2020 in books

I read a bunch this year.  And despite averaging a pace of about three books a week in the end, I still feel like I didn't read enough, and I definitely didn't read nearly enough nonfiction. (seriously, am I just going to keep beating myself up and feeling like an intellectual failure because I prefer fiction? a couple decades of the trend suggest so, but it's getting kind of stale too.) I got better at abandoning books, I learned I can uncritically absorb mediocre het romances when unwell, there was a month or so where I also entirely abandoned novels to consume a whole lot of very good horror podcasts. 

 

Quick reviews of a brief handful of what I liked best. 

 

Know My Name by Chanel Miller fucked me up the most. The author is the person previously known as Emily Doe from the People v Turner case, and she was fucking brilliant, remarkably vulnerable, furious and seventy other things.   I know everything's broken, but it still relally hammered home how easy it is to fall through the cracks, to be undermined, to be required to be a perfect victim and/or survivor and to be taught to question your own experience.  Similarly, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl: A Memoir by Jeannie Vanasco is about a woman reconnecting with a childhood friend who raped her and asking him questions about why he did it and fighting with and sometimes noticing she's failing to fight her impulse towards forgiveness.  

 

A Wizards Guide to Defensive Baking, Paladin's Grace and The Hollow Ones all by T Kingfisher.   In order, a children's book written for adults, and contained a minor character death that straight up made me cry; a believable romance between two people traumatized by their respective pasts and a creepy as fuck horror story.   I usually try to leave myself very short reviews to remind myself of how I felt about books and the three for these are "Carnivorous sourdough"  "THE FUCK"  and "keyboard smash."  Not a keyboard smash, the words keyboard smash.   Apparently, past omnia wasn't too worried about forgetting these and she was very correct.  

 

Two really good graphic novels I read were a graphic novel version of Laurie Anderson's Speak, by one of my favorite comic artists and authors, Emily Carroll.   (if you haven't checked out their work and enjoy horror, I strongly suggest getting your hands on Through the Woods)  and Noelle Stevenson's The Fire Never Goes Out, their autobiography which talks about identity and mental health.  It feels a little weird to feel so strongly about a memoir of a person fifteen years younger than me, but it was still an emotional gut punch of a book.   "It feels like a piece has been ripped out and left behind but you can't tell which piece and you can't look back to check or you will surely fall apart"

 

Two really good short story collections; The Mythic Dream ed by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe and A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope ed by Patrice Caldwell.  I find it difficult to sum up anthologies, because they're often wildly varied within a given theme both in quality and type. These were both excellent collections, featuring bunches of authors I adore, and well-centered around their original premise.