My Favorite Reads of 2020

Alexei Kivshenko “Military Council at Fili” (1880)

When 2020 began who could have predicted what we were in for? You might think that in the midst of stay-at-home orders and quarantines I would have had a banner year in reading. The reality is that I had to spend a lot of time working from home and planning for how to reopen our school, so my brain was often too tired to read. However, I still did manage to have a fairly robust year of reading, and I met most of my reading goals.

Here are a few thoughts as I reflect on my year in reading (statistics from Goodreads):

• I finished 39 books this year, reading almost 13,000 pages (12,914 to be exact). That’s an increase of 9 books and 262 pages over last year. Of the 39 books, 18 were nonfiction and 21 were fiction. The shortest book I read was The Light Princess by George MacDonald and the longest, of course, was War and Peace.
• I surpassed my goal of 36 books and completed all the reading challenges I participated in except for the Deal Me In Short Story Challenge. The pandemic disrupted that weekly challenge and I was never able to make up lost ground. I only read 15 out of 52 short stories, so I plan on bringing that challenge into 2021 because I love the Deal Me In concept of choosing a short story from a deck of cards. The challenges I completed were the European Reading Challenge, the Mount TBR Reading Challenge, the Russian Literature Challenge, and the What’s In a Name Challenge.
• I am still working on my five year Classics Club challenge, and in 2020 I read ten books for year four of the challenge. I only have nine books left before my deadline of October 25, 2021. Unfortunately, I have not been able to blog about the books as I finished them, but I still plan on completing the challenge.

As I looked back to make my list of the books I enjoyed most in 2020, I noticed a couple of things. First, only 3 of my favorites were novels. That doesn’t mean I didn’t read a lot of novels, but a huge chunk of my fiction reading this year was from the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, and I grouped them together as one book on my list of favorites. The Jack Reacher books were a good escape during quarantine and I read 8 books in the series in 2020, enjoying every one.

Second, I find that most of my favorites this year were rereads. Maybe I appreciated the comfort of reading familiar books in 2020, or maybe it was just an off year for new titles. Regardless, here are my favorites of the year, in reverse order of how much I enjoyed reading (or rereading) them.

1. The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life by James Martin
2. Praying the Liturgy of the Hours: A Personal Journey by Timothy Gallagher
3. Deacons and the Church by Owen Cummings
4. The Liturgical Year Volume 1 by Adrien Nocent
5. Armchair Mystic: Easing into Contemplative Prayer by Mark E. Thibodeaux
6. Jack Reacher books 12-19 by Lee Child:
   • Nothing To Lose
   • Gone Tomorrow
   • 61 Hours
   • Worth Dying For
   • The Affair
   • A Wanted Man
   • Never Go Back
   • Personal
7. Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina by Michael Casey
8. Reading God’s Word Today by George Martin
9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
10. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Happy New Reading Year! Many blessings on you and your family.