Me, looking back at 2020: well… that happened.
It feels like this year has happened both very slowly, and very, very fast. Time whirled past me in a blur of images and colors, and sometimes, it fell away like petals from a blown flower, numbingly unhurried. But always, the inexorable tides of time receded into nothingness when I was lost inside a book.
There were many days this year when it seemed like the world was falling down around me, when I felt unmoored, hideously lonely and unsteady as a reflection in boiling water, missing home and my family and feeling sick with it, but stories always dulled the edge of my despair, even if it were only for the space of a few hundred pages. They took my mind out of its iron cage, and let it swim in a pool of make-believe wonders and terrors. They coaxed me from my sulks, and threw my troubles into the air, leaving them to be carried off by the winds. Stories found me sinking beneath the surface of a cavernous gloom, slowly dropping out of sight of heat and light and air, and stretched out to me, offering me a life buoy.
This post is a thank you to the stories that kept me sane and kept me company. Stories that I honestly cannot imagine surviving this year without. So, without further ado, here are my favorite books of 2020.
P.S. Books with LGBTQIA+ representation have a little rainbow flag emoji next to the title! (Disclaimer: it’s like, pretty much all of them.)
Continue reading “The Best Books I Read in 2020”