What to read in 2020 based on the books you loved in 2019
If you liked any of the 12 books listed here, Angela Haupt has suggestions about what you might like to read this year. The 12 books from 2019 that she references are:
- “City of Girls,” by Elizabeth Gilbert
- “All This Could Be Yours,” by Jami Attenberg
- “Know My Name,” by Chanel Miller
- “Evvie Drake Starts Over,” by Linda Holmes
- “The Silent Patient,” by Alex Michaelides
- “No Happy Endings,” by Nora McInerny
- “Normal People,” by Sally Rooney
- “Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered,” by Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff
- “Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II,” by Svetlana Alexievich
- “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” by Marlon James
- “Inheritance,” by Dani Shapiro
- “Lost Children Archive,” by Valeria Luiselli
Fiction to look out for in 2020
This list from The Guardian also includes a link to their list of nonfiction highlights of 2020 as well.
Storytelling Across the Ages
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker muses on the discovery in a cave in Indonesia of “the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world”:
Our oldest stories are like our newest; we look for explanation and hope for a happy ending. People, then and now, tell tales about the brave things they are about to do, or just did, or are thinking of doing, or thought they might do, if they were not the people they are but had the superpowers we all wish we had. Our enterprises vary; our entertainments do not.
Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020
“With our democracy in crisis, the poet and prophet of the American ideal should be our guide.”
‘Jo Was Everything I Wanted to Be’: 5 Writers on ‘Little Women’
“Julia Alvarez, Virginia Kantra, Anna Quindlen, Sonia Sanchez and Jennifer Weiner talk about how the book, now a hit movie, inspired them.”
© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown
