Despite a global pandemic I somehow still managed to read some great books – here are some of my favorites reads in 2020 out of the 79 I got to this year.

Let’s start off with some newer releases…

• The Deep, Rivers Solomon (and the music it’s inspired by: ‘The Deep’ by clipping)
• The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel
• The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay
• Conjure Women, Afia Atakara
• The Forest of Enchantments, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (it’s the Ramayana from Sita’s perspective)
• Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, Deepa Anappara
• Breath, James Nestor
• The Summer Book, Tove Jansson (yes, save this to read in the summer)
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• Ninth Street Women, Mary Gabriel (a tome of inspiring female artists, worth it)

and ya’ll… did you know about these things called Classics? They are books that many people have loved for a long long time. If you start off by avoiding the dead white men they become much more palatable than your high school English teacher might have made them out to be.

• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (and the Bronte biopic ‘To Walk Invisible’)
• Love in a Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

…and these enchanting middle-grade/young adult books soothed my mind with nostalgia and delighted my imagination.

• Nevermoor, Wundersmith, and Hollowpox, Jessica Townsend (BIG TIME favorites of the year)
• The Hazel Wood and The Night Country, Melissa Albert
• The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series, Maryrose Wood
• The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
• Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
• The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett

and a few more favorites in the arts…

• Royal Swedish Ballet performing Alexander Ekman’s work on Marquee.TV
• The Prom on Netflix: I love how they chose to adapt the staged show to film.
• Hamilton on Disney+
• Broadway Bounty Hunter, Original Cast Recording
• Weekly showings from the Doug Varone and Dancers archives earlier this year
• Over The Garden Wall on Hulu: I will watch this every Autumn till the end of time now.
• Dior Cruise 2021 fashion show: no really, it is a b e a u t i f u l performance.
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron: yes this is another book but you can READ the book or you can DO the book and I did the later with a small group of inspired humans and got so much out of it.

What were your favorite reads of the year?