2020 – A (Reading) Year in Review

When I wrote the title of this entry I wanted to specify that this was going to be a recap of my reading from 2020, not the year as a whole. If I was reviewing 2020 as a year it would be a very short post, containing only the gif of the flaming dumpster floating away in a flood.

Of course, I need to lead in to this by first mentioning this project and blog. If Laura hadn’t pressed me to read through my backlog, I would almost certainly be continuing my old ways of buying books and not reading them. Thankfully, I’m working that number down and will hopefully have better habits once this has passed.

So now let’s take a look at some highs and lows of my 2020 reading!

Total Books Read: 25. I’m very happy with this number. My goal for the year was to read 24 books, so it was nice to exceed that number. I’ve set a goal of 30 books for 2021.

Favorite Book: All Systems Red by Martha Wells. I picked up the first book of The Murderbot Diaries for $0.99 (shocking, I know) and sat on it for a long time. Finally, in October, I decided to tackle it after hearing even more people recommend the series to me. It’s fantastic. Fun and interesting, Wells does an excellent job creating characters to which the reader feels an immediate attachment. I promptly bought the rest of the series. And actually read them.

Biggest Disappointment: The Daylight War by Brent Weeks. This is book three of a five volume saga, and it was so frustrating that I walked away from the entire series. The first book was amazing. In the second book, Weeks tells the story from another character’s point of view, more than half of which is their backstory and a retelling of book one. The rest advanced the story, but slowly.

Book three was more of the same – but this was more like 75% backstory and 25% plot movement. I had purchased book four, but after slogging through book three read some reviews to see that this trend continues. To me it feels like Weeks said to his publisher “I have a trilogy written” and the publisher asked if he could make it five books. If the first book had been similar, I wouldn’t have such a problem with this. Alas. I may never finish this series though book four is on The List.

Other Highlights:

• Jim Butcher released not one but two new books in The Dresden Files series. These are some of my favorite books, and I’ve logged multiple reads and/or listens to each title. Butcher had some upheaval in his life which led to a six year gap between releases, so two in one year was a breath of fresh air.
• N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy was a fantastic reading experience. The first book plays around with narrative perspective, and the worldbuilding is top notch. Highly recommend this series.
• For Christmas 2019, Laura gifted to me the first book in a series as a semi-joke. The book is Open and Shut by David Rosenfelt and is about a lawyer that has a Golden Retriever companion. The joke was that we had just added our wonderful Ruby to the family, and she’s a Golden. But the books are nice light reads that I’ve used as palate cleansers between the normal genre fiction I enjoy.

Hopefully 2021’s recap will have even more to discuss. Here’s to cleaning up The List!