Lauren B. Lentini

The 5th through 9th days of Christmas proffered little more than laundry, falling on my ass while taking out the garbage, a flu shot and a trip to Joann Fabrics for Cricut supplies, so let’s dispense with that gimmick. All agreed? Moving on. Let’s talk about books instead.

2020 gave us nothing if not more time to read. And yet, thanks to doom-scrolling and TV-watching (and parenting a toddler occasionally), I barely eked out my 20 books for the year, according to GoodReads. GoodReads doesn’t automatically count my audiobooks, though, or my rereads — or a few books I was too embarrassed to tell all my followers about at the time. I think I counted everything, though. This list will be part review and part year-end wrap-up, because one of the things I love about books is remembering what life was like around you while you read them for the first time.

#1: Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

I listened to this book on Audible in January, driving to and from the office with Jordan in the backseat. It feels like a million years ago. It was stunning, emotionally heart-wrenching, and often really hard to choose a side. It was the character I hated throughout the whole book who made me sob at the end. I haven’t watched the miniseries yet, but its still on my list.

#2: Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch

I enjoyed this book, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me with all that has happened since I read it. GoodReads says I finished it on January 19. GoodReads also says I highlighted some pretty funny passages, such as, “The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn’t set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper. Actually there’s no such motto—from my mum’s point of view it was simply inconceivable that anybody would want to eat anything that didn’t burn the inside of your mouth out.” The second book in the series had a waitlist on the Libby app at the time, so I didn’t continue with it, but I’d like to pick it up again.

#3: Paradox Bound, by Peter Clines

I have a love-hate relationship with Peter Clines. His books 14 and The Fold were incredibly enjoyable, but Dead Moon might have gotten thrown across the room if I was reading a physical copy. I also didn’t like his Ex-Heroes series enough to continue past the first one. But I’m a sucker for time travel, and Paradox Bound ended up being pretty fun. It was like he set out to write a Doctor Who book, but he wanted to make it as American as Doctor Who is British. This is another one I listened to in the before-times, and I particularly remember sitting in the parking lot at daycare waiting for a scene to finish. (My audiobook consumption vastly decreased when I stopped commuting, much to my husband’s and our accumulating Audible credits’ consternation.)

#4: Time’s Convert, by Deborah Harkness

I did love the All Souls trilogy, although Harkness never quite managed to recapture the magic of A Discovery of Witches for me. Time’s Convert is the follow-up to that trilogy and follows different characters in the same world. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t grab me. I kind of hated the Discovery of Witches TV show, for which I used a free trial to binge-watch in a week. It completely missed all the subtlety of their romance. Also, I know my husband loves me because he not only sat through the show but also read all three books just because I wanted someone to discuss them with. I won’t be making him read Time’s Convert.

#5: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

I grabbed this for something quick and easy, and it was good. I’m only a quarter of the way through a very long list, and I don’t have more to say about it than that, so I won’t.

#6: Outland, by Dennis E. Taylor

Skipping right over this one, as well, because it was adequate sci-fi that suffered from a huge pacing problem.

#7: Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner

In the early days of self-quarantine, the golden age of social media when everyone was trying to use their talents to make isolation more interesting, one of my Facebook friends proclaimed that she could recommend our next favorite book based on just one that we had loved. I said Little Fires Everywhere. You may have noticed I read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, and LFE is decidedly not that. So I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was completely charmed by this book. It perfectly captured what I loved about LFE. It kept me up late at night trying to find a reasonable stopping point to tear myself away from these characters. Just beautiful.

#8: Midnight Sun, by Stephenie Meyer

I’m not sure what happened between May and August, but there’s a big gap in my list. I know I was rereading Twilight in anticipation of this trainwreck of a sequel, and that’s when I turned off the “Mark as reading on GoodReads” toggle on my Kindle. Maybe it failed to capture something else I read during that time. It was definitely August when I read Midnight Sun, because I devoured a good chunk of it sitting in Jerald’s car with the air conditioner and the stereo cranked during our week-long power outage. I even used the dwindling power in my work laptop to recharge my Kindle. I first found comfort in the Twilight series during the emotionally fraught time after my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, then found I could never read it again, but the timing was right for it to make a reappearance. The less said about the book itself the better, but it was interesting that Stephenie seemed to enjoy writing the car chase scene so much more than the rest of the book.

#9: Fallen, by Lauren Kate

After realizing that sparkly vampires could still suck me in, I embarked on a quest to figure out the formula for making me feel like a 13-year-old reading an issue of Seventeen. Angels were not the key. This book was bad.

#10: Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris

I don’t really get the appeal of Sookie Stackhouse, either, but I might delve into True Blood before this pandemic is over.

#11: The Selection, by Kiera Cass

I kind of enjoyed this one more than I care to admit. I have the second book on hold with the library app. It’s rather like someone had a fever dream while watching The Bachelor and reading The Hunger Games at the same time. I guess that’s a concept that works for me?

#12-#15: Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, by Veronica Roth

These were fine. Whatever. I can tell I’m too old for the teens-save-society genre, because I keep wondering what the hell all the adults are doing while everything is collapsing around them. Then again, we could use a few more headstrong teenagers in our society. I wouldn’t complain. (I should note that it’s still August on my GoodReads timeline.)

#16: The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern

I technically read this one before the not-Hunger Games trilogy, but I wanted to get all the crap out of the way before talking about it. Maybe it was just because I read so much pablum before it, but it was easily the best-written book I read all year. A book about books, what’s not to love? It’s one of those books where you can just sit and soak in the sentences. I read this one during my first staycation, and I luxuriated in every second of it.

#17: Customer Education, by Adam Avramescu

One of the reasons 2020 sucked is because one of my favorite bosses ever (and I’m not just saying that because I expect her to read this) left for another job. I feel like she had a lot left to teach me, so I started reading books about work to try to fill the void.

#18: Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson

I ended up reading this one twice, once to absorb the information and again to take detailed notes and plan my own content audit for 2021. It’s almost here, and I’m tempted to read it a third time. I’ll settle for rereading my notes.

#19: The Last Emperox, by John Scalzi

Scalzi is one of my favorite contemporary sci-fi authors (you may remember him from Redshirts), and the end of the Interdependency trilogy didn’t let me down. I actually re-listened to the first two books before embarking on the third, which took most of the year without the built-in listening time of a daily commute. (That’s the only time you will hear me complain about not having to commute.)

#20: Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

I got sick on Thanksgiving this year, and I ended up coming home and collapsing into bed around 8:00. I woke up a few hours later, slightly less nauseated and completely disinclined to go back to sleep. So I turned to Netflix for some late-night comfort and found myself with Dash & Lily. And I proceeded to watch the. Entire. Series. Then I made Jerald watch it with me a few days later. Then I decided it was probably worth it to to buy the book, since my library doesn’t have it. I think I enjoyed the series more than the book, honestly. The most interesting part of the book was noticing all the easter eggs the series writers threw in, calling back to the book without strictly following the plot points.

Honorable mentions

I spent most of December watching sappy Christmas movies and doing too much online shopping, so I’m not really reading anything right now. I can’t leave without giving a shout-out to some of the books I tried but didn’t finish this year, including:

• Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan. I’ve been trying to read this book for years, after it was gifted to me by a friend and lauded as “blow-your-hair-back good.” This year I decided to give the ebook a try, but after renewing it from the library twice, it refused to let me open it in the Kindle app and I lost my place. A convenient excuse. I still have high hopes of finishing someday.
• Dune, by Frank Herbert. This is one of my husband’s favorites, as well as my mother-in-law’s, and I made a(nother) valiant attempt this year, including a chart of all the names I can never keep straight. With the new movie coming out, I really wanted to finish this time, but I barely got into it.
• How Long ‘til Black Future Month?, by N.K. Jemisin. This is a beautiful collection of short stories by one of my favorite authors, and I really regret not finishing it before it was returned to the library. It’s been unavailable ever since. Maybe I’ll just buy it.
• The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. Funnily enough, a version of the first chapter of this book is one of the stories in the aforementioned short story collection. Jerald and I got this book on Audible with the intention of listening to it together, but we hardly took any long car trips this year. It’s a very rich book, more suitable for long stretches of highway than a quick spin around the block, so it’s waiting in our queue for the right time to dive into it again.
• Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente. I’m not sure why I didn’t finish this one. It’s very short, and it’s right up my alley. Jerald may have ruined it for me by telling me its premise is the same as an episode of Rick & Morty. I hate that show.

2021

My WordPress app is trying to tell me this post has gone on too long, but it’s New Year’s Eve, so what else am I doing? We always have a quiet NYE, even without social distancing. My 2021 bullet journal hasn’t arrived (and I’m contemplating burning the 2020 one), so I haven’t set any goals yet, reading or otherwise. How many books should I aim for? What should go on my list? What were the best/worst things you read this year?

I don’t want to jinx anything, so I’ll just say that, whatever the coming year brings, I believe in you, and I believe in us. Godspeed.