Back by request, the books I read in 2020 in the order I read them, with a few recommendations from the bunch:

2020 Books

• Duluth – Gore Vidal
• La Place de La Concorde Suisse – John McPhee
• Founding Brothers (reread) – Joseph Ellis
• The Lady In The Lake – Raymond Chandler
• Basin and Range – John McPhee
• Samuel Johnson Is Indignant – Lydia Davis
• Caffeine – Michael Pollan
• The Drowned World – JG Ballard
• Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
• 50s: The Story of A Decade – The New Yorker
• The Complete Stories of JG Ballard – JG Ballard
• Words of Radiance – Brandon Sanderson
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey – Robert MacFarlane
• The Way of the Iceman  – Wim Hof
• The Road (reread) – Cormac McCarthy
• The Boys In The Boat – Daniel James Brown
• On Writing (reread) – Stephen King
• Irons In The Fire – John McPhee
• Ion – Plato
• A Journal Of A Plague Year – Daniel Dafoe
• Simple Fly Fishing (reread) – Yvon Chouinard
• The Barbary Plague – Marilyn Chase
• Mother American Night – John Perry Barlow
• The Kalevala
• John Coulter: His Years In The Rockies – Burton Harris
• The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patrica Highsmith
• Augustus – John Williams
• The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
• The 60s: A Story of A Decade – The New Yorker
• The Jazz of Physics – Stephon Alexander
• Rationality from AI to Zombies (reread) – Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Classic Krakauer – John Krakauer
• Hello America – JG Ballard
• Billionaire Wilderness – Justin Farrell
• The Golden Bough – James George Frazer
• Entangled Life – Merlin Sheldrake
• Lost Nation – Jeffrey Lent
• Silk Parachute – John McPhee
• Night Boat To Tangier – Kevin Barry
• The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler
• Desert – Anonymous
• Breath – James Nestor
• One Man’s Meat – EB White
• Kasumakura – Natsume Soseki
• The Abstainer – Ian McGuire
• Venus In Furs (reread) – Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
• Meditation: The First and Last Freedom – Osho
• Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer
• Authority – Jeff VanderMeer
• Acceptance – Jeff VanderMeer
• Dracula – Bram Stoker
• Just Enough Leibling – AJ Leibling
• A Canticle For Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller Jr.
• Ready Player Two – Ernst Cline

Recommendations

Fiction

This past year I read quite a bit more fiction than usual. In addition to enjoying light reads like Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe detective stories, I also found myself drawn to more science fiction. For example, Jeff VanderMeer’s genre-bending Southern Reach Trilogy, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle For Leibowitz. I picked up VanderMeer’s Annihilation on the strength of a recommendation that described the book as ‘mind-altering’, and I found this rare superlative to hold reasonably true. VandeerMeer’s paints the strange Southern Reach environment itself as one of the main characters in his trilogy and I found his rich descriptions of the setting hypnotic, in the first book in particular.

New Fiction

I try to pick one or two new releases off the shelf each year. Night Boat To Tangier by Kevin Barry was the better of the two I read this year, both by Irishman. The other was The Abstainer by Ian McGuire whose debut, The North Water, I’d recommend over The Abstainer. The strength of Barry’s dialogue in Night Boat sets it apart.

Novel

Lost Nation by Jeffrey Lent was gifted to me and it proved to be one of my favorites of the year. I look forward to reading more from Lent.

Short Non-Fiction

John McPhee is one of my favorite non-fiction writers. After reading several more McPhee’s this year, I am close to completing his entire catalog. Irons In The Fire, a collection of several short accessible essays, is a good introduction for those getting their feet wet with McPhee. Some of McPhee’s writing on scientific subjects is dense, for example his works on geology, but everything in Irons is much lighter.

I could just as easily recommend collections I read this year from The New Yorker progenitors EB White, with One Man’s Meat, or AJ Libeling, with Just Enough Leibling. When you have decades of great writing to pick from, the anthologies are bound to good.

New Non-Fiction

Merlin Sheldrake gives a fascinating look at the oft-overlooked world of mycology in Entangled Life. The subject itself is illuminating and Sheldrake also shines though as academic who can effectively position a potentially abstruse topic in a compelling and approachable way for a popular audience. Sheldrake himself seems an interesting personality and I hope he continues to expand on mycology for a popsci audience.

(2019 Recommendations here)

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This post 2020 Reading Recap and Recommendations originally appeared on williamwickey.com.