This year has been a bit of an odd reading year. On one hand I've read some books I've absolutely entirely fallen in love with whilst at the same time I've read a few books (and am still reading now) that are of average length but have taken me what felt like an age to read (Children of Time). I also read 10% of a book (The Stone Man) this year and hated so much that I stop there but still had to leave myself a review. I did manage 7,559 pages of 23 books (I'm excluding the 10% book… ).

My absolute favourite this year (and goes straight into my most favourite books of all time) was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers - this is the first book, that I can remember, that has made me laugh (multiple times) out loud(!) and cry.

Instead of my usual listing of all the reviews, since I now publish all my reviews directly on this web site, instead I've included some statistical breakdown of the books I've read.

Longest book: Children of Time (Children of Time #1) - 609 pages

Shortest book: All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman - 54 pages

Quickest read: 4 days

Longest read/slog: 54 days

Diversity of authors:

  • Women: 8 - 6 of the books I read in 2020 we written by the same two authors (still counted as unique authors)
  • Men: 11

Those who were not white authors, I believe there was only one to my discredit. Frustratingly some of my favourite authors are women and non-white women, so I really must do better to find more books from this background.

On that note, the majority of the books I read this year were from the 2010s era, though I also know this is related to two of my favourite authors this year publishing their books during this period: Becky Chambers and Cara Hunter. Though I do enjoy the classics (understandably as they've lasted the test of time).

Rated books

5 stars

4 stars

Books by decade

1930
1939: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

1940
1943: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

1960
1963: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
1966: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
1967: The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov

1980
1982: Spectrum Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner by William Tang

1990
1997: Stardust by Gaiman, Neil

2010
2012: The Stone Man by Luke Smitherd
2012: Speccy Nation by Dan Whitehead
2013: The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike, #1) by Robert Galbraith
2014: All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman
2015: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
2015: Children of Time (Children of Time #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
2016: A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2) by Becky Chambers
2016: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
2018: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
2018: Close to Home (DI Adam Fawley, #1) by Cara Hunter
2019: Last Christmas by Greg Wise
2019: All the Rage by Cara Hunter
2019: In the Dark (DI Adam Fawley, #2) by Cara Hunter
2019: Exhalation by Ted Chiang
2019: The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2) by Margaret Atwood

2020
2020: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
2020: Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5) by Martha Wells