Now that reading is having a moment, I'm gonna make a thread of the books I read this year. Not a list of recommendations, just my own lil 2020 journey. (I will not apologize for my tastes, which can be summed up as "I don't like being sad or thinking hard.")

1. Station Eleven by @EmilyMandel. I read this over New Years, before a book about a civilization-ending global pandemic was too on-the-nose. It's beautifully written and ultimately hopeful about humanity despite the subject. Pretty freakin' great!

2. Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen. No one does Florida better. Gave my copy to @LiamPierce in NOLA so I wouldn't have to carry it on the plane home. http://www.carlhiaasen.com/book-detail.shtml?bid=9

3. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu). Needed a transcontinental flight without TV or wifi to slog through the first third. Fascinating payoff but definitely harder sci-fi than I prefer.

4. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. VanderMeer's books are like bizarre dreams — ethereal, haunting, hard to describe, narratively ambiguous. Not sure if I'll follow through with the rest of the trilogy. (I previously read Borne and preferred that.)

5. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. Yes, I inherited a Reese's Book Club selection about lady spies. It's got a more accurate depiction of PTSD in this than most WWI/WWII fiction I've read. At 500+ pages, it felt longer than it needed to be, but I liked it.

6. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. Another end-times book! Mostly reads like Pratchett; the obvious Gaiman touches are the medieval witch-burning and the Four Horsemen and demons made of maggots. Pretty good!

7. Life Itself by Roger Ebert. Started this 3-4 years ago and never finished it until this weekend, which is crazy, because it gets better as it goes on. "Nil by Mouth" remains a perfect piece of writing. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/nil-by-mouth

One more thing from Life Itself: Ebert's description of visiting a lake in Wisconsin in summer ("The weather was one degree above cool.") has stayed in my head for years since I read it. He swept his arm over a region and casually tossed a bullseye.

8. Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. Supernatural LA noir in which the antihero returns from Hell to get revenge on the magicians responsible for his banishment there. Delicious garbage. I will return to the series the next time I get bored with reading.

9. Fleishman is in Trouble by @taffyakner. It’s not at all my preferred genre (family of privilege falls apart), but it casts a wider net and is much funnier and more empathetic than ostensibly similar books. It’s excellent! (The lesson, as always: Read everything by Taffy.)

10. Point B by @drewmagary. In the 10+ years since we blogged together, I've gotten burnt out by writing 3 times & changed careers twice, while Drew has written 5 books in 4 genres. It's fine, I'm fine.

Anyhoo, Point B is an escapist page-turner. Buy it! https://www.amazon.com/Point-B-teleportation-love-story/dp/B087HC32K2

11. The Prodigal by Derek Walcott. This was beautiful, but 100+ pages of metaphors is a looooong way to go without a plot or characters. (I'm not really equipped to read book-length poems; if that sort of thing is your bag, the payoff at the end is great.)

12. Vacationland by John @hodgman. I first read this a year ago, but read it again because I was in Maine last week. It is self-aware and self-deprecating in the Hodgman way, but there's also real warmth and kindness to it.

13. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. My guess is Neil overheard someone say, “There’s NO WAY he could write something MORE goth than Sandman,” and Neil got pissed and was like “Victorian fashion in a magic London sewer, baby.” Extremely my jam.

14. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. What an absolute delight! Funny and heartwarming and the perfect antidote to both my reading slump and the malaise of, y'know, (*gestures at everything*)

15. Interior Chinatown by @charles_yu. This book is GREAT and fun and left a huge smile on my face. Written with huge empathy not just for the Asian-American experience, but for parents, adults, humans in general. Also it won the dang National Book Award, you don't need my rec.

I don't think a single page has affected me as deeply all year

16. I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell. Memoir about the CBGB punk scene from the Television/Voidoids frontman. Dude can write! Very artful telling of “Drugs are bad, I was a mess, what amazing sex I had.”

(please do not inject cocaine into your arm!! even if your girlfriend is a coke dealer)