I had a splendid year in 2020.
Let me rephrase that. A splendid reading year. If nothing else went right, my reading did and I ended up reading 120 books! So, when I finally sat down to make this list, I spent a week pulling my hair out, trying to narrow down my favourites to just 10.
Clearly, that didn’t work out… if you feel that reading about 20 books is simply too much, you can skip to a final list of all 20 books at the very end of this post (by scrolling all the way down)!
(Click on the picture and it will take you straight to the Goodreads page where you can view the summary, italicized text are all excerpts from the corresponding books )
20. The Saga Compendium By Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples
Do you hear that keening sound in the air?
Don’t worry, it’s just me…sobbing because I read all the Saga volumes too fast and now my heart doesn’t know what do.
The Saga series is an intergalactic family escapade told through 9 graphic novel volumes (so far) featuring gorgeously illustrated spacescapes and perhaps the most violently, lovable family I’ve ever read about. Our narrator is the unborn child of the couple we start off our story with, and her perspective is one of my favourite parts of the entire series. SHE’S JUST SO ADORABLE.
As you can tell, I am heavily invested in the safety and security of this fictional family and shall proceed to reread all the volumes right now because writing this got me excited all over again.
19.“A Burning” By Megha Majumdar
“Mother, do you grieve? Know that I will return to you. I will be a flutter in the leaves above where you sit, cooking ruti on the stove. I will be the stray cloud which shields you from the days of sun. I will be the thunder that wakes you before rain floods the room. When you walk to the market, I will return to you as footprint on the soil. At night, when you close your eyes, I will appear as impress on the bed.”
There is a silent hope in the dregs of society. The sort of hope that constantly gets stamped out. But somehow seems to flicker back to life.
I saw that hope in every character in this book.
Megha Majumdar’s talent in crafting characters through the nuances of lingo sears the images of Jivan, Lovely and PT Sir onto your mind. But, what truly elevates this book is the knowledge that there are Jivans and Lovelys and PT Sirs everywhere you go; these characters and this story is just a glimpse into South Asian society’s often errant patriotism, its products and its consequences.
And how, sometimes, it’s just too late.
18. “A Man Called Ove” By Fredrik Backman
“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”
When I first heard of A Man Called Ove , I assumed that the name ‘Ove’ was a play on the word ‘l-ove’…that was until I learnt it was translated from Swedish and ‘love’ in Swedish was ‘kärlek’.
When I look at this book, I no longer see the wordplay, but I do see an abundance of
kärlek.
17.“Half the Sky” By Nicholas D. Kristof & Emily Wudunn
“More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century…”
I saw this book in my campus library and I immediately wanted to read it; what did Nicholas D. Kristof and Emily Wudunn believe, could change the world?
The answer, was in the title itself:
“Women hold up half the sky.”
(Chinese proverb)
Half the Sky is a manifesto of the importance of women empowerment and its ability to quite literally change the world; how empowering women in every society or household is the key to unlocking some of humanities core problems.
Not only did I learn about interesting initiatives and people all over the world taking proactive action to counter the women-centric issues in their communities, I found myself looking at the world with a new, polished lens.
If you’re looking for a way to change the world, this is definitely a book you should read.
16. “Hollowpox” By Jessica Townsend
( Nevermoor #3 )
”Proudly born and raised atop the Highlands, in the Third Pocket of the Free State,’[…]’Daughter of Mary the Heart-Eater and Malcom the Mellow, grand-daughter of Deirdre the Deathbringer, great-granddaughter of Eileen Never-Surrender, great-great-granddaughter of Ailsa the Tetchy, great-great-GREAT granddaughter—‘”
You know that feeling in your belly when you’re at the amusement park and you’re waiting for the ride to start and the staff comes to tighten your seatbelt and your heart is pumping so hard and you don’t know if you can take it–that’s how reading a Nevermoor book feels like.
It quite literally feels like a rollercoaster. (Or a ride on the brolly rail, really!) Morrigan’s journey is filled with so much obnoxious energy and foolish but loving characters that I just can’t get enough of it. With this particular instalment in the series, I grew to love Jupiter EVEN more than I already had (didn’t think it was possible)!
There are books that remind me of why I started loving books in the first place, this book is one of them.
15.“The Simple Wild” & “Wild At Heart” By K. A. Tucker
“I’m now unmistakeably attracted to the yeti.”
DISCLAIMER: there is no yeti-related bestiality in this book…
So this is what it’s like to live in Alaska with a yeti in the mountains and the snow and a cabin in the woods and all the people who won’t leave you alone but force you to join their community and proceed to shower you with warmth and affection and accidently bump heads with the guy of your dreams?
Count me in.
14.“The Toll” By Neal Shusterman
( Arc of a Scythe #3 )
“I am in turmoil. The world is so vast and the cosmos more so, yet it is not the things outside of me that leave me so uneasy; it is the things within me.”
I would be lying if I told you I remember every little thing in this book but I can remember—as clear as day—the moment I finished it.
It was like the world stood still for just that moment.
And it is for moments like that, that I read so fervently.
13.“How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?” By Moustafa Bayoumi (“كيف تشعر و لديك إحساس أنك مشكلة؟”)
“Where elements touch and merge,
where shadows swoon like outcasts on the sand and the tried moment waits,
its courage gone—there were we
in latitudes where storms are born.”
– Arna Bontemps, ‘Reconnaissance’
(Epigraph from Sami’s chapter in the book)
How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? is a foray into the idea that the definition of a ‘Muslim’ or an ‘Arab-American’ is not a singular one.
Moustafa Bayoumi narrates the stories of Rasha, Sami, Yasmin, Akram, Lina, Omar and Rami to illustrate the versatility in the lives and struggles of a minority that is constantly huddled in the same basket.
Now, look at that; 1.8 billion Muslims are not exactly the same…what a surprise!
12.“When the Moon Split” By Safiur Rahman Mubarakpuri
“I have never seen a man who smiled as much as the Messenger of Allah.” (Tirmidhi)
My spiritual journey is something I seldom nourish as much as I should. So this year, I decided to acknowledge my curiosities about my own religion (Islam) through a medium I was well accustomed to: books.
Reading the Seerah (biography) was an experience unlike any reading experience I’ve had. It felt like taking a walk in old Arabia with the Prophet (PBUH) and his companions in the warmth of his story.
I hesitated to include ‘When the Moon Split’ on this list, but I’m really glad I did. For all the complex biographies of the Prophet (PBUH) out there, this has to be the most clear and readable version I’ve come across.
To live like the Prophet (PBUH) lived, follow his mannerisms and habits has never been more urgent to me than when I closed the pages of this book (that includes smiling as much as I can too)!
11. “Elephant Complex” By John Gimlette
“It’s not difficult to see why people have fought over this island for thousands of years. […] Sri Lanka has to be the most beautiful country I have ever seen.“
There’s a quiet struggle expat children go through when they go back to their home countries. They stumble through words that feel unfamiliar on their tongues, but are of their mother’s instead. And above all, they struggle to answer the penultimate question EVERYONE never forgets to ask: Do you like Sri Lanka [my home-country] or Dubai [where I grew up] better?
And I always said Sri Lanka. But I lied.
After reading this book, I don’t have to lie anymore.
10. “Chain of Gold” By Cassandra Clare
( The Last Hours #1 )
“The point of stories is not that they are objectively true, but that the soul of the story is truer than reality. Those who mock fiction do so because they fear the truth.”
There’s a veritable portion of bookish people I’ve met who’ve scoffed at The Mortal Instruments and subsequently all of Cassandra Clare’s books (in the Shadowhunter series) and I’ve prickled with the challenge to dig them out of their prejudice long enough to lavish in the splendid serenity (and agony) of reading a Shadowhunter novel.
And I , myself, had forgotten that feeling. So I originally did not plan on loving this book as much as I did. And it’s a testament to Cassandra Clare’s genius in crafting characters that I did anyway.
I felt the tug of 20th century London just as strongly as I did while reading The Infernal Devices, and just to experience the candid conversations and banter of Cordelia and the Merry Thieves again, was delight enough for me!
9. “Muse of Nightmares” By Laini Taylor
( Strange the Dreamer #2 )
“Many a choice is made this way: By pretending it makes itself.”
I didn’t grow up reading fairy tales and I constantly feel like I’m trying to make up for it.
Alongside Sarai and Lazlo, it’s impossible not to feel like you’ve stolen into a secret fairytale world you shouldn’t really know about. Laini Taylor’s writing has that haunting quality that is often lost in the transition between traditional fairy tales and a YA Fantasy novel today.
Not for a lack of witty characters and dialogue (I’m looking at you Ruza and Ruby), this bewitching duology is the makings of stories that nudge at that part of you that somehow still questions the existence of magic.
8. “Anxious People” By Fredrik Backman
“This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”
Fredrik Backman is a human I refuse to call an idiot. This book is just far too much of a masterpiece for me to utter such profane words.
There are books with writing that takes my breath away, characters that melt my heart, and plotlines that keep me up all night; but the convergence of these three qualities in a single book is an absolute rarity, but – my dear friends, Anxious People is most definitely one of these books.
Backman weaves a story unlike any other, untangling the mess of characters we seem to have started with into a plethora of emotions and colors and stories we are loathe to forget. His singular writing style creates the perfect medium for a story that does not seem to have a main character, but quietly claims that every one of us is a main character. It guides us through the undulating strings of plot that seem to take us completely by surprise.
In the beginning of 2020, I would never have believed one of my favourite books of the year would be about a hostage drama.
But I also wouldn’t have known it was about so much more.
7. “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry” By Neil DeGrasse Tyson
“We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.”
When I started my first year of A-levels, I was convinced that I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I believed that was the closest I could get to real magic.
But then I realized that the nuances of an astrophysics job would drive me insane so I finally listened to my Art-heavy heart and bade adieu to my inner astronaut. But astrophysics was still something I held really dear and close.
This book reminded me of that. It took me straight back to my first planetarium showing-tears in my eyes, hands gripped onto the chair- completely and utterly entranced by the universe we lived in (SubhanAllah).
Neil DeGrasse Tyson uses fact to dance around the fictitious delight of the stars, the galaxies and the planets. He reveals the image of the tapestry time stretched out on our night sky for us to view. That galaxy right there, probably doesn’t exist anymore, it just took light that long to get here! *
If you feel like there’s no more wonder or magic left in the world – just look up (or into this book, because it makes you look up…).
*”Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were, back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view.” (Excerpt from the book)
6. “The Great Gatsby” By F. Scott Fitzgerald
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
They say that children don’t see class and race. But truthfully, I think they do. It’s just a matter of time. And to me, reading The Great Gatsby was a revelation of class divide and a society that creates Gatsbys.
The Great Gatsby triggered a paradigm shift in my perspective of class divide. You think you see it and then a slight angle change reveals a whole other branch of inequality and its subsequent consequences.
I believe there’s a little bit of Gatsby in almost everyone I’ve met (including myself). When you live in a society that focuses on the external; the pretty and the material, there’s a tendency to lose track of the beliefs and principles we truly hold dear. We internalize what does matter while portraying what society deems to matter.
Maybe if we turned that inside out, our existence would be brighter. Or, maybe we’d simply, “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
5. “Six of Crows” & “Crooked Kingdom” By Leigh Bardugo
“When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyways.”
( Quote from ‘Crooked Kingdom’)
When I was 12, I decided I didn’t need many friends. I had books, you see.
I had them at recess behind the study tables and at end-of-year parties. I had Peeta and Katniss (The Hunger Games) and Kenji (Shatter Me) and Karou (Daughter of Smoke and Bone). I chose Young-Adult Fantasy at every societal turn. It was through the same genre that I eventually met some of my closest friends.
Today, my reading list is almost extinct of Young-Adult Fantasies and I felt the yearning for something familiar when I picked up Six of Crows. And I am forever grateful that I did.
Leigh Bardugo has furnished an enchanting world with an array of characters chock-full of the very best features of Young-Adult Fantasy: angst, spunk and passion. And it went down like ginger beer by a blazing fireplace. Spicy with an undercurrent of sweet warmth.
I could spend hours re-reading the conversation of the Six and laugh every single time. Bardugo covers the distance between witty dialogue and the pain it often hides. And she takes you on that road, completely unawares to the extent you’re going to love these characters and this story.
Through the Grishaverse (I’ve read every single book in it, except King of Scars), I was reminded of why 12 year old Zafra called these fantastical worlds home.
4. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” By Stephen R. Covey
“And I can change. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past.”
2020 was a year of suffering for many. But where, there is suffering, it is often followed by healing.
And this book was a salve to a wound that 2020 had inflamed. I’d had it all along.., but this year made me face it head-on. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People built a literary therapist’s office out of my bedroom. It made me dig deep into my beliefs and principles to build the life I’d wanted to live all along.
Entering 2021 with the lessons I learnt from this book is a steady warmth. I feel comforted in knowing that no matter what 2021 throws at me, I’ve got my own vision to fulfil, and I’ll strive to live it.
3. “Footnotes in Gaza” By Joe Sacco
(Page 119-120 of ‘Footnotes in Gaza’)
I have a distinct memory from Ramadan (a month of fasting for Muslims) 2009. We’d wake up for suhoor (a pre-dawn meal before you fast) and settle in front of the sofa in the living room to watch the news on Al-Jazeera. And my little sister would bolt out of the room.
It was Gaza on the news. And all I remember seeing was rubble and blood and the wailing interviews of mothers and fathers grieving their children. For years, the word ‘Gaza’ would trigger those images and I’d shut my eyes and plug my ears. I was lucky enough to be far from life in a warzone, so I chose ignorance and lavished in the luxury of it.
It took 11 years for me to find Joe Sacco’s ‘Footnotes in Gaza’ and finally come face-to-face with the agony of the people and story I’d sidelined my whole life.
The pages of Joe Sacco’s ‘Footnotes in Gaza’ is covered in the cross-hatchings of a people that are yearning to be heard. Sacco’s prose is honest and raw. He doesn’t feign his own humanity. And that is what I truly appreciated. He is a journalist. To his core. And he does not deny it.
But he also does what most anyone would shrink away from.
He enters active warzones and sites of repeated shelling and bombings. And he stays. To give these people a medium to scream their agony through. Did he give them a voice? No; they already had one. He gave the plural scream channels of singular voices.
Now, to me, the word ‘Gaza’ is not a singular memory to thwart, but a plural echo of a people with faces and fears and dreams and lives that they simply want to live.
2. “Morning Star” By Pierce Brown
( Red Rising Saga #3 )
“In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.”
Science-fiction from the outside is glamoured. Its high-tech rocket ships and space travel and AI robots. It simply does not seem human enough. I shrugged off the genre for many years, for that reason alone.
But, Pierce Brown has proven to me -book-by-book- the falsity of that perspective.
Beyond the GravBoots and the Clawdrills are the pounding hearts of the Howlers and the Sons of Ares. The battle is charged with the emotions of an army that beats its own rhythm of humanity.
The story of Darrow and Sevro and Mustang and ALL THE OTHER beautiful characters in this series is charged with the core of love and hope and all the other pretty words we use to describe the things that make us feel like sunshine.
It’s a ballad as much as it is a war cry.
And it’s bloodydamn brilliant.
1. “No Longer Human” By Osamu Dazai
“I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”
I’ve written letters to myself before. In scribbled longhand in diary entries and swathes of ink in art journals. But I never thought I’d find it in between the lines of a book.
This book is a raw depiction of the sort of artistic insanity that I find increasingly hard to explain to people. How do you articulate the nuances of deprived creativity?
There are answers in this book to questions I’ve been asking myself, my entire life (or at least the 19 years of it, so far). We follow the blue road that many creatives find themselves on; the sort of road that ends only one way.
It’s a grim representation of what happens when you follow that road to the end.
Thank you so much for viewing this post!
I hope you enjoyed reading it! Let me know what are some of your favourites from 2020 and if you will be picking up any of these books.
Here is the finalized list, if you want to skip to a particular book:
20. The Saga Compendium By Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples
19. “A Burning” By Megha Majumdar
18. “A Man Called Ove” By Fredrik Backman
17. “Half the Sky” By Nicholas D. Kristof & Emily Wudunn
16. “Hollowpox” By Jessica Townsend
15. “The Simple Wild” & “Wild At Heart” By K. A. Tucker
14. “The Toll” By Neal Shusterman
13. “How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?” By Moustafa Bayoumi (“كيف تشعر و لديك إحساس أنك مشكلة؟”)
12. “When the Moon Split” By Safiur Rahman Mubarakpuri
11. “Elephant Complex” By John Gimlette
10. “Chain of Gold” By Cassandra Clare
9. “Muse of Nightmares” By Laini Taylor
8. “Anxious People” By Fredrik Backman
7. “Astrophysics for people in a hurry” By Neil DeGrasse Tyson
6. “The Great Gatsby” By F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. “Six of Crows” & “Crooked Kingdom” By Leigh Bardugo
4. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” By Stephen R. Covey
3. “Footnotes in Gaza” By Joe Sacco
2. “Morning Star” By Pierce Brown
1. “No Longer Human” By Osamu Dazai
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Stardust & Inkstains 
Reading your post makes me want to read non fiction because some of these books sound like they had a serious impact on you! I used to be a person who read nothing but contemporary fiction and now I’m that person who chooses YA fantasy nearly everytime. It’s wonderful to have fantasy worlds to escape to!
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That’s really great to hear, I hope you have fun reading them, if you do pick them up! YA Fantasy and Contemporary fiction were some of my favourite genres for a long time too (I still can’t get enough of them). You’re absolutely correct, Fantasy worlds are the best to escape to (middle-earth has to be my ideal fantasy world though).
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I’ve never really been a person to read non fiction, but part of me wants to!
I love escaping into a good book, and there is nothing better than an amazing fantasy novel!
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