In an annual, much-loved ritual (by me, at least), I gather up all the books I read the past year — all the ones still in my possession, that is, which leaves out audiobooks and others borrowed from local libraries — for a photo and a roll call of sorts. (Here’s the 2019 post.) It’s a fun exercise for me and, with them all off my shelves, lets me also shift the ones I no longer want to a sell pile. It should probably be all or almost all of them, but usually it’s more like one-fourth.
You’re encouraged to comment on your own reading for 2020, such as number read, nonfiction vs. fiction, trends in your reading and such. I’m always a bit surprised at the amount of nonfiction this self-defined fiction guy reads; this year it was a bare win for fiction, 27 compared to 26 nonfiction. Almost all my books were published some or many years ago; my only 2019-20 reads were Callaci, Straight, Best SF, Madigan, Mantel and Cummins, with one 2021 book thanks to an advance copy.
1. “Walden and Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau
2. “Europe Through the Back Door,” Rick Steves
3. “The Golden Man,” Philip K. Dick
4. “The Golden Scorpion,” Sax Rohmer
5. “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
6. “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1, 1929-1964,” Robert Silverberg, editor
7. “The Fourth Galaxy Reader,” H.L. Gold, editor
8. “Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019,” Carmen Maria Machado, guest editor
9. “Ecology of Fear,” Mike Davis
10. “Wrath of Fu Manchu,” Sax Rohmer
11. “That’s Amore,” Diana Sholley
12. “Hail, Hail Euphoria!,” Roy Blount Jr.
13. “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem
14. “Bob Dylan in America,” Sean Wilentz
15. “Love is a Mix Tape,” Rob Sheffield
16. “100 Cassettes,” Dennis Callaci
17. “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel
18. A Short History of the World,” J.M. Roberts
19. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Mark Twain
20. “The Twilight Zone Companion,” Marc Scott Zicree
21. “Death in Venice,” Thomas Mann
22. “Bring Up the Bodies,” Hilary Mantel
23. “Written in My Soul,” Bill Flanagan
24. “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said,” Philip K. Dick
25. “Crime and Punishment,” Fyodor Dostoevsky
26. “The Prisoner,” Thomas M. Disch
27. “Camp Concentration,” Thomas M. Disch
28. “Extra Innings: Fred Claire’s Journey to City of Hope and Finding a World Championship Team,” Tim Madigan
29. “Sonnets and Narrative Poems,” William Shakespeare
30. “The Comedy of Errors,” William Shakespeare
31. “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” William Shakespeare
32. “Henry VIII,” William Shakespeare
33. “The Mirror & the Light,” Hilary Mantel
34. “In the Country of Women,” Susan Straight
35. “Juliet, Naked,” Nick Hornby
36. “She,” H. Rider Haggard
37. “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman
38. “The Wind in the Willows,” Kenneth Grahame
39. “American Dirt,” Jeanine Cummins
40. “A Handful of Dust,” Evelyn Waugh
41. “Joan Baez: The Last Leaf,” Elizabeth Thomson
42. “Just Kids,” Patti Smith
43. “Younger Than That Now: Collected Interviews With Bob Dylan,” James Ellison, ed.
44. “About Aging,” Josephine Smith
45. “A Good Life,” Ben Bradlee
46. “Larger Than Life: The Playboy Interviews,” Stephen Randall, ed.
47. “Not Dead Yet,” Phil Collins
48. “Eternally Yours,” Jack Smith
49. “Books: A Memoir,” Larry McMurtry
50. “A Passion for Books,” Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, editors
51. “My Bookstore,” Reginald Rice, editor
52. “Booked to Die,” John Dunning
53. “Always a Song,” Ellen Harper
