What a year! 2020 is over! Not that things are all that different, but I think part of the mentality is that we know where we are and how the year is starting off – maybe 2021 will have fewer surprises for the world.
I read 156 books in 2020! All the free time COVID gave me led to an average of three books read per week. The list of 5-star books was slightly long, but I do want to share with you what my top reads are and I would love it if you read them, too, and let me know what you thought!
FICTION
In a follow-up to The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Albom brings the child who Eddie saved into the after-life in The Next Person You Meet in Heaven. Annie is grown and has just gotten remarried. Her new husband Paolo and her decide to take a balloon ride before leaving for their honeymoon. Disaster strikes and they end up in the hospital with Annie wanting to give Paolo her lung. She then heads to Heaven and meets her five people – all of which change her in ways she never knew were possible. It is a captivating read that will remind you how much impact we all have on each other.
In The Noel Letters, Noel Post has her world fall apart all in a short period of time – she gets divorced, finds out her father is dying and then loses her job a few weeks before Christmas. She has barely talked to her father since she was a teenager and now 16 years later she heads back “home” to see him before he passes away. She blames him for her mother’s death. She remembers her mother trying to leave one night and her father trying to stop her and then she got into a car accident. Once she is back and sees her father’s world and his friends, she wonders if she really knew him at all?
In A Dog’s Promise, Bailey is back for a final important mission. Safe and loved in the afterlife, CJ tells him he has to go back and is sent to Ethan’s great grandson, Burke. Burke was born a paraplegic and needs a dog to help him get around. He trains Cooper, Bailey’s new name, to do steady, assist and pull. Yet, one day Burke can have a surgery that can help him walk and Cooper is no longer needed. Cooper does meet the love of his life, though, and has puppies with Lacey.
A tale of four young girls growing up into four women is the general summary for this classic Little Women, but there is so much more to it. The book spans their story from being little girls until they are grown and have children of their own and the big lessons they learn along the way. Meg is the oldest and would love for them to have finer things even though they are considered poor. Jo is a writer and full of life. Beth is frail but loves to play piano. Amy is the youngest and can’t wait to enter the world and do what her sisters do. Their next-door-neighbor, Lorrie, becomes like a brother to them during most of their childhood; yet, the relationship must change as they all become adults.
HISTORICAL FICTION
It seemed innocent at first – two young girls exploring the gypsy camp in the nearby woods. However, when the older sister discovers their father’s secret, she is threatened to behave or else. Her father threatens to send her to the House of Mercy where girls of bad moral character are “reformed.” Effie wakes up one morning and her sister is gone, but her mother distracts her with a day out shopping and tells her Luella is with their father. When they get home and Luella is nowhere to be seen, Effie just knows she has been sent to the House of Mercy in The Girls with No Names.
In The Widows, Lily Ross is the wife of Sheriff Daniel Ross, mother to two children with one on the way and daughter of a coal miner who died trying to rescue miners. Everyone in the area lives each day hoping to not hear the siren from the mines. Talk of miners creating a union is getting stronger as the mine owner wants to reopen the “widowmaker” – a shaft that collapsed and killed many good men. Lily doesn’t know her husband has taken the miners’ side until he is murdered. In the wake of his death, she is offered his job as sheriff until a special election can be held. The town thinks she’ll just be a placeholder, but she can’t rest until she sees justice done for her husband’s death.
A family camp was set up at Auschwitz so that if the Red Cross came to check out the camp, they would see families and children living together. The children were supposed to be gathered at a warehouse each day and kept entertained, but a few adults secretly turned it into a school. There were even a few books hidden away that could only be borrowed by asking the librarian. Just a teenager, Dita is charged with making sure the books are hidden away if any Nazis or Kapos darken the school doors. She knows the power of books and takes her role seriously in The Librarian of Auschwitz.
In The Paris Library, Lily feels lost in the aftermath of her mother’s death and her father’s marriage to another woman just a year later. She then gains two brothers in quick succession and starts helping more at home than being with her friends. A neighbor, Odille, has taken a liking to Lily and starts giving her a place of sanctuary at her house where she can learn French and vent about her life. Odille is a Frenchwoman who married an American soldier at the end of WWII. As Lily opens up, she wonders what Odille’s story is and why she never talks about the family and friends she left behind in Paris.
BIOGRAPHICAL
In About Your Father, Peggy Rowe shares more family stories, but focuses on ones involving her sons and husband. With the same strong voice, she tells about events she thinks helped shape Mike into the Dirty Jobs celebrity we all know. She talks about how she and her husband got to do commercials and how they adjusted moving from acres of land to a condo. I laughed many times.
Did you ever listen to Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” radio show? I did. Growing up most of my childhood on overseas military bases, we had one American TV channel and one American radio channel. In high school, I tried most days to catch “The Rest of the Story.” Now, I enjoy Mike Rowe’s podcasts in the same genre, which he had now turned into a book. “The Way I Heard It” tells a short story about a person, place or event in a way that makes you really wonder who, what or where it might be about. I always feel really good when I can guess it right before the end.
It’s not often that I read two books by an author back to back. A family member recommended One Beautiful Dream to me at a family Christmas party. I checked and it was available from the library right away as an ebook. I didn’t start reading it until a few days later. In One Beautiful Dream, Fulwiler talks about the process of writing her first book, Something Other Than God. I had to read that one, too, to get a full understanding of her journey. That book, too, was available right away from the library as an ebook, allowing me to read one right after the other.
A child rarely comes into someone’s life without making a mark – especially a loved child. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, Mitch Albom found himself not just reporting on how to help, but offering to help an orphanage that was destroyed. He was one of the few who managed to get a plane and team together and land on the island within days of the quake. Years of helping the orphans followed, yet he and his wife also had their life back in the U.S. Then, one little girl in the orphanage was diagnosed with a brain tumor and no one in Haiti could help her. Her story is told in Finding Chika.
INSPIRATIONAL
When Life Gives You Pears is the story of how Jeannie Gaffigan found out about having a brain tumor, faced surgery and had a long road to recovery. As a mom of five children and wife to a comedian, she had been the glue holding the family schedule together. During her ordeal, she realizes some key life lesson about motherhood, faith and love. She is candid about her fears and struggles, hoping to help anyone else who might face similar circumstances. The lessons she learned are lessons we can all learn.
What is your passion? What do you do that makes you come alive? If you haven’t found it yet, that’s okay. Your Blue Flame was written to help you find that passion or “blue flame” and set it on fire. Jen Fulwiler speaks from her experience of dragging through life day after day until she made the time to write. When she wrote, she ended up with more energy to give her family than when she didn’t follow any dreams. She shares her struggles, successes and lessons learned in Your Blue Flame.
Everyone could use a therapist at some times … even a therapist. Lisa shares her story about a time when she couldn’t get past a sudden breakup and went to see a therapist. In true therapy fashion, what she thinks her issues are might actually just the tip of the iceberg and she finally digs deep to figure out how to break out of her self-imposed cell. The lessons she learns are not just from her therapist but also from the patients who come to see her and open up their lives to her in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.
Malcolm Gladwell books
I read five Malcolm Gladwell books and would recommend them all:
In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell explores scenarios where our subconscious takes over and makes judgment calls.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell examines several of the key factors that have led many people to success.
In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell explores various cases in life where the underdog often succeeds because of a disadvantage.
Talking to Strangers doesn’t solve the problem of reading people, but it gives readers the ability to be aware of other people and more aware of oneself.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell examines some theories as to what or who can make something go from being a small thing into something huge.
HISTORICAL NON-FICTION
Could you fight through emotional and physical abuse every day at school just to make a difference? Nine students did this exact thing in 1957 when they integrated into Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Melba was one of these students and she writes the bare bones truth about her experience in Warriors Don’t Cry. It gives a first-person perspective to a very important time in U.S. history.
How did the Nazis come to power in Germany and why didn’t the German people do more to stop them? Those are the questions that people have been trying to answer for decades. Defying Hitler is a personal memoir by one man who was an eyewitness to the changes that happened in Germany during those years. As a boy, he read the news and numbers coming out about The Great War. He was a teen as the country tried to recover. As a young man, he saw the Nazis come to power and sought to find a way to avoid getting caught up in their way of thinking.
It’s a day many remember down to the very last detail – Dec. 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was attacked the Japanese, costing almost 2,500 American lives. The events that led up to the attack have been scrutinized many ways trying to place blame. However, sometimes in war, you are surprised and America was surprised that day. In To Wake the Giant, Jeff Shaara makes the events leading up to Pearl Harbor come to life in this historically accurate novel where one of the main characters is a young man from Florida who enlists in the Navy.
If you have read Before We Were Yours, I strongly suggest you read Before and After very soon. Shortly after the release of Before We Were Yours, Lisa Wingate started getting emails from families who were affected by the adoption scandal. They saw their family member in the historical fiction story Wingate had created. One of the women, Connie, suggests a reunion at the dedication of a monument in Memphis to the hundreds of children who died in Tann’s care. Wingate agrees and brings her journalist friend Judy Christie along on the journey to record the stories of the survivors for posterity.
Priska, Anka and Rachel were all barely pregnant when they were sent to concentration camps in the summer and fall of 1944. Even though Dr. Mengle had a keen eye at rooting out the pregnant women for his experiments, they all managed to hide their condition. The timing of their pregnancies saved their babies lives as they each gave birth just days before liberation. However, the months they spent took a toll on their bodies and minds and they barely had strength to keep them and their babies alive. Their stories are told in Born Survivors.
Some true stories read like fiction. A Bookshop in Berlin is the true story of one woman’s survival during WW2. She starts the war owning a French bookshop in Berlin. She is a Polish Jew, but her store survives Kristalnacht due to her reputation in the community. However, from then on, she is on the run with “no place to lay her head” (the original title for the book). She escapes to France, but hopes to get passage to Switzerland somehow so she can be safe and find out how her family is going in Poland.
NON-FICTION
This is the first cookbook I’ve reviewed on my blog. It is half a cookbook and half an instruction manual for cooking. Samin Nosrat shares her knowledge of cooking from years of working in restaurants, studying throughout the world and learning her family’s recipes. Her focus is on four key things: Salt, Fat, Acid and Heat. She proposes that if you learn how to use these four things correctly, you can make any dish and make it delicious.
What are the best books you read in 2020? Share in the comments so I can add them to my to-read list!
Also, if you have any reading goals for 2021, share them, too!