Books Read 2020

Goodreads (Amazon affiliated book review website) has gamified book reading with a “contest” the last several years. At the beginning of the year, you set yourself a goal of reading X books. In theory, you then Tweet or whatever all about it and race your friends. Or followers, since you probably don’t have many if you Tweet a lot.

I have been participating for several years. Not because I have no friends, I do and I have posted not one single tweet, ever. I use it as a way to track what I have read. Out of a morbid sense of, “gee where did all the time go?”

In January 2020, I picked the number 52 as my goal. I had picked that in 2019 and missed it by 3 books. I feel I could squeeze in a couple more and make it to 52. Of course, we all know what happened next. That gave me some unexpected, but welcome free time and I hit 80 books instead.

What kind of books? A lot of fiction, history, woodworking. roughly:

• Woodworking, furniture making, or historical furniture – 9 books
• Alternate History – 11
• British Naval Thrillers – 5
• Sci-Fi – 47
• Non-fiction, history, science, biography – 13

Nothing too shocking there I suppose. The year started off with the tail end of binging a new genre (for me), British Naval Thrillers. Lately republished from the 40s and 50s I guess, mostly written by veterans, these are pretty good brain candy even if the characters are a little wooden and tropish. The action is good because these guys were there. Recommended. Look for Alan Evans and Antony Melville-Ross. You can find more riffing off their Amazon pages for similar authors.

And here’s the list: