2020's Hits and Misses

I thought it might be fun to finish up the year by seeing what books we've raved and ranted about in 2020. What earnt 5 stars? What deserved nothing more than a trip to the recycling centre? Who knows, you may find your next must-read book on this list.

Hurrah
I only gave 2 books more than 5 stars, but I know I rate somewhat hard. 5 stars and it blew me away.
5 stars to A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.
4.5 stars to The Pact we Made by Layla Alammar.

Bah Humbug:
Watching the Hare by Adeline Yen Mah. Earnt all of 1 star.

Over to you...

Not counting re-reads, these are the books I gave five stars to in 2020:

The Inconvenient Indian, by Thomas King
Seven Fallen Feathers, by Tanya Talaga
Watership Down, by Richard Adams -- the audio edition read by Peter Capaldi
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

>2 rabbitprincess: Oh, I loved Watership Down when I read it ages ago, and an audio by Capaldi?! Wow!

My favorites from 2020:

The Lumberjanes collected comic volumes
Call Down the Hawk
New Kid
The Wise Man's Fear
The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Pride and Prejudice
Silver in the Wood
A Tale of Two Cities

Sometimes I wonder about my rating system of what I read, but now that I am in a reflective mood, my stand out reads are:

Valentine
The Cold Millions
Becoming
The Mercy Seat
Girl, Woman, Other
Deacon King Kong
Only Killers and Thieves
When They Call You a Terrorist

Here are my Top 6 reads for 2020 (the last two tied for 5th place):

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - a re-read as an audiobook
His & Hers by Alice Feeney
A Phantom Lover by Violet Paget, as Vernon Lee
A Room of One's Own by Viginia Woolf
Where Serpents Sleep by C.S. Harris
Where Shadows Dance by C.S. Harris

Stinker read for 2020 (with two honorable mentions):
Father Briar and the Angel by Rita Saladano
The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai by Ruiyan Xu
Her Revolution by Gemma Jackson

5 star reads for 2020:
No Fear Shakespeare: Henry V
Dancing with the Enemy: My Family's Holocaust Secret by Paul Glaser
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
Brothers by Angela Hunt
Journey by James Michener
Poldark books # 1-8
Brontes and Their World (Pictorial Biography) by Phyliss Bentley
Plain Meetinghouses: Lancaster County Old Order Mennonites Gather to Worship by Beth Oberholzer
My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton by Stephanie Dray
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea: The History and Discovery of the World's Richest Shipwreck by Gary Kinder
Books # 1-6 Accursed Kings series by Maurice Druon
The Good Girl by Mary Kubica
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
Fall of Giants by Ken Follett
The Plantagenet books # 1-3 by Sharon Penman
57 Hours: A Survivor's Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama by Vesselin Nedkov
Mary Donoho: New First Lady of the Santa Fe Trail by Marian Meyer
The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland by Jim DeFede
438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea by Jonathan Franklin
Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford by Clint Hill
The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain's Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Mutiny, Shipwreck, and Discovery by Martin Dugard
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Original Classic Edition): An American Slave by Frederick Douglass
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

The Stinkers: 2 stars or less (I had no 1's)

The End of the World by Andrew Bliss
The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond by Howard Steven Pines
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition by Oliver Sacks
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Daughters of Mars: A Novel by Thomas Keneally

A great reading year!

Preparing my end-of-year summary I found the following for best and worst:

Best:
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor TOwles
Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

DNF:
Wintering by Kate Moses

Not Great:
Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith
An Equal Justice by Chad Zunker
The Recipe Club by Andrea Israel

My 5 star reads of 2020 were:

The Trespass by Barbara Ewing
The Grifters by Jim Thompson
All That I Have by Castle Freeman
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti
The Facts of Life and Death by Belinda Bauer

Some of my less than steller reads were:

Blackberry Winter by Sarah Jio
Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West
Hunt for the Skinwalker by Colm Kelleher