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At the beginning of last year I mentioned how I wanted to read more. Taking the time to pick up a book, being immersed in the words and truly relaxing was something I’d been lacking in 2019 and wanted to make up for. I should point out that I didn’t set a particular number in mind when deciding I wanted to read more. So this post is simply a list of the books I read in 2020, the ones I loved, the ones I didn’t, and all those in between.
Books I Read in 2020
The Good
The books I read, devoured and loved. The ones that made me laugh, cry and think and basically made me want to hide away from the world.
How Women Rise by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith
Do you hesitate about putting forward ideas? Are you reluctant to claim credit for your achievements? Do you find it difficult to get the support you need from your boss or the recognition you deserve from your colleagues?
If your answer to any of these is ‘Yes’, How Women Rise will help get you back on track. Inspiring and practical by turns, it identifies 12 common habits that can prove an obstacle to future success and tells you how to overcome them. In the process, it points the way to a career that will satisfy your ambitions and help you make the difference you want to make in the world.
Work Like a Woman by Mary Portas
Are you ready to be your best self at work?
Packed with advice, tips and decades of business experience from Mary Portas, this is a book for every one of us: whatever level you are, wherever you work.
It’s about calling time on alpha culture and helping every one of us to be happier, more productive and collaborative.
It’s time to #WorkLikeAWoman.
Tell Me No Secrets by Julie Corbin
You can bury the past but it never dies.
They say that everybody has a secret. Mine lies underground. Her name was Rose and she was nine years old when she died . . .
Grace lives in a quiet, Scottish fishing village – the perfect place for bringing up her twin girls with her loving husband Paul. Life is good.
Until a phone call from her old best-friend, a woman Grace hasn’t seen since her teens – and for good reason – threatens to destroy everything. Caught up in a manipulative and spiteful game that turns into an obsession, Grace is about to realise that some secrets can’t stay buried forever.
For if Orla reveals what happened on that camping trip twenty-four years ago, she will take away all that Grace holds dear . . .
Kaizen by Sarah Harvey
From Marie Kondo to Hygge to Ikigai, in recent years, philosophies to help people live better lives have taken the world by storm. Kaizen will change your habits for good.
This beautifully colour illustrated and photographed book offers a way to build good habits and remove bad ones, without being too hard on yourself along the way. The focus is on having patience, shaping solutions for yourself rather than following others and not giving up when things aren’t working. Rather than being critical of your faults, the emphasis is on mindful, positive change. Well-known in the business and sports worlds as a method for mapping incremental goals, Kaizen is also a wonderful tool for slowly improving aspects of your life, without feeling daunted or overwhelmed by the challenge.
Kaizen by Sarah Harvey brings you a personalized and flexible approach to change that you can apply to any area of your life (whether it is health, relationships, money, career, habits, new hobbies or general wellbeing). You can adapt it to suit working style, preferences and personality. Every person’s experience of Kaizen will be different, which is what makes it such an effective tool for positive change.
The Doll Maker by Richard Montanari
A quiet Philadelphia suburb. A woman cycles past a train depot with her young daughter. And there she finds a murdered girl posed on a newly painted bench. Strangled. Beside her is a formal invite to a tea dance in a week’s time.
Seven days later, two more young victims are discovered in a disused house, posed on painted swings. At the scene is an identical invite. This time, though, there is something extra waiting for Detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano.
A delicate porcelain doll. It’s a message. And a threat.
With Marseille and Anabelle stalking the city, Detectives Byrne and Balzano have just seven days to find the link between the murders before another innocent child is snatched from its streets.
The Mistake by K.L.Slater
Eight-year-old Billy goes missing one day, out flying his kite with his sister Rose. Two days later, he is found dead. Sixteen years on, Rose still blames herself for Billy’s death. How could she have failed to protect her little brother?
Rose has never fully recovered from the trauma, and one of the few people she trusts is her neighbour Ronnie, who she has known all her life. But one day Ronnie falls ill, and Rose goes next door to help him… and what she finds in his attic room turns her world upside down.
Rose thought she knew the truth about what happened to Billy. She thought she knew her neighbour. Now the only thing she knows is that she is in danger…
Into The Wild by Jack Krakauer
In April 1992, Chris McCandless set off alone into the Alaskan wild. He had given his savings to charity, abandoned his car and his possessions, and burnt the money in his wallet, determined to live a life of independence. Just four months later, Chris was found dead. An SOS note was taped to his makeshift home, an abandoned bus.
In piecing together the final travels of this extraordinary young man’s life, Jon Krakauer writes about the heart of the wilderness, its terribly beauty and its relentless harshness. Into the Wild is a modern classic of travel writing, and a riveting exploration of what drives some of us to risk more than we can afford to lose.
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky. He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye.
The Bad
The books I read but didn’t love. The ones that tricked me into finishing but ultimately let me down.
The Shivering Turn by Sally Spencer
Oxford, 1974. When seventeen-year-old Linda Corbet goes missing, the police dismiss her as an obvious runaway. Only Jennie Redhead, recently driven out of Oxford’s police force, is prepared to dig deeper.
She suspects that something truly dark and depraved drove Linda from her beloved home and doting parents. Jennie’s investigation leads her to a secret Oxford society and to a clandestine world of violence, excess and desire, hidden behind the city’s dreaming spires.
The Abandoned
In a change to my normal behaviour, I am now giving myself permission to put down and step away from the books that fail to grab me and hold my attention.
One Step Too Far by Tina Seskis
An apparently happy marriage. A beautiful son. A lovely home.
So what makes Emily Coleman get up one morning and walk right out of her life?
How will she survive?
And what is the date that looms, threatening to force her to confront her past?
No-one has ever guessed her secret. Will you?
The Repeat Offenders
The ones that I have read and loved and have read again.
Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
On a trip to the South of France, the shy heroine of Rebecca falls in love with Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower. Although his proposal comes as a surprise, she happily agrees to marry him. But as they arrive at her husband’s home, Manderley, a change comes over Maxim, and the young bride is filled with dread. Friendless in the isolated mansion, she realises that she barely knows him. In every corner of every room is the phantom of his beautiful first wife, Rebecca, and the new Mrs de Winter walks in her shadow.
Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the other woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.
Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis
This 1936 bestseller sold over 100,000 copies in the first two months of its release. Marjorie Hillis, a 1930s Vogue editor, provides a stylish, no-nonsense guide to living and loving single life. Written with wisdom, humour and panache, this is advice that will never go out of fashion. She takes women through the fundamentals of living alone by showing them how to create a welcoming environment and cultivate home-friendly hobbies, ‘for no woman can accept an invitation every night without coming to grief’.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
It’s New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany’s. And nice girls don’t, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while – down. Pursued by to Salvatore ‘Sally’ Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and ‘Rusty’ Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly ‘top banana in the shock deparment’, and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.
On Writing by Stephen King
Part memoir, part masterclass by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have.
King’s advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 – and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery.
Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King’s critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.
Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it – fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.
What did you read in 2020 and what would you recommend?
Let me know in the comments.
