I Read 86 Books in 2020 And All I Got Was This T-Shirt

Janet Frishberg
2 min readMar 18, 2021

--

The books I read + loved in 2020.

Note: Books are not stack ranked within their categories.

Top 6

  • Real Life…Brandon Taylor
  • Women Who Run With the Wolves…Clarissa Pinkola Estés
  • Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl…Jeannie Vanasco
  • The Fifth Season…N. K. Jemisin
  • Drifts…Kate Zambreno
  • Your Silence Will Not Protect You…Audre Lorde

Books I Am Still Thinking About (They Are Very Powerful)

  • Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls…Nina Renata Aron
  • Magical Negro…Morgan Parker
  • Weather…Jenny Offill
  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous…Ocean Vuong
  • The Friend…Sigrid Nunez
  • In the Dream House…Carmen Maria Machado
  • Emergent Strategy…adrienne maree brown
  • Sacred Economics…Charles Eisenstein
  • The Answers…Catherine Lacey
  • The Stone Sky…N.K. Jemisin

I Keep Recommending These Books

  • Luster…Raven Leilani
  • The Undying…Anne Boyer
  • The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness…Sarah Ramey
  • Circe…Madeline Miller
  • The Fire Next Time…James Baldwin
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation…Ottessa Moshfegh

Book That Gave Me Permission As A Writer

  • The Other Side…Lacy M. Johnson
  • Small Fry…Lisa Brennan-Jobs
  • Places I’ve Taken My Body…Molly McCully Brown
  • New Waves…Kevin Nguyen
  • Against Memoir…Michelle Tea
  • Good Morning, Midnight…Jean Rhys
  • Intimations…Zadie Smith
  • The Collected Schizophrenias…Esme Weijun Wang
  • Certain American States…Catherine Lacey
  • A Star is Bored…Byron Lane
  • False Papers…André Aciman
  • My Husband…Rumena Buzarowska
  • Mother Winter…Sophia Shalmiyev
  • Not That Bad…Ed: Roxane Gay
  • Make It Scream Make It Burn…Leslie Jamison
  • Future Sex…Emily Witt
  • Uncanny Valley…Anna Wiener
  • Big Friendship…Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

I’ll Take Engrossing Novels for 500, Trebek

  • My Dark Vanessa…Kate Elizabeth Russell
  • Coventry…Rachel Cusk
  • We The Animals…Justin Torres
  • Such a Fun Age…Kiley Reid
  • The Immortalists…Chloe Benjamin
  • An American Marriage…Tayari Jones
  • Stoner…John Williams

These Were Just Really Good Books

  • Educated…Tara Westover
  • Passing for Human…Liana Finck
  • In the Field Between Us…Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison
  • Exhalation…Ted Chiang
  • The Obelisk Gate…N.K. Jemisin
  • The Paper Menagerie…Ken Liu
  • Go Tell It On The Mountain…James Baldwin
  • So We Can Glow…Leesa Cross-Smith
  • Deluge…Leila Chatti
  • The Crying Book…Heather Christle
  • Just Mercy…Bryan Stevenson
  • Stories of Your Life and Others…Ted Chiang
  • Saga Vol 1–9…Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Books That Taught Me Something(s) Necessary

  • Before And After The Book Deal…Courtney Maum
  • Beating Endo…Iris Orbuch and Amy Stein
  • Eyes of the Gorgon…Jaffa Vernon Frank
  • The Gift…Lewis Hyde
  • Writing Down the Bones…Natalie Goldberg (reread)
  • If the Buddha Dated…Charlotte Kasl (reread)
  • Making the Gods Work for You…Caroline Casey
  • How To Be An Antiracist…Ibram X. Kendi
  • The Smell of Rain on Dust…Martín Prechtel
  • Recollections of My Nonexistence…Rebecca Solnit
  • Funny Weather…Olivia Laing
  • The Power of Receiving…Amanda Owen
  • Tell Me How It Ends…Valeria Luiselli
  • Come As You Are…Emily Nagoski
  • Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race…Reni Eddo-Lodge
  • Mating in Captivity…Esther Perel

Books That Kind of Broke My Brain But In A Good Way (I Think…)

  • The Art of Cruelty…Maggie Nelson
  • Indelicacy…Amina Cain
  • Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You In Your Life…Yiyun Li
  • Taipei…Tao Lin

--

--