all 124 books i read in 2020, reviewed in one sentence each

This is just essential reading for any book lover. It's so enchanting and exquisite and it's just about the correspondence between a woman in New York and a bookseller in London and just very heartwarming and cozy.

These are both 18th century satires which are so witty and can still be enjoyed by a modern audience today.

Then i read some absolute classics we have the Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar and then a book called Sylvia Plath: in Context.

Anyway, this book is really, really boring and even less worth reading now that we have literally lived a plague year.

A Streetcar Named Desire broke my heart into tiny pieces and i enjoyed every second.

Then we have You Gotta Want It and a Work in Progress which aretwo books which just prove that just because you can hire someone to write an autobiography doesn't mean that you should.

followed by rereading A Single Man which was the reason i chose to study Isherwood for my dissertation. It is his Ulysses, his Mrs Dalloway, and it follows him in a 24-hour period.

And then the final boss of terrible Youtuber books: Adultolescence. ... I hated it.

All the Conspirators is about English middle-class heteronormativity and propriety.

Antony and Cleopatra, because we do love a bit of shakespeare in this household ...My English Lit student is showing.

Around the World in 80 days, i just lived vicariously through this charming classic travel story and read it voraciously all in one sitting

Atomic Habits is the best self-help book i think I've ever read. It's all about changing the systems in your life to make positive changes to the habits that you have.

Beloved is a completely stunning story about motherhood, about sacrifice, about racism... just a must read.

is a stunning book with beautiful illustrations my mum actually gave this to me while i was processing grief ... and it just had all the right words that i needed to hear and, yeah, i really recommend this book.

Brother had my heart in my throat. It's about gang crime in a neighbourhood and the loss of a brother and coming to terms with that grief and it's so sad.

so i read You Get so Alone at Times that it just Makes Sense, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame and the People look like Flowers at Last which is the loveliest title for a poetry collection I think ever.

Candide is a fun little satire that i read because a fictional character from Normal People recommended it.

Changes: A Love Story is everything the Course of Love isn't because it's gripping. It's about divorce, the female body, complicated adult relationships and the role of women in independent Ghana and it's really great.

I will never, ever, ever stop raving about how talented Shyam Selvadurai is and how well he weaves Sri Lanka's social and political history into his narratives about personal dilemmas.

Then we have a rogue bit of Shakespeare ... i randomly read Coriolanus. I'm not entirely sure why. I might have been having withdrawal symptoms from my degree, stockholm syndrome or something like that.

I think reading Sally Rooney and Agatha Christie just reminded me why I love literature so much.

Disgrace is about racial relations in South Africa, post-apartheid It uses the symbol of the sexualized female body as a landscape for discussing colonialism in such a fascinating way.

Drive is one of those self-help books that has a point to make which could be made in 50 pages but instead takes 250 pages to say it.It's very repetitive but it's basically about how motivation needs to come from within.

the Epistemology of the Closet which is just essential reading if you want to understand queer theory

The first one is Girl Online which actually I was pleasantly surprised by.I enjoyed reading this a lot.

It tells the tales of a plethora of women, so intersectional and so important. The only thing i would say is that it portrays young people quite badly just because when you're reading it and you're reading the perspectives of the young people in the novel it's very obvious that they have not been written by young people.

This Modern Love, Hello Life isgenuinely not worth the paper that it's printed on.

Home Fire is one of the best books that i encountered on my degree. It is political and social fiction at its absolute best.

Homegoing! Wow, this covers so much ground. It's such an ambitious and powerful novel that traces about 300 years of a family tree descending from two sisters born into different villages in Ghana.

How to be a Bawse - stupid title for a book, hated this.

which is surrealist, post-modern, post-apocalyptic, it's just bonkers. It's a story about a utopia with no consumerism or materialism which basically turns out to be less great than they originally thought it might be

Intimations is a book of Zadie Smith's observations during the beginning of the pandemic which captures the experience, i think so perfectly.Not a single word is wasted and i think it's such a cool sort of time capsule of that time.

Kari is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel, I've never really given graphic novels a chance and this was the first one that i properly read and really, really enjoyed - it is just exquisite.

Lions and shadows is kind of the same.

which was initially rejected by publishers until an actual lockdown came along but honestly it should have just stayed rejected. That book is bad.

Then i read some absolute classics we have the Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar and then a book called Sylvia Plath: in Context.

Love is a Dog from Hell this is a poetry collection that i enjoyed so much that i then went on a bit of a Bukowski binge

this is a memoir eulogizing this man's wife who sadly died very young and it's written by the editor ofRolling Stone magazine and just captures incredibly well how music is just the soundtrack to our existences. Music lovers will adore this book.

Manhattan Transfer is a very cinematic book about New York City and the stories of all of these individuals who inhabit the city and their lives just interweave to create this really rich tapestry. it's kind of like a montage, it's brilliant.

I think reading Sally Rooney and Agatha Christie just reminded me why I love literature so much.

This was My Policeman, a beautifully crafted narrative all about perspective, betrayal, acceptance (or lack thereof), telling the story of a woman whose husband has a gay love affair and how their three lives all become desperately unhappy.

I found it particularly poignant for me because Akala was born in the exact same hospital that i was born in ... i would recommend this to anyone.

Oh, this shattered my soul. Ishiguro is an incredible writer and this is basically a book about people who are being raised specifically to one day donate their organs and, I have to say, much better than it sounds like it will be.

Night is a heart-wrenching book about the Holocaust and it's so important to read these narratives as the people who wrote them are starting to not be around anymore.

Sally Rooney especially captures young people and university and imposter syndrome so well and i think it's important to remind yourself why you actually did the degree in the first place

On the other hand we have Norwegian Wood which is by Murakami and it just captures human beings so well. I loved his writing, I thought it was so vibrant

I then read Outline which I think is just the best title for any of the books on this list because I feel like the central protagonist only ever allows you to understand an outline of her character.

I actually wouldn't recommend reading Jane Austen books back-to-back because pretty much the plot of all of her books is just people going to each other's houses and, firstly, when you can't do that it's really annoying and, secondly, because they're so similar you do get a bit muddled with the names and the characters and the plots and quite quickly you start to lose the plot.

Then i read some absolute classics we have the Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar and then a book called Sylvia Plath: in Context.

Playland is an allegory about racial tension and race relations in post-apartheid South Africa.

On the other hand we have Polly Honeycomb which is a hilarious and frankly ridiculous play.

I then read Prater Violet which is kind of a semi-autobiographical account of Isherwood's time as a screenwriter

Then i read some absolute classics we have the Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar and then a book called Sylvia Plath: in Context.

Then Say Something Back is a poetry collection which is alright but it uses so much specialist medical jargon that it's almost impossible to actually enjoy without Googling every single word.

Selp Helf - I think I genuinely lost brain cells reading this one and i cannot afford to lose any more.

But I think that sense and sensibility might have actually been my favourite Austen novel aside from Emma which is just... elite.

Siddhartha is about one man's quest to find spirituality before eventually realising that it has to come from within.

which is a very interesting book all about cancel culture and the impacts that having your mistakes kind of amplified on social media can have on your life

Followed by Temples of Delight which is all about childhood friends who become suddenly separated and then find each other again in later life.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was charming and brilliant.

The Alchemist is a brilliant, charming little book. It's about a man who goes in search of his destiny to find treasure and all the different people that he meets along the way. It's lovely.

Then i read some absolute classics we have the Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar and then a book called Sylvia Plath: in Context.

Then we have the Crying of Lot 49 - I hated this book. It's not often i get to the end of the book and understand the plot less than I did before I opened it but in this case that was true.

it is just classic Cold War, anti-communism propaganda and not worth reading in the slightest. It's actually terrible.

The Golden Notebook was long and that's the only way i can think of describing it.

I then read the House on Mango Street which is a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago kind of inventing herself for the future.

The Hungry Tide is so beautiful, it's all about language, sacrifice, protest, resistance, communication, symbiosis.

The very first book that i read in 2020 was called The Memorial - this is a book about post-war trauma and repression of grief and also repression of sexuality.

This is so bizarre and so excruciatingly slow but then i think that's kind of the point.

I just became completely enchanted with Hemingway's writing and his stories of life all around the globe - they're so vivid.

so i read You Get so Alone at Times that it just Makes Sense, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame and the People look like Flowers at Last which is the loveliest title for a poetry collection I think ever.

Book number 40 is The Provoked Wife. This is another 18th century satire. Really witty, really funny.

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, possibly the last thing I read for my degree and incidentally also one of the worst.

I just became completely enchanted with Hemingway's writing and his stories of life all around the globe - they're so vivid.

Now i read this not that long ago and I literally cannot for the life of me remember what this was about.

Then, and i still cannot believe i'm saying this, I actually read The Uni-Verse by ... me. ... i'd like to think that it's one of the best books that I read this year

it's all about how the Home Office started deporting people from the Windrush Generation ... it's just really heartbreaking ... So, yeah I would definitely recommend this book.

These are both 18th century satires which are so witty and can still be enjoyed by a modern audience today.

The Year of the Runaways is just aggressively average I think.

The Course of Love i found just not enjoyable to read at all because it's just so bleak and there's all these philosophical kind of interruptions which i just found really cringey and stupid.

The Essential Rumi. Rumi was a Persian poet and again it's all about kind of spirituality.

which became particularly poignant because at this exact moment the Black Lives Matter protests were happening and, yeah, just a really important piece of history that we have lived through, i think, that is still so important to continue talking about.

The Inheritance of Loss is another good postcolonial book, this time about two parallel lives, one in America and one in the area where India meets Nepal.

The Railway Accident is just surrealist nonsense, it's so pretentious and just a bit frustrating to read.

Stephen Hawking has the power to make me enjoy it. ... i loved the subtle wit of the way that he writes. But, I could not give this anything other than five stars simply because i do not understand physics enough to correct anything that he said so... it's a five from me.

This Modern Love, Hello Life isgenuinely not worth the paper that it's printed on.

which is all about womanhood and femininity and for me personally I think that it improved my feminism a lot.

The next book was Trainspotting which is shocking, it's gritty -- i've never read the C-word so many times in my life in one sitting.

Wilde Like Me, again it was actually pretty decent but not really aimed at me i think, it was more aimed at, like, mothers.

This is filthy, raw, pretty much just about Bukowski bonking any woman in sight. It gets quite repetitive after a while.It's very blunt and very authentic but i basically listened to this as an audio book...

so i read You Get so Alone at Times that it just Makes Sense, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame and the People look like Flowers at Last which is the loveliest title for a poetry collection I think ever.

Then we have You Gotta Want It and a Work in Progress which aretwo books which just prove that just because you can hire someone to write an autobiography doesn't mean that you should.