Best Books of 2020
Bill and his Book Oscars
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, which means that the year is coming to a close.
Many people reading this will be familiar with GoodReads and its Reading Challenge. For those who are not, the concept is simple enough: at the beginning of the year, you pledge to read a certain number of books; then you track your progress throughout the year.
According to my account, I’ve attempted this three separate times:
2015: I naively pledged to read twenty books and ended up landing on my face with a total of eleven. For some, shooting for the stars to land on the moon is a useful psychological trick. For dopamine-fiends like myself, however, I like to shoot for the moon and land on the moon. My absence from Reading Challenges in 2016, 2017, and 2018 corroborate this theory.
2019: After a three year hiatus, I decided to try again. This time, I roughly halved the number of books I pledged to read to twelve: one book each month. I setup an implementation strategy to set a timer each night and read for fifteen minutes; I kept a journal to track my consistency; I finished the year with a total of fourteen.
2020: Setting the target for 2020 was interesting because I wanted to move the goalposts just the right amount: not-too-near and not-too-far. In the end I decided that my Goldilocks Zone would be fifteen; I wanted to err on the side of caution and be reasonably sure that I could hit my target. For me, hitting the target is the most important part. As ridiculous as it may sound, I think it is even more important than reading the books themselves. While the year has yet to conclude, I can happily announce that I hit this year’s goal, which was aided in no small part by the global lockdown due to COVID-19.
This blog post attempts to convince people to create an account on GoodReads and consider participating in a Reading Challenge for 2021. While this post may seem suspiciously like a plug, unfortunately for me, it is not sponsored and will likely never be sponsored. I’m endorsing GoodReads as the quintessential example of beneficial social media.
Choice Awards
Annually GoodReads hosts its Choice Awards where users vote on the best books published that year. Think of this a bit like the Oscars but for books. Peruse the list if you’re interested in the winners of each category, but for better or worse I try to steer clear of pop-literature; if something is good in 2020 and people are still talking about it in 2030, I may read it then.
Inspired by the idea of declaring winners across genres, I decided to host my own Choice Awards.
Ladies and Gentlemen: your attention please. Announcing this year’s winners for…
Bill’s Best Books of 2020!
Self Improvement: The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsay
Fiction: Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
Science & Technology: Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman
Philosophy: The Book by Alan Watts
Runners up
Self Improvement: Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
Fiction: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Science & Technology: Haskell Programming From First Principles by Christopher Allen and Julie Moronuki
Philosophy: Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday
In Summa
If you’re already on GoodReads, follow me. If you aren’t, consider signing-up. For anyone interested, I crammed all of the books that I read in 2020 at the bottom of this post; feel free to either ignore them or ping me for a hot-take about them.