My reading in 2020 was all over the map because of Covid-19. My moods changed and I read (and reread) a number of “comfort” books: Urban Fantasies, classic Science Fiction, and locked-room mysteries. I also read about how some of my favorite films were made and how Evil Geniuses are ruining our lives. This is not a typical list of my reading interests, but 2020 wasn’t a typical year. What books kept you going through the coronavirus pandemic?
I just realised I’m getting old …
Totally forgot that you already wrote about the “Evil Geniuses” and we discussed it here:
http://georgekelley.org/evil-geniuses-the-unmaking-of-america-by-kurt-andersen/#comments
Well, after having moved I might have more time to read books next year – and be in the mood to do so.
Wolf, these are all books I read in 2020 and enjoyed despite the pandemic. I recommend all of them!
The biggest effect the plague had on my reading this year was not so much that it kept me in, although it did, but because it kept my library closed from mid-March until early August, knocking out my primary source of new books for nearly half the year. And I’m still catching up on books that came out during that period. I did some rereading, mostly working my way through Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series. Also, something launched me into a reread of several Shirley Jackson novels. It wasn’t a good year for new genre novels, but two that stood out were Michael Robotham’s “When She Was Good”, an excellent sequel to “Good Girl, Bad Girl” and, completely out of the blue, “The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires” by Grady Hendrix, a delightful vampire novel. I was aware of Hendrix due to his co-authorship of “Paperbacks From Hell”.
Of the books George chose, “The Big Goodbye” is definitely on my must read list, and the Grant biography is on my “if I live long enough” list.
Michael, we listened to GRANT (38 discs!) and it took us a couple of months (we would listen during lunch). Great book! THE BIG GOODBYE is also great. I’ll have to pick up a copy of Grady Hendrix’s THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB’S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES.
That is yet another book I have through the generosity of Beth Fedyn, though neither of us has read it yet.
Jeff, Beth Fedyn is the Santa Claus of Good Books! I love when they show up in my mailbox!
My reading habits stayed pretty much the same. The only one on your list I read was The Big Goodbye which I liked a lot.
Steve, I’m just hoping the Libraries stay open here. After Christmas and New Year’s all the experts around here are predicting a coronavirus Surge!
My library is open but only for curbside pickups.
Steve, our Libraries have curbside pickups and limited hours–10 AM to 2 PM–daily. But, a Covid-19 Surge could shut everything down again.
THE WRITER’S LIBRARY was definitely a favorite here too. I loved the interviews, not least because they were longer and more free-ranging than the usual Q & A. That’s why the Donna Tartt stood out as worthless, since she never made time to meet with them and gave perfunctory answers by email. I found myself reading a lot more non-fiction, especially towards the end of the year. I enjoyed Wendy Lesser’s SCANDINAVIAN NOIR, Jerry Seinfeld’s IS THIS ANYTHING? (thanks to Beth Fedyn for both), Arlene Alda’s book of interviews JUST KIDS FROM THE BRONX, Laura Lippman’s MY LIFE AS A VILLAINESS, Otto Friedrich’s CITY OF NETS (on 1940s Hollywood), Jay Parini’s BORGES AND ME, Hilary Mantel’s book of essays MANTEL PIECES, and David Sedaris’s THE BEST OF ME.
Also more short stories the second half, as I just wasn’t finding many mysteries that grabbed me. One exception was Thomas Perry’s latest sequel to THE BUTCHER’S BOY, EDDIE’S BOY, which I raced through in a few hours yesterday. I really want to catch up on some of his non-series books that I’ve missed over the years. Tonawanda boy makes good! Will have to check my fiction list, but for short stories I enjoyed collections by Stephen King (IF IT BLEEDS), Joe Hill (FULL THROTTLE and STRANGE WEATHER), Clayton Rawson (Complete Great Merlini stories), Robert Silverberg (ALIEN ARCHIVES), Laurie Colwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as many anthologies.
Jeff, you got a lot of reading done in 2020. I recognize plenty of books from your comment! Patti Abbott’s WEDNESDAY’S SHORT STORIES accelerated my reading of short stories.
I’ve read about 250 books so far this year (about 140 of those during the lockdown), most romances, romantic suspense, and psychological suspense. Big meaty biographies and non-fiction just weren’t doing it for me…I needed quick, brisk reads, most with the promise of a happily-ever-after or at least a resolution, mystery style. I’d say my favorite non-romances of the year were Simone St. James’s THE SUNDOWN MOTEL (horror processed through the female gaze) and Lucy Foley’s THE GUEST LIST (billed as a murder-mystery, but I found it more of a character study of how a self-absorbed narcissistic personality can wreak havoc on so many of the lives around him—as if we haven’t had four years of that, lol). My favorite romance of the year is a trilogy by N.R. Walker called Missing Pieces (PIECES OF YOU, PIECES OF ME, and PIECES OF US) about two men in a long-term relationship and what happens when one of them is in a terrible vehicle accident that causes severe physical injuries and wipes out his memory of his partner. Amnesia is a frequent romance novel trope, but I thought Walker did an excellent job with it.
Deb, I’ve read 196 books so far in 2020. I’m hoping to read four more books by December 31 to make it a nice round 200 books. While you were reading “comfort” books like romances, romantic suspense, and psychological suspense, I was reading (and rereading) Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Locked Room Mysteries. Whatever gets us through this pandemic… The Saints certainly handled the Vikings with ease!
I read 612 short stories last year and I’m at 543 so far this year, but there were a lot fewer short shorts and a lot more novellas this time.
Jeff, I lack your exquisite sense of keep track of things like the number of short stories you’ve read in 2020. I could figure out how many short story collections and anthologies I read in 2020. All I can say for sure is that I’ve read MORE short stories in 2020 than 2019. I also read some Basil Copper’s Mike Faraday mysteries, some John Creasy (The Toff), and I have a stack of DOC SAVAGE pastiches to read in 2021.
250! Wow, I haven’t seen that total in decades. I was over 100 and definitely accelerated as the year went on, but Trump destroyed my reading early in the year. I spent too much time online, I’m sure. Besides the blogs and things, we get the Daily News, the NY Times and the Washington Post online, and during this year they’ve taken up more time than ever. Plus I had my medical issues from March through June and didn’t feel like reading much of anything other than a short story most days. One more thing: I read a bunch of BIG books, mostly anthologies that were 500 pages or more. Looks like I only read 48 books the first half of the year and 62 so far the second half. I want to be at least at 150.
I have enjoyed almost everything I have read this year and it feels wrong to mention favorites. I will say that the authors I have read most of in 2020 are Basil Copper (Mike Faraday mysteries), John Creasy (Roger West mysteries), and Terry Carr (science fiction/fantasies anthologies) — I’ve read a dozen or so from each. Also big on my reading list were “George Gilman’s” Edge series of violent, pun-filled westerns, “Kenneth Robeson’s” Doc Savage novels, and “Grant Stockbridge’s” Spider novels, with half a dozen to a dozen read of each. It has been a year of comfort reading for me. I’ll wait until January 1 to count up the books I read this year.
I also will not list the favorite blogs I have read this year because I don’t want you to get a swelled head, George.
Jerry, I have a number of George Gilman’s EDGE Westerns to read. And some of Grant Stockbridge’s SPIDER novels, too. Diane constantly charges that my head swells periodically and I can’t make it through the Front Door because of it!
Looks like we’ve seen 66 movies. We went once a week in Florida, the rest are on television, some borrowed from the library, others on Netflix or other premium channels, a lot more documentaries than usual.
As for the books, I’d say they were overwhelmingly ebooks this year. Since the library has started buying more Kindle books, it is so much easier to just download one from there. Plus, of course, I have about 600 books on my Kindle, and many of those are actually complete collections, so you can probably add another one or two hundred to that total.
Jeff, Diane and I saw about 20 movies before the theaters all shut down. I watched a couple on-line movies, but they were far from the actual theater experience. I probably added another 50 ebooks to my KINDLE library on my iPad. Many of them were recommendations by…you! Many were free or practically free (a couple of bucks at most). I have around 300 ebooks…most unread.
George and Jeff, and Deb, you seem to somehow live in a world of 200-hour weeks, or more. How on earth do you read so many books, plus watch so much TV and movies? It seems impossible. I have nothing to do but read, yet it doesn’t look like I’ll make 75 books this year. Sigh.
Rick, it’s not quantity, it’s quality.
This was my list from a few weeks ago. http://pattinase.blogspot.com/2020/12/my-favorite-books-read-in-2020.html
I read more books than last year but not nearly as many as I read 25 years ago. The blogs and Facebook are my excuse. And I seem to read the NYT for about 90 minutes a day. And then, audio books go slower for me than reading print. I sure watched more TV this year than in any year in my life. TV is better, which makes it hard to resist.
Patti, we’ve watched more TV than any other year I can remember. And listened to many audio books, too. Diane listens to hours of National Public Radio each day. I read the WALL STREET JOURNAL every day. And the BUFFALO NEWS. We’re trying to cut back on MSNBC now that Trump is about to be evicted from the White House. I try to listen to a music CD every day, too.
Just one question. When do you sleep?
Michael, I sleep whenever I can! But I like to stay busy.
I don’t keep track of what I read, unfortunately. At the moment, I can only think of one novel I read this year pre-pandemic, and that’s Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold. It’s a YA fantasy/horror, sort of a Buffy the Werewolf Slayer; a high school girl finds out she has special powers, gathers a group of friends, and tries to protect her town. So, a familiar story arc, but told quite differently from Buffy. I loved this book, maybe the bloodiest I have ever read. (YA!) In fact, I read it again last month, just because I enjoyed it so much, and think about it so often, reliving favorite parts. I would tell anyone who thinks they might like something like this — you will.
After watching a bunch of Vera and Shetland episodes, I decided to try reading something by Ann Cleeves. I probably read her first one first, the beginning of a series about a birder/amateur-detective. I liked it, and ordered another. And another. I ended up reading nothing but Ann Cleeves for months. Her two early series — George & Molly Palmer-Jones and Inspector Ramsay — are good, and her later series — the afore-mentioned Vera and Shetland — are very good. I’ve been skipping around the different series (though reading each one in order), and I’ve read all but one or two in each series now. The way she follows her detectives but also different characters from the book as the stories unfold hits my sweet spot; she works really well for me.
Then a few months ago I decided to break up the Cleeves books with a couple old favorites: Edgar Rice Burroughs and Agatha Christie. I’ve so far reread six early books by each, with great pleasure. I’m reading each in order, the question being which order? For Burroughs I thought about the order the books were published in, but that front-loaded the Tarzan books, so I ended up with the order each book was written in — so if a book consists of more than one story, it gets placed where the last story was written. So far I’ve read A Princess of Mars, The Outlaw of Torn, Tarzan of the Apes, The Gods of Mars, The Return of Tarzan, and At the Earth’s Core.
I did something similar with Christie, but it was easier to compile the original magazine publications than the writing dates, so I went with that. I made a handwritten list of all her works in book publication order, then wrote down the magazine dates for each, then drew arrows moving them around to my approved order. Some also got repositioned for internal chronology. I think my list looks great with all the arrows; unfortunately I needed to write just a tiny bit smaller, because the last two books didn’t fit, ruining its elegance (if I can call it that). My first six Christies are The Mysterious Affair at Styles (book published 1920), The Secret Adversary (1922), Poirot Investigates (1924 UK, 1925 US), Murder on the Links (1923), The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), and The Big Four (1927). The next three will be from 1925, 1926 and 1951.
With the news that a version of Harlan Ellison’s long-rumored anthology The Last Dangerous Visions is being prepared for publication, I pulled out the first two volumes to look at, and am now rereading the first one. No rush, just reading some stories in between other books.
Jeff, I’ve been meaning to read some Edgar Rice Burroughs during the pandemic. Perhaps in 2021. I’ll take a look at RED HOOD. I’m a Buffy fan so that book might appeal to me despite the blood. I’ve read a couple of Christie’s in 2020, but I have more in the Read Real Soon pile.