Books I Read in 2020

A year in review

2021-03-25

Summary

This is an installment of my annual “Books I Read in XXXX” year-in-review series. It follows the previous one.

So, 2020 was horrible. My mental health took a serious blow over the course of the year and I found myself, for the first time in my life, unable to read. I couldn’t focus. And when I could, I couldn’t tolerate the feeling of somebody else’s words in my head.

It felt like a blow to my identity to be honest. I’ve always been an avid and constant reader. I’ve always measured time, and progress, and growth in books. I had to spent a lot of time figuring out who I am when I’m not doing the things that make me who I am.

At the beginning of 2020 I set a goal to read 100 books. Third year in a row making this ambitious goal. Third year failing. But it was my first time failing by such a large margain. In previous years, I read 83, 79, and 97 books.

This year I read about 50. If you count the ones I didn’t finish.

A lot of them were bookclub books that I agreed to commit to in order to try forcing myself back into the habit. I don’t remember most of them. Others are audiobooks that I started and then quit. And a lot of them are RPG rulebooks, which I tend to read a lot of anyway, but this year they provided a weird and very comforting solace of imagination without narrative.

If you’re on goodreads, feel free to follow me. I try to leave a review of everything I read.

Here are some numbers.

How many did I start vs. how many did I finish:

I am an unapologetic book putter downer. Life is too short to waste time on something you’re not enjoying¹. Last year I abandoned 15 books. Which means that the number of books I start but don’t finish roughly scales with the number of books I do finish. This year I did half of both compared to last year.

Format:

I’m an ebook purist. I read print ebooks and I read audio ebooks, and that’s about it.

I read a couple physical books this year. Mostly comics, and a couple software books from the library at work.

Pages:

Smallest number of pages is fake. Goodreads often counts the number of CDs or “parts” in an audiobook as pages. Don’t really know what to do about that.

The actual smallest number of pages is 16, and that belongs to The Quiet Year a beautiful rpg rulebook about story telling and map drawing and enduring in the face of imminent disaster.

The longest book, at 849 pages, was 11/22/63 by Stephen King, which I really enjoyed, but about which–like most of King’s work–I ultimately have kind of mixed feelings about.

Awards

• Best book on software design: A Philosophy Of Software Design. This is probably the best book I’ve ever read on software design.

• Worst classic: How to Win Friends & Influence People. How about “How to be a psychopath?” Actually, the very first bit on morals was pretty good. But the rest of the book was all manipulation and gross.

• Best book about gender/sex: Born Both: An Intersex Life. A great book about how sex is often as arbitrary as gender.

• Best YA Feminist Fantasy book: Tess of the Road: A young heroine takes to road to slay a dragon and the dragon is internalized mysogony.

• Best RPG: Troika! Troika really captured my imagination this year. The thing that it does that is really unique is eschew a setting or even classes in the traditional sense for a table of 36 unique backgrounds which, taken as a whole, start to suggest some kind of a cohesive universe. It is also immensely hackable and modifiable, something the creators encourage, and a very active community has sprung up around it on discord and itch.io.

  • Runnerup: I’m Sorry Did You Say Street Magic. The loveliness of this book’s focus on narrative world-building and storytelling is matched by its beautiful layout and aesthetics.

• Best Fantasy: The Blade Itself. Absolutely riveting characters. I was mesmerized the whole time.

• Best Management Book: Managing Humans. A subjective choice because one highlight for the year was convincing the author, Michael Lopp, to come speak and answer questions at the bookclub meeting after we read this book together.

• Worst Book: The Boys. Awful everything. I don’t know why I bothered picking it up. I hated the TV show too.

• Best “Everything” book: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Ourselves. Part memoir, part cookbook, part philosophy, part anarchist political manifesto, part self-help, and oh yeah. Managing people and ourselves. I would pay money to live inside this guy’s head for a day. Guess I’ll have to settle for reading all the rest of his books.

Data

Last year I kind of went through my list of books by hand.

This year I grabbed a csv export and installed the truly awesome csvkit and just had it display and summarize the data for me:

1. “Title”

Type of data:          Text
Contains null values:  False
Unique values:         51
Longest value:         101 characters
Most common values:    11/22/63 (1x)
                       Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations (1x)
                       We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump (1x)
                       The Shadow/Batman (1x)
                       The Witches Are Coming (1x)

2. “Date Added”

Type of data:          Date
Contains null values:  False
Unique values:         39
Smallest value:        2020-01-02
Largest value:         2020-12-22
Most common values:    2020-01-02 (3x)
                       2020-01-19 (3x)
                       2020-01-18 (2x)
                       2020-02-26 (2x)
                       2020-03-02 (2x)

3. “Date Read”

Type of data:          Date
Contains null values:  True (excluded from calculations)
Unique values:         37
Smallest value:        2020-01-07
Largest value:         2021-01-06
Most common values:    None (6x)
                       2020-05-04 (3x)
                       2020-02-23 (2x)
                       2020-02-25 (2x)
                       2020-01-27 (2x)

4. “My Rating”

Type of data:          Number
Contains null values:  False
Unique values:         6
Smallest value:        0
Largest value:         5
Sum:                   164
Mean:                  3.216
Median:                3
StDev:                 1.616
Most common values:    3 (14x)
                       5 (13x)
                       4 (12x)
                       0 (6x)
                       2 (3x)

5. “Exclusive Shelf”

Type of data:          Text
Contains null values:  False
Unique values:         3
Longest value:         17 characters
Most common values:    read (44x)
                       abandoned (6x)
                       currently-reading (1x)

6. “Bookshelves”

Type of data:          Text
Contains null values:  True (excluded from calculations)
Unique values:         37
Longest value:         64 characters
Most common values:    comic-book, ebook (4x)
                       audio-book (3x)
                       abandoned (3x)
                       rpg-rulebook (3x)
                       ebook (2x)

7. “Number of Pages”

Type of data:          Number
Contains null values:  True (excluded from calculations)
Unique values:         45
Smallest value:        5
Largest value:         849
Sum:                   11,426
Mean:                  243.106
Median:                224
StDev:                 174.425
Most common values:    None (4x)
                       160 (2x)
                       224 (2x)
                       192 (2x)
                       849 (1x)

Row count: 51