2020 in Books

Quarantine led many people to read more books than they’ve read in a long, long time, with so much time freed up and a re-dedication to supporting local bookstores. Book clubs were a big thing this year for staying social, too, as reading became a lot more trendy in the social media circles I follow.

Well, for me… my commute remains my primary dedicated reading time and space, so when I stopped having a commute in March, I stopped reading for a long time, too.

Needless to say, it was another year of falling disappointingly short of my books goal, coming up shorter on my Goodreads challenge than ever before. It stings a bit to think of the years that I far surpassed the number of books I aimed to read, and that those numbers far exceed how many I got through this year. But I’m not too beat up about it, I know how difficult this year was and the only reason I read as much as I even did was because of many bouts of stressed and anxious insomnia. Probably half of my reading was done between 2-6am this year, hours that I am usually not awake for at all.

Here was 2020 in books completed:

Collage of covers for books read in 2020
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2020 in Film

So…
… it’s been a really rough year for movies, among other things. I can’t even really differentiate movies I watched in theaters and not, since movies stopped being shown in theaters a long time ago and many movies that I was looking forward to seeing this year have been delayed to next year.

In the olden days , I’ve noted the exceptions that were watched outside of their theatrical release, as in I had to watch them on a streaming service or even on an airplane. Well… this year, the only movies I saw in theaters were originally released in December 2020. Every new release I saw this year was on a streaming service. (I only saw 2 movies in theaters, back in January.)

But I did still watch a lot of movies, many of which were released this year.
(If you’d like to see every movie I watched this year, regardless of release year, you can check my Media Log.
I am thinking tracking movies on Letterboxd next year, after years of neglect, so let me know if that is something you use and you can add me!)

Without further ado, here are the 2020 releases I saw this year:

Collage of posters for movies watched in 2020
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2020 Media Log

Inspired by my friend Ben Hong, who got the idea from Jen Myers, I am continuing the practice of tracking my media consumption this year. This will now be replaced with a 2021 media log, which I will update regularly on its dedicated page. Here are all the movies, shows, books, albums, games, and more that I logged this year.

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Looking Back on 2020

… this year was an unconventional one, wasn’t it? I thought about not doing this post at all, as I was looking forward to it less than any of the other year-end posts (and I was… dreading doing any of the year-end posts, if I can be honest). But I had a very nice first 2 months of the year and the rest of the year could have gone so much worse. While the year had fewer milestones and events to look back on compared to years past, there are still little things here and there to remember. It’s good to look at the highlights of the year, no matter how difficult it was, perhaps in spite of how difficult it was.

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2019 in Books

2019 was a great reading year for me in that I didn’t feel like I read too many painful books. However, I am disappointed that I didn’t complete my Goodreads reading challenge, breaking my streak of exceeding my challenge 3 years in a row. Last year, I read 29 books and thought that, with my past pattern of exceeding my reading goal by a few books, I would be able to get to 30 this year. It seems that I may have plateaued at 29 for the time being, however, so I’ll need to re-evaluate how much reading time I have to achieve these goals.

Here are the books I read in 2019!

2019inBooks.jpg

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