the books I read in 2020

 You'd think a year of lockdown and isolation would vastly increase your reading. It didn't work that way for me. Here's the list of books I read this year, in chronological order.

• Europe without Baedeker, by Edmund Wilson (1947) - impossible not to think of E.M. Forster's chapter in A room with a view about visiting Santa Croce without a Baedeker
• Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan (2018)
• So you want to talk about race, by Ijeoma Oluo (2018) - hard not to reflect on spell check having no problem with Wilson and Forster but not recognizing Esi, Edugyan, Ijeoma, and Oluo
• Fascism: a warning, by Madeleine K. Albright (2018)
• The great believers, by Rebecca Makkai (2018) - read this while at College Art in Chicago; parts of the book are set in Chicago; the book resonated in a number of ways: "Wi-fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora's Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists."; the main protagonist Yale wasn't named after the school but after his Aunt Yael; "Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy."; standing up in an auditorium and screaming
• Manhattan memoir by Mary Cantwell (2000) - a one-volume gathered edition of the author's Manhattan girl, Manhattan, when I was young, and Speaking with strangers
• Michael Tolliver lives, by Armistead Maupin (2007) - a continuation of the Tales of the city
• Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (2009)
• Amiable with big teeth, by Claude McKay (written in 1941, published in 2017)
• Inside a pearl: my years in Paris, by Edmund White (2014)
• Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan (2008) - movie tie-in edition
• Midnight in Sicily, by Peter Robb (1996) - this book had been on my shelf for a long time, calling me but I was afraid it would be just too filled with mafiosi; it was filled with Sicily more than Mafia and really quite a page-turner
• How to be an antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (2019)
• Necessary errors, by Caleb Crain (2013)
• Mapping the territory: selected nonfiction by Christopher Bram (2009)
• Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay (written between 1929 and 1941, first published 2020)
• The nature principle: human restoration and the end of nature-deficit disorder, by Richard Louv (2011) - what about urban-deficit desire?
• The Mussolini canal, by Antonio Pennacchi (2013) - translation of Canale Mussolini (2010); my bookstore friend Fred from Sundance Books in Geneseo had to get this from England (buy from independent bookstores as much as you can)
• Stories of God, by Rainer Maria Rilke - translated from the German, published 1899; the Alfred libraries didn't have an edition and I had to order it on interlibrary loan; Daniel had noted that the German title is Geschichten vom lieben Gott but most English editions leave out the "lieben"
• The Blackwater lightship, by Colm Tóibín (1999)
• Building and dwelling: ethics for the city, by Richard Sennett (2018)
• The overstory, by Richard Powers (2018) - about a quarter of the way in; so far, a panoply or perhaps a cacophony of mostly unrelated stories but each involves a tree or a bunch of trees or a species of tree; the table of contents seems to indicate that the second, third, and fourth sections are different in structure (not chaptered)

Looks like eleven each of fiction and non-fiction. As I reviewed the list of books read last year, several of the titles were fonder in memory than in recall as I started this recounting. Some were quite forgettable but then I have also forgotten many of the films and TV episodes that I watched over the course of the year.

P.S. You can see the illustrated version of this compilation at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2020/6837039