Growing up, I loved to read, and would gladly spend hours demolishing stacks of books of all kinds from the library. As the years went by and the afflictions of adulthood responsibility mounted, I found that I was giving over less and less time to reading, and that twenty minutes before I fell asleep just wasn’t cutting it.
Last year I decided to make a concerted effort to dedicate a good chunk of time to recapture some of what I used to love, and in 2019 managed to get through a respectable total of 23 books. I wasn’t sure if I would top that this year. However, after discovering that my colleague Andrew Spittle had read 72 (!), I doubled down, even upgrading my old Kindle to a fancy new one with a warm backlight that has been much easier on my ageing eyeballs.
Below is a list of all the books that I’ve finished in the year gone by. Not included are those that I started but discarded through lack of interest, or any kind of academic-only reading, as that falls into something of a different category. The last time I did this, some folks asked for more specifics on what books I liked best, so for this year I’ve added some notes at the end, which might be rough as I jotted them down as I went. Click through for those.
I was aiming to read 50 books this year, but only managed to complete 40 in the end. While that is 8 more than last year (you can find the 2019 list here), I’m pretty sure I could have managed 50 if I had pushed for it. That said, I did take up learning Japanese, and re-discovered both music and film photography in force during lockdown, which probably accounts for the gradual slowdown over the year. If you’re on Goodreads, you’ll find me as clickysteve.
- Severance – Ling Ma (2018)
- Golden State – Ben H. Winters (2019)
- The Paper Menagerie – Ken Liu (2016)
- Welcome to the Heady Heights – David F. Ross (2019)
- Skin – Liam Brown (2019)
- OddJobs – Heide Goody (2016)
- Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries – Tim Anderson (2010)
- For Fukui’s Sake: Two Years in Rural Japan – Sam Baldwin (2011)
- Range: The Key to Success, Performance and Education – David Epstein (2019)
- A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy – Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum (2019)
- Photographing People – A Guide for Shy Photographers – Kevin Landwer-Johan (2020)
- Dark Matter – Blake Crouch (2016)
- Recursion – Blake Crouch (2019)
- Mohammed Maguire – Colin Bateman (2002)
- The Wall – John Lanchester (2019)
- The Photographer’s Playbook – J. Fulford (2014)
- PRACTICE LESS, PLAY MORE: The simple, three-step system to play songs you love on your guitar from day 1 – Steve Mastroianni (2019)
- Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers – Dennis DeSantis (2015)
- Recording Unhinged – Sylvia Massy (2016)
- Unlocking Japanese – Cure Dolly (2016)
- Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
- Revenge – Yoko Ogawa (2013)
- One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking – D Trott (2015)
- Three Japanese Short Stories (Penguin Modern) – K. Uno et al (2018)
- Striptease – Carl Hiaasen (1993)
- The Guest List – Lucy Foley (2020)
- The Parade – Dave Eggers (2019)
- Not the end of the World – Christopher Brookmyre (1998)
- Hardcore Self Help: Fk Anxiety – Robert Duff (2014)**
- Photographers on Photography: How the Masters See, Think & Shoot – Gerry Carroll (2018)
- Double Whammy – Carl Hiaasen (2005)
- The Alcohol Experiment: A 30-Day, Alcohol-Free Challenge to Interrupt Your Habits and Help You Take Control – Annie Grace (2018)
- Native Tongue – Carl Hiaasen (2005)
- In Your Defence – Sarah Langford (2020)
- Exit – Laura Waddell (2020)
- The Courage to be Disliked – Ichiro Kishimi (2019)
- Cult of the Dead Cow – Joseph Menn (2019)
- How to Ikigai – Tim Tamashiro (2019)
- Lockdown – Peter May (2020)
- Love Means Love: Same-sex Relationships and the Bible – David Runcorn (2020)
