Hey, guess what? It turns out when you're essentially confined to home for the better part of a year, you wind up having more time to read. Who'd have thunk it? In 2018, I had a lot going on, and only read 12 books. Pitiful. I did much better in 2019, putting away 24 books. And in 2020, it's bumped up again to 34. There usually seems to be a guiding theme for each year's books, and as with the games I played this year, the theme for 2020 appears to be "Dealing With Loss".
A lot of the books I read this year bear witness to their characters looking inward to explore a tangled web of painful memories, or grimly going about their business as the world falls to pieces around them. Some make peace with their demons, be they literal or metaphorical, and some are subsumed. 2020 has forced us all to ask some probing questions about the human condition, and to look for answers about just how the hell we're supposed to react when the invisible bonds of society fray and snap.
Not everything I read this year was a bummer, but even among the books that did have a melancholy bent, there were plenty of wonderful finds. Let's get to the ranking!
The Book of Speculation - Erika Swyler (2015) (A)
Atonement - Ian McEwan (2001) (A)
To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis (1998) (A)
Circe - Madeline Miller (2018) (A-)
The Just City - Jo Walton (2014) (A-)
The Last Policeman - Ben Winters (2012) (A-)
The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern (2019) (B+)
Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine - Sarah Lohman (2016) (B+)
My Sister, The Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite (2017) (B+)
Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2019) (B+)
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan (2012) (B+)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow (2019) (B)
Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill (2017) (B)
XL - Scott Brown (2019) (B)
The Party - Elizabeth Day (2017) (B)
The Dreamers - Karen Thompson Walker (2019) (B)
Then She Was Gone - Lisa Jewell (2017) (B)
The Warehouse - Rob Hart (2019) (B)
The Dirge of Reason - Graeme Davis (2018) (B)
Did You Ever Have a Family - Bill Clegg (2015) (B-)
253 - Geoff Ryman (1998) (B-)
Becoming - Michelle Obama (2018) (B-)
Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) - Jeff VanderMeer (2014) (B-)
Long Way Down - Jason Reynolds (2017) (B-)
Ire of the Void - Richard Lee Byers (2017) (B-)
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts - Kate Racculia (2019) (C+)
The Deep Gate - Chris A. Jackson (2017) (C+)
Dark Revelations - Amanda Downum (2020) (C+)
Blood of Baalshandor - Richard Lee Byers (2020) (C+)
Murder in the Crooked House - Soji Shimada (2016) (C+)
To Fight the Black Wind - Jennifer Brozek (2018) (C+)
The Arrangement - Sarah Dunn (2017) (C)
You Know You Want This - Kristen Roupenian (2019) (C-)
American Panda - Gloria Chao (2018) (C-)
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