yearender: things we read in 2020
Note: Share your best reads in the Yearend survey—still open! Thank you in advance. :)
Manila, 27 December—One of the few bright spots of this year was the amount of reading I surprisingly pulled off. Some favorites:
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite - [entry] Lesbians who are into astronomy, writing and embroidery, what else could you ask for? Slow burn beautifully written. Felt a lot like Portrait but in book form. [Kindle]
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon - [entry] Oh to be able to read this book again for the first time—it’s that good. Lush world-building! Dragons! Complex female characters! Queens! Women warriors! And a breath-taking slow burn queer romance at the heart of it. What a fantastic quarantine read. This definitely helped me get through initial pandemic anxieties. An exquisite escape in book form.
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed - [entry] Warm as a hug, tender and funny and heartbreaking and insightful.
The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski - [ongoing] Got this book as a Christmas present (thanks, love). So so good. Review forthcoming probably, but I’m trying to delay finishing it haha.
Some of the online reads this year that moved me, in case you haven’t come across them this year:
The poem Atlas by UA Fanthorpe
What is ‘time-blindedness’ and do you have it? via The Cut
That discomfort you’re feeling is grief via Harvard Business Review
The poem Atlantis by Eavan Boland
Mourning the Letters That Will No Longer Be Written, and Remembering the Great Ones That Were via The New York Times
This piece of fandom meta about The Old Guard.
This Kate Winslet profile by The Hollywood Reporter
Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet via Technology Review
This poem by Sue Hyon Bae
“I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation via BuzzFeed News
Your ‘surge capacity’ is depleted—it’s why you feel awful via Medium
The Incredibly True Story of Renting a Friend in Tokyo via Pocket
A heart is not a nation via Book Forum
The good enough job via Refinery29
Do You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score? via New Republic
The Year We Lost via The Atlantic
It’s been quite the year for thought-provoking pieces. Par for the course, I think, given how 2020 panned out. Hope you find something interesting and useful from my list, at least :)
Did I miss anything? Taking recs via the Yearend survey—still open! Thank you in advance.
Thanks for making it this far.
XO,
K