Here’s a teeny tiny blog post about what I read in December of 2020 followed by what I read in all of 2020! As always, all links within this post will go to support Twice Told Tales–my bookstore in McPherson Kansas!

What I read in December of 2020:

Very similar to my last post about what I read in November of 2020, I thought we were going to have another month with a big fat “nothing” in that space. Which, I can’t stress this enough, I was completely unbothered by. The holiday season in retail is challenging enough in a normal year. In 2020… ha! No space in my brain for books of my own.

And then just after Christmas, I started listening to the audiobook of When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole and I was hooked so quickly. I finished this book in about three days and loved every minute of it. I feel like Cole did what Kiley Reid did so well with Such a Fun Age which is using story telling to tell white people about themselves. I guess, that’s a quick way to say what I think that they did so magnificently. Sometimes when someone says, “this is an important book to read”, I hear “I’m assigning you homework.” But Alyssa Cole (and Kiley Reid, too) dropped us into an incredible, suspenseful, thriller and got us hooked and there were several times when I looked at what the villains (or even the people that you aren’t sure are villains?) were doing and I was like, “Oh yikes, I’ve totally done/ absolutely do that! Time to pivot.” I also learned so much about the history and power of Black communities and Red Lining and all that. All wrapped up in a thriller. Genius.

Also the ending was ASTOUNDING! I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING!!

Okay so this wasn’t such a teeny tiny review. If you want to listen to When No One is Watching, you can grab it on Libro.fm. If you want to read the print version, here’s a link to buy it from our Bookshop page!

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What I Read in 2020

I had a goal to finish 50 books in 2020. I finished 42, which, I gotta say, is pretty good considering I had a brain that turned most words on a page into alphabet soup.
Here are five of my favorite reads from 2020 in no particular order.

Just FYI, since I instated my strict, do-not-finish-books-you-hate policy, most of the books I completed the past year were all 4 and 5 star reads! Which makes picking my favorites really challenging but it makes reading books really fun.

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore
Grab it on audiobook. Snag the print version.
Every night on New Years Eve, Oona jumps to another period of her life. Sometimes it’s forward, sometimes it’s backwards, every time she’s living through a year that she’s never been to yet. Through this book, she lives her whole life–just out of order. Filling in gaps. It was hilarious and light and also kind of sad and poignant at times as well.

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
Grab it on audiobook. Snag the print version.
This book tells the story of Ana–the wife of Jesus. Usually I don’t care for historical fiction–especially if we’re talking ancient history. But Ana’s story gripped me from start to finish. I blew through this one so fast–even though it’s considerably longer than most books I like to read. It wasn’t until near the end that I remembered what happened to Jesus… and yeah. I cried like a baby. I straight up wept when I was finishing it up at work. But it’s not all sad. Ana is powerful and subversive and incredible.

Mercy House by Alena Dillon
Grab it on audiobook. Snag the print version.
This one was kind of an unexpected love for me. I downloaded it on a whim–I had a roadtrip coming up and this book was long enough to last the whole trip! So I downloaded it and fell in love. It’s about a group of nuns living in modern day Brooklyn and working to maintain their safe house for women who need help. We do jump back in time to see what made these nuns into the badasses that they are today and we see the hurt they’ve felt through the church that they’re so dedicated to. It’s another story of powerful women with untold stories.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong
Grab it on audiobook. Snag the print version.
I’ve always said that stories make change and I feel like this book sets out to do that, too. Disability is such a broad category–affecting so many potential different parts of each individual person. No one’s story is the same as anyone else’s. This book sheds light on just a few different stories–which not only showed me all the different ways I could make changes in order to be more adaptable to disabled humans, but it also gave me permission to explore various ways that disability might be impacting my own life.

Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins
Grab it on audiobook. Snag the print version.
Morgan Jerkins goes on an incredible (literal) journey to trace the paths that her ancestors took as they migrated around the United States post-slavery. This is one of those books that showed me how much I absolutely do not know when it comes to the history of Black Americans–and I don’t think that is accidental either. I think it was intended that I know as little of the truth of American history as possible. And that’s why I’m 37 years old, sitting on my couch, listening to Morgan Jerkins tell me the story of her family (and herself), gape-mouthed and amazed. I especially loved listening to Jerkins read this in her own voice–so much so that I reached out to her on Instagram to tell her so. And she wrote me back about how nervous she was to record her own voice! I like her a lot and I want to read everything she ever writes forever. She dips her toes in so many different topics and genres!

That isn’t all the books I loved but I wanted to talk about a few of my favorite books that not everyone else is talking about. Y’all don’t need to hear me talking about how Untamed was awesome–everyone else already did that.