🐱👓 8 best reads in 2020, based on how they make you feel
Here're the best books I've read this year.
My sudden, inexplicable appetite to read has ballooned tremendously in the tail-end of 2020. Here are the best books that I’ve read this year.
If you want to feel how some introverts do,
Convenience Store Woman (2018)
by Sayaka Murata
The story is about the life of an unmarried, 36 year old Japanese woman who is content working at a convenience store.
This isn’t a highly grippling or life changing sort of tale, instead, it is more of a nice post-work short read that you can gobble up in one sitting. The book promises nothing less than the provision of a new perspective on career and life.
I enjoyed being absorbed in the microcosm of society depicted by the convenience store, and seeing the world through the protagonist’s eyes. You get to follow her character growth as she seeks to find her own level of comfort and confidence, sometimes through measures that are a tad extreme. Through this process, you get to conjure another take on what happiness can entail too.
If you want to feel pensive,
Dept. of Speculation (2014)
by Jenny Offill
This book is a sad love story, and an unsettling reminder that relationships that start well and go well, may still end terribly. Ouch.
As motherhood ensues and the decent marriage degenerates, you’ll realise that the protagonist starts to actively detach herself, and refers to herself as the ‘wife’. As evident, this is not a book to turn to for joy or happy thoughts. There’re profound thoughts, yes, but it’s mostly coupled with an uneasy sense of depression.
The book has many short chapters featuring various life milestones and memories. While the writing style worked for me, I’d like to extend a word of caution as some readers may find it shifty and random instead. I can imagine this being a pain for those who cannot stand reading streams of consciousness.
The protagonist tends to recall random quotes, facts, or general thoughts throughout the book. Here’re four short extracts:
“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”
“If [my husband] noticed something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never f*cking outrun entropy.”
“There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button in the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.”
“In some [creation myths], when God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.”
If you want to feel sad yet hopeful,
Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family (2019)
by Mitch Albom
Having read all of Mitch Albom’s books, I was clearly excited to give this a go, and the book did not disappoint. Reading this pulls you in all sorts of emotional directions. The feelings of devastation and unfairness are often intertwined and balanced with hope and love.
It was a heartwrenching process though, watching young Chika deteriorate and wishing for miracles, particularly if you’ve had experienced watching someone close undergo something so incredibly unfortunate. Yet, this book is heartwarming and reassuring, and I can imagine it being a consoling read.
If you want to feel amused,
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (2013)
by Allie Brosh
TLDR: If you like memes, and feel like reading episodic childhood and adulthood rants with a comedic slant, this is for you.
This is the kind of book that you’d either love or hate. Overall, it’s a conversational and reflective comedy on life, with part of the comedic effect aided by the ridiculous drawn-using-a-mouse-on-paint comic strip memes. Oh paint, those were the days.
You’ll be looking at a mixture of prose and memes that form episodic snippets of the author’s life from childhood through adulthood. Throughout the process, the author deals with (or discovers in hindsight) her own set of insecurities and, well, general quirky personality and outlook. She also needs to handle two dogs (one of which is not very smart), her parents, a monstrous goose, hot sauce lies, self-lies and much more.
Here’s a wise quote from the tail end of the book:
“I thought the whole process [of self-improvement] was going to be sort of like getting rid of a wasp nest- a few stings, but once you remove the source of the problem, it’s gone.”
“Unlike wasp nests, however, you cannot beat your fundamental insufficiencies to death with a fourteen-foot-long tree branch while hiding behind a ski mask and a cloud of Mace. And unlike wasps, uncomfortable truths don’t stop coming once your destroy their home.”
If you want to feel thrilled with adrenaline,
My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018)
by Oyinkan Braithwaite
I must say that this is a tough book to put down. The inception gives you a raw perspective of the narrator, and draws you in instantaneously. You’ll find yourself, in the first 20 pages of the book, rooting for the protagonist to complete her successful murder despite knowing that it’s, clearly, a bad thing to root for.
This book follows the mind of the protagonist, a smart female Nigerian nurse, whose younger sister somehow tends to kill her boyfriends. Our protagonist is a self-engineered monster, who sort of became this way due to the unending and crippling comparison that their family has between her sister and herself.
Broken down into bite sized chapters with less than five pages each, the book doesn’t seem disjointed. In fact, it makes it easier to pause your reading at the end of the chapter since they come so quickly. The physical book only has 223 pages (even lesser considering how many blank spaces there are, which is expected for books with many micro-chapters), and can be polished off within the evening. I'm always a fan of good short reads over long ones.
Here're three of the saddest lines in the book. They don't reflect the overall plot, but I just wanted to share it:
“Patients come to the hospital for healing and, sometimes, it’s not just their bodies that need attention.”
“Two packets of pocket tissue, one 30-centiliter bottle of water, one first aid kit, one packet of wipes, one wallet, one tube of hand cream, one lip balm, one phone, one tampon, one rape whistle. Basically, the essentials for every woman.”
“In the western world you can walk or dance in the rain, but here, the rain will drown you.
If you want to feel completely weirded out,
The Vegetarian (2016)
by Han Kang
I had high expectations because the book started by listing all the amazing reviews that it has gotten. I was hopeful about plot development as the story’s premise gave room for things to get really, really weird. And it DOES get uncomfortably creepy.
We started off with a glimpse into a strangely distant married life, then the protagonist’s wife had a dream, and everything started getting uncanny. She stopped eating meat, ceased sleeping, and avoided contact with meat in all aspects imaginable.
The protagonist went off about his wife as the ‘most ordinary woman in the world’, being supposed to cook for him, do housework for him, look presentable for him, exchange pleasantries with other wives of his bosses for him, obey him for him, and basically do anything a women was expected to do a century ago for him. Those were major eye rolls, but paved the way for strong characterisation for the protagonist as a self-entitled and selfish villain with no respect or sympathy for his wife.
A quarter into the book I realised that the author must have used vegetarianism as a subject matter to show the absurdity of various expectations of women- from her husband, her own family, and the society at large.
P.S: The latter part of the book is quite a difficult read for me because things got messy.
Here are two reads previously featured in the 10 best books of 2020 to gift this Christmas. The following are my top two favourites from the list.
If you want to feel fuzzy wuzzy romance,
Beach Read (2020)
by Emily Henry
This is a story of how a young adult accepted her broken family after her cheating father passed away, leaving her with a psychological mess to clean up, all while being circumstantially forced to stay in a beach house that her father and his mistress shared.
It follows the protagonist as she broke free from what was thought to be happiness, with the help of a love interest that gradually became that very definition of happiness, of course.
If you’re craving for an accidental reconnection turned budding romance, turned pressure-cooked love, turned confusion and uncertainty, turned true love, this is the book to reach out for.
Coming from someone who doesn’t enjoy reading romance, some parts were a little cheesy, but in a good way. All in all, Beach Read is a good romantic getaway.
If you want to feel transported into people’s lives,
Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café (2020)
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
First things first, I read this book, which is the second in the ‘series’, as opposed to starting with the first book, ‘Before the coffee gets cold’.
I fell in love with the simple and smart premise of this book. Basically, there’s a cafe that allows you to travel back in time if you follow a couple of simple rules. All you need to do to return back to the present safely is to finish drinking the coffee before it gets cold. I shall not reveal the other rules, but it’s, as aforementioned, simple, and brilliant.
This book is great if you enjoy learning life lessons through the regrets of others. The storytelling is to the point and the concept is great. I like that the author jumps straight into the whole time travelling elements instead of building an unnecessary foundation. Instead, the plot grows alongside the time traveling adventures. You’ll kind of fantasize about time traveling the next time you visit a quaint and quiet cafe for sure. I can also imagine this book being made into a movie.
I have to say though, that I was a tad annoyed in the first third of the book where the author kept repeating the simple time travel rules. it’s understandable though, as a reminder.
This book is perfect for fans of short reads. You can wolf it down in about three to four hours (the physical book had just 192 pages, which makes it an unbulky one to carry around too). Also, I thought the character map in the beginning was kind of helpful for readers unfamiliar with Japanese names.