review

2020 ON GOODREADS

By karen t. brissette

Posted on December 31, 2020

2020 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 4/5 cats
One Star

welp, that’s the end of 2020, a year that went by in a big garbagey blur. book releases were delayed or cancelled, there was no BEA and i only got to go to two book release parties before the world shut down. despite being in lockdown for four months, i didn’t get as much reading done as i could have, because my anxiety eroded my concentration, and reviewing was even more difficult, so even though i’m still optimistically INTENDING to review all the books i haven’t gotten to yet—i have so many half-written reviews just waiting for me to have the time/presence of mind—there are a lot of gaps, and my ‘review-pending’ shelf is swollen grotesquely. in my round-up below, i have marked those still-to-come (maybe!) with this crying kitten, to show how badly i feel about the situation:

time was scarce this year. i went back to work in july—no working from home for this wage slave! and then i took on another part-time job, so for a while i was working seven days a week and everything was physically exhausting and emotionally overwhelming. if only i could get all that time back that i spent staring at walls or scrolling through one horrible news story after another during lockdown. alas.

i’m going to try to be less…fastidious in my reviewing in 2021. i spend too much time trying to corral my thoughts into something useful for others, and whether it’s the screwy goodreads-feed or just me overstaying my welcome, my likes n comments numbers have dwindled, so i’m not sure anyone’s even benefitting from my efforts anymore. which is not me being thirsty and moping about my obsolescence at all; those are just the only metrics i have for assessing my usefulness, and if i’ve outlived that usefulness, i need to be more practical about my time and spend it writing stuff for $$—my whole fantasy about ‘maybe someday someone will read a review i wrote and offer me my dream job’ just ain’t gonna happen. i’m not ‘off’ reviewing, but my process is bananas—most of the time i’ll write something that’s practically dissertation-length and i’ll whittle down into a more reasonable size until it’s probably not even coherent or interesting anymore, but frustration and the lengthening shadows make the “GOOD ENOUGH” decision for me. and this thing that i am writing this very moment is turning into one of those situations, so ANYWAY, 2020. it’s over. i set my reading challenge at 250 books, and these were my additional stated goals:

THIS YEAR’S MINI-CHALLENGES:

-i am going to go back to reading a free tor short a week.
-i am going to read a book each month that was given to me as a present that i haven’t yet gotten around to reading because i am an ungrateful dick.
-i will once again read a book each month that i bought in hardcover but haven’t yet read even though it’s been so long that the paperback has already come out.
-i will get back in the monsterporn saddle. as it were.
-i will continue my monthly projects, naturally.

and because why not make my life even more difficult, i’m going to do the bookriot challenge again this year:

#1 Read a YA nonfiction book
#2 Read a retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, or myth by an author of color
#3 Read a mystery where the victim(s) is not a woman
#4 Read a graphic memoir
#5 Read a book about a natural disaster
#6 Read a play by an author of color and/or queer author
#7 Read a historical fiction novel not set in WWII
#8 Read an audiobook of poetry
#9 Read the LAST book in a series
#10 Read a book that takes place in a rural setting
#11 Read a debut novel by a queer author
#12 Read a memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own
#13 Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before
#14 Read a romance starring a single parent
#15 Read a book about climate change
#16 Read a doorstopper (over 500 pages) published after 1950, written by a woman
#17 Read a sci-fi/fantasy novella (under 120 pages)
#18 Read a picture book with a human main character from a marginalized community
#19 Read a book by or about a refugee
#20 Read a middle grade book that doesn’t take place in the U.S. or the UK
#21 Read a book with a main character or protagonist with a disability (fiction or non)
#22 Read a horror book published by an indie press
#23 Read an edition of a literary magazine (digital or physical)
#24 Read a book in any genre by a Native, First Nations, or Indigenous author

HOW DID I DO?

well, i read 266 books, so that part was a success. i didn’t read a single monsterporn, which is probably for the best, since those take so long to review, and reviewing them requires a cleverness and sense of humor that i just wasn’t feeling for most of 2020. however, the tor shorts, the prezzie and hardcover challenges, and the monthly projects were all fulfilled (except in july, which is when i went back to work so i guess i biffed that month’s reading), and i NEARLY finished the bookriot challenge (with some scrambling and dubious interpretation of the prompts in december). the only two i didn’t get around to were:

#12 Read a memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own

#14 Read a romance starring a single parent

i ran out of time and i’m okay with it—i know the whole point of the ‘read harder’ challenge is to read outside one’s comfort zone, but i wasn’t jazzed about either of these prompts. i don’t really read much nonfiction, and romance is dull. i valiantly attempted to find a single-parent chuck tingle or an mpreg book to make it more interesting, but it never came together. unlike people (or objects) in chuck tingle’s stories.

MISCELLANEOUS PLUGS:

i only wrote one review for la review of books in 2020, for ivy pochoda’s excellent novel These Women.

but i made several booklists for f(r)iction online:

for the identity issue
THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE YOU!

for the monsters issue
NAUGHTY BY NURTURE

for the memory issue
TO FUGGEDABOUT IT OR NOT TO FUGGEDABOUT IT

and i wrote two pieces in the print edition of that memory issue.

i have a booklist due soon for the next issue: LEGACY, and i’m taking suggestions because i don’t even know where to start with that one.

and here is my thanksgiving write-up, because why not?

ONTO THE BOOKS!

JANUARY

1) How Much of These Hills Is Gold
2) Skinner Box
3) Such a Fun Age
4) Lights, Camera, Cats!
5) Come Tumbling Down
6) Painless
7) No One Likes a Fart
8) Snowflake Time: A Christmas Story
9) The Town
10) As the Last I May Know
11) These Women
12) Julián Is a Mermaid
13) The Girlfriend’s Guide to Gods: A Tor.com Original
14) The Winter of the Witch
15) Farmhand, Vol. 2: Thorne in the Flesh
16) Weather
17) Let’s Be Weird Together: A Book About Love
18) You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples
19) Pride of Eden
20) Zeitgeber
21) Prosper’s Demon
22) Sticker Mosaics: Rainbow Unicorns: Create Magical Paintings with 1,942 Stickers!