2020 so far.

Title: The Goldfinch
Author: Donna Tartt
Genre: Fiction
Blurb: It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

Me: I finally did it, y'all. I read the book of 2014 six years later in self-isolation, but as someone who never thought they'd get around to it, I'm pretty happy! I was excited to see some of the hype for myself but unfortunately, I think I might understand why I avoided reading it for so long.

Title: Trick Mirror
Author: Jia Tolentino
Genre: Essays, Nonfiction
Blurb: Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social Internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.

Me: I got to see Jia Tolentino in a passing second before I read her work. Having shown up late to one of her readings at college (which was so fully packed that I ended up leaving after a few minutes), I saw her walk in in a animal print coat with such a charismatic aura about her. I remember thinking that I absolutely had to read her book. And on finishing it, it didn't disappoint.

Title: The Secret History
Author: Donna Tartt
Genre: Fiction, Mystery

Blurb: Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

Me: After years of being too lazy (and definitely thinking I was too indie yikes) and multiple glowing reviews from my friends, I decided to use self-isolation time to read some of Donna Tartt's masterpieces. And oh my good lord. This might be the best literary decision I've made all year. This book sucked me in and crushed me in a way no contemporary book has done in a while. I just couldn't stop reading, couldn't take my mind off the characters and the world.

Title: Sula
Author: Toni Morrison
Genre: Classics, Fiction
Blurb: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Me: I read Beloved about a year ago and was stunned. After Toni Morrison passed this summer, I told myself I'd make it a point to try and read all of her works at some point. The first one I've picked up since is Sula, and wow- Toni never disappoints.

Title: Villette
Author: Charlotte Bronte
Genre: Fiction, Classics
Blurb: With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Brontë's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. The first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey - a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature.

Me: When I read Jane Eyre for the first time a few years ago, it absolutely blew me away with how complex the characters and fictional world were in just a simple story. I received Villette as a birthday present a little bit after, and though I always told myself I would get around to it, I never seemed to have a reason to. But being in self-isolation and trying to get through all the physical I haven't read gave me the time to fully enjoy it and oh my gosh- it might be my favorite Victorian novel yet.

Title: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Author: Ocean Vuong
Genre: Fiction
Blurb: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

Me: I've heard Ocean Vuong's name again and again now for a couple of years. I'm so glad I finally got to sit down and read one of his works- especially a book as beautiful and heartbreaking as this one.

Title: Invisible Cities
Author: Italo Calvino
Genre: Fiction, Magical Realism

Blurb: Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.

Me: I picked this book up in Faulkner House Books, a New Orleans bookstore in the most picturesque alley with the best vibes. I knew I had to get a book there and I chose Invisible Cities because I'd heard great things about it and the cover was so unique (almost like a textured cover?). I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it, because it's a stunning book that almost defies classification: a collection of vignettes, a bunch of traveling tales, and just pockets of imagination in one?

Hey guys! First of all, I just want to check in and make sure everyone is doing okay. We're living through some crazy history right now, and before anything, it's so important that we take care of each other. The best thing we all can do right now is stay home. For those who are lucky enough to work or study from home, we've found a lot of extra time on our hands. So what better time to tackle that stack of books?