Hello! Been a minute. I am currently working on the two top 10s of 2020 media I will have for y'all this year. It's only books. I read a lot of books.
The two lists (books published in 2020 and books published pre-2020 that I read in 2020) will be out fairly soon. Before that, though, this: some a full list of all the books I read last year, at least as far as I was able to remember when I thought to start listing them. Between a new job at a bookstore and running the Spectology Quarantine Digital Book Tour, it turns out I had a lot of incentive and had to spend very little money to read, so I did a lot of that!
I'm not doing other lists this year because I did way less film watching, album listening, and show watching than usual. Highlights:
I watched very few movies (The Turning sucked, Fantasy Island was a fun kind of messy, Invisible Man sucked a whole bunch in that Message Horror way, Mrs. Serial Killer was hella reactionary but the colors and that one Vertigo zoom-pan were excellent, Mutiny of the Worker Bees was techieprop with one good riot porn scene, We Summon the Darkness was the worst kind of twisty, and Time to Hunt which was the only good movie I saw this year and it hated the shit out of cops), two shows (the end of The Good Place and the end of the then-current season of Riverdale), and haven't cataloged my albums at all this year (Kesha's High Road is the only thing that matters, Fiona Apples Fetch the Bolt Cutters and Lori McKenna's The Balladeer also rule)
The Full Lists (as remembered circa Dec-Jan)
Published 2020
Finished
- Mutual Aid (Dean Spade)
- The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective)
- Pen Pal (Tiyo Attallah Salah-El)
- The Butterfly Lampshade (Aimee Bender)
- The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa)
- Black Sun (Rebecca Roanhorse)
- Goldilocks (El Lam)
- The Obsidian Tower (Melissa Caruso)
- The Chosen Ones (Veronica Roth)
- FINNA (Nino Cipri)
- Westside Saints (WM Akers)
- Flyaway (Kathleen Jennings)
- Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
- You Let Me In (Camilla Bruce)
- Beyond Survival (Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Perez)
- Anarcho-Blackness (Marquis Bey)
- All Boys Aren’t Blue (GM Johnson)
- Deciding for Ourselves (Cindy Milstein)
- Cemetery Boys (Aiden Thomas)
- An Onion in My Pocket (Deborah Madison)
- The Dead Are Arising (Les Payne)
- Ikenga (Nnedi Okorafor)
- Stranger Faces (Namwali Serpell)
- Tokyo Ueno Station (Yu Miri)
- Barren Grounds (David A Robertson)
- Disability Visibility (Alice Wong)
- The Queer Games Avant-Garde (Bo Ruberg)
- Oak Flat (Lauren Redniss)
Unfinished
- Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)
- A Taste of Sage (Yaffa S Santos)
- The Man Who Ate Too Much (John Birdsall)
- Luster (Raven Leilani)
Pre-2020 Books I Read in 2020
- The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)
- Cujo (Stephen King)
- Do You Dream of Terra-Two? [twice] (Temi Oh)
- Book of Salt (Monique Truong)
- Dragon Pearl (Yoon Ha Lee)
- From Democracy to Freedom (crimethinc)
- Are Prisons Obsolete (Angela Davis)
- The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
- Akata Witch (Nnedi Okorafor)
- Akata Warrior (Nnedi Okorafor)
- Heaven is All Goodbyes (Tongo Eisen Martin)
- Someone’s Already Dead (Tongo Eisen Martin)
- The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (Larry Mitchell)
- Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)
- Salt Fat Acid Heat (Samin Nosrat)
- Carceral Capitalism (Jackie Wang)