Since starting my degree, I’ve found myself wanting to expand my horizons and incorporate types of literature I might not have looked twice at previously into my collection. And so, one resolution that I make at the start of every year is aiming to read roughly 100 books. Despite the pandemic last year and having a lot more time on my hands, I let myself have a wee break from this so-called resolution, and so I fell slightly short of my target. Still, 93 books is pretty impressive, right? It’s safe to say that I discovered some new all-time favourites while still letting myself reach for some absolute classics.
So, here is everything I read in the year that was 2020 (and yes, I recommend all of them):
- The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Familiars by Stacey Halls
- How To Be Right in a World Gone Wrong by James O’Brien
- Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
- 52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School by James Felton
- It’s Not OK to Feel Blue (and other lies) by Scarlett Curtis
- The Last Thing She Told Me by Linda Green
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay
- Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson
- The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd
- The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
- Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
- Renaissance Women Poets by Isabella Whitney
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells
- History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
- The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
- Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
- We Hope This Reaches You in Time by r.h. Sin
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- The Waves by Virginia Woolf
- I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: An Insider’s Guide to Coalition, the General Election and false promises by John Crace
- Wonder by RJ. Palacio
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- Extraordinary Means by Robyn Schnedider
- Helium by Rudy Francisco
- What a Time to Be Alone by Chidera Eggerue
- Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Manifesto for Change by Chelsea Kwakye
- Me and White Supremacy by Layla. F. Saad
- All My Sons by Arthur Miller
- Women Don’t Owe You Pretty by Florence Given
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
- Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas
- The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath
- Expectation by Anna Hope
- Lanny by Max Porter
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
- A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
- Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
- The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Paradiso and Purgatory) by Dante
- So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
- The Classic Works of Hilda Doolittle by H.D
- The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy by Mina Loy
- The Iliad by Homer
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S Eliot
- Flux by Orion Carloto
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Salt Path by Winn Raynor
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
- Jazz Poems by Kevin Young
- The Greek and Roman Myths by Phillip Matyszak
- A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce
- My Friend Leonard by James Frey
- Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield
- The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
- Metamorphoses by Ovid
- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller
- The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ariel by Silvia Plath
- If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
- Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
- Richard III by William Shakespeare
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
- Persuasion by Jane Austen