In January I set two reading goals. In my Not 20 for 2020 list, I included an intention to read four books a month. On Goodreads I set a slightly higher goal of reading 55 books. Goodreads reports that I’ve read 80 books. That’s 145% of my 55 book goal, 24,874 pages, and 32 books more than I read last year. That doesn’t include the false starts, books I put down when I couldn’t connect, or the books I’m currently reading. Welp, the pandemic has at least been good for my reading!
While I haven’t done a reading round-up review since September, before Thanksgiving I put together a list of books that would make great gifts. I’ve read another 15 books since then, but I thought I’d end the year by compiling my 2020 5-star reviews.
Book titles link to Amazon for more info + easy purchasing. Please note: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn from qualifying purchases.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My first 2020 read remained my favorite all year. Love this book, a magical (“m-word”) ode to stories, to story lovers and story tellers. She even weaves in the storytelling involved in video games, a field with which I have little experience. I rarely reread, but the stories within stories and the connections between them that eventually become apparent deserve another go.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Mesmerizing. I don’t know what a singing crawdad sounds like, but my brain buzzed with the heavy-hot song of cicadas as I read this beautiful book. It was a fascinating back-to-back companion to The Giver of Stars, both about women who don’t fit in, who balk against cultural standards to live their own lives.
Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God by Sarah Bessey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve now read all of Sarah’s books and this is her best. Oh-so-vulnerable, gut-wrenching, thoughtful, loving… Bravo, Sarah, for writing your journey so that we may be blessed through your suffering.
“May you be swept off your feet by the goodness and welcome of God, the ferocious love and friendship of Jesus, the delight and disruptions of the Holy Spirit. May you love because you were loved first” (211)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Love! Of course I’ve seen both movies countless times (prefer the Gene Wilder version), but reading the book was so much fun. I can’t believe it took me so long to get to it.
Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN by Tara Brach
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Life-changing! RAIN is hard, important work, learning to Recognize my feelings, Allow them to just be (rather than stuffing or numbing them), Investigating how they feel in my body, and Nurturing my inner self. As a life-long Christian, I feel like I just got a crash-course in prayer that the Church never provided.
“Simply put, RAIN (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture) awakens mindfulness and compassion, applies them to the places where we are stuck, and untangles emotional suffering.”
I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you are a white Christian, do I have a book for you! Brown has written from her heart and her head, from her experience, from her place in the shadow of hope. Sit with this one. Listen hard. Drop your defenses. Take notes. Ponder and pray. Then commit to do something to work toward change.
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Book of Longings is the fictional account of Ana, a strong woman with a largeness inside her to be a voice, to fill others’ ears with the words she writes from the holy of holies inside her. She is also the wife of Jesus.
I wasn’t sure I could go there with a married Jesus; it doesn’t offend scripturally, but it sure bucks tradition. Kidd writes in the author’s notes that she recognized the audacity of the goal in writing this story. But the story is fully Ana’s, and with her, I fell in love with a human Jesus whose humanity often gets lost in the religious focus on His divinity. I wept while He died in a way that, with its familiarity, I don’t weep nearly enough when I read the Bible.
“All shall be well,” Yaltha had told me, and when I’d recoiled at how trite and superficial that sounded, she’d said, “I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There’s a place in you that is inviolate. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of.”
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Some of the most uniquely vivid characters I’ve encountered in recent reads, and another mind-bending illustration of how our lives can be so incredibly intertwined even without our recognition of it.
“…and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.”
“But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, ‘Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God’s child. And I. Am. Still. Here.”
Dear Martin by Nic Stone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading this book during a week of protests over another cop-involved shooting of a black man… Let’s say it was timely reading and I felt angry, sad, confused, heartbroken, challenged. I appreciate that, as the author tried to work out her own questions and feelings about the devastating state of race relations in America, she provided a well-rounded picture of its complexities.
Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today by Joan D. Chittister
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So much wisdom! I first read this book more than a decade ago for a spiritual disciplines seminary class that I audited. I picked it up again since the pandemic erased my daily routines and I thought it could offer a much-needed perspective. Amazing that Benedict’s rule, written in sixth-century Italy to establish order among monastics, still has so much to say to life in 2020 (another 30 years after Sister Joan wrote this book).
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read this as part of a grad-level writing class called “Writing into the Unknown.” The professor used selections from Eliot as epigraphs to every class session since Eliot writes so eloquently about time. You can also find it read by Sir Alec Guiness on YouTube.
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of my all-time favorites, as I read it this time I paid close attention to her use of language and storytelling. Lamott’s writing is so unbelievably good. With her reverent irreverence, she makes her conversion to Christianity accessible to even the most doubtful.
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My favorite Backman book yet! Life and death, loneliness and love, isolation and connection, this book about idiots, about anxious people, is truly about all of us and our greatest needs: to be seen and known and loved, and to be allowed to see and know and love in return. Backman’s storytelling style, the way he breaks in to tell his readers what’s coming, or shed new light, or change the paradigm, is fantastic. His comparison/contrasts and his humor make this book so readable I couldn’t put it down.
“…we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.”
