I read 17 books in 2020 which is just about my usual. I aim for 12 a year and usually end up with a few more thanks to a few shorter works.

Like most years, this year in books was largely disappointing. I disliked most books I read. Like usual, I read most of these books on Kindle app on the iPhone/iPad and some books I listened to on the Audible app on the iPhone while a handful I used both Kindle and Audible for the same book using the app that was most accessible at the time.

Following is a list in descending order of dislike.

17. Poison Orchids by Sarah A. Denzil, Anni Taylor

Poison Orchids was easily the worst book I read this year. This is a childish b-movie plot trying to act like a “psychological thriller” - it is nothing of the sort even though that genre seems ripe for over inclusion.

16. Grand Union by Zadie Smith

The brilliant essayist Zadie Smith continued to baffle me by her poor attempts at fiction.

15. Amnesty by Arvind Adiga

Adiga’s White Tiger had teeth. Amnesty lacks any sense of bite. A weak meandering story, about a Tamil immigrant in Australia who witnesses a murder, starts with a promise but gets lost very quickly.

14. How to be a stoic by Massimo Pigliucci

My continued search for convincing material on a better approach to life’s vagaries met another dead-end.

13. A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Easily the most overrated book I read this year. This is the type of contemporary writing about Indian sociopolitical climate that unfortunately has no appeal for me. And the rather amateur writing style didn’t help its cause.

12. The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Peterson

An unconvincing essay pretending to be a serious book about a largely unserious topic specially with the hindsight of Covid.

11. Happy Like This by Ashley Wurzbacher

A short story collection for the fringe. Oddball but largely uninteresting subjects. A couple of gems out there but way too many duds to justify reading the whole thing.

10. Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

I like J.K. Rowling’s throwback Cormorant Steike gumshoe novels but this one was hard to like. It seemed like an intermediate piece - more a personal story. The mystery was just barely there.

9. Rosmerholm by Henrik Ibsen

Might the book I was most ambivalent about I liked it but not as much as I thought I would. The late 19th century morality play is complex enough to hold one’s interest but the characters just fall short of being interesting.

8. Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

Probably the best Galbraith book so far. However, it is quite overwritten and repetitive with way too many uninteresting subplots. I so wish that Rowling would write a really tight mystery that is focused on the main story and not the love affair between the detective and his secretary.

7. Caffeine by Michael Pollan

More of a long essay, Caffeine raises some important questions about coffee and its impact on the modern world. However, it isn’t really fully done. Seems like the first few chapters of a longer book.

6. Money by Jacob Goldstein

A very entertaining and informative book about a very western history of money. I enjoyed it quite a lot even though it seemed a bit incomplete.

5. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

The snark dripping from every sentence in the book makes it a hard read but I have grown fond of this non-fiction account of Anna’s rather random trip down Silicon Valley’s misogyny. While it feels obvious it still is cringeworthy enough but not in an overly depressing way.

4. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Yeah, finally. I got done with the tomb and I liked it more than I thought I would. It has so much energy, so much life. It is infectious in its excitement about the topic that is largely uninteresting to me and I guess to most today.

3. A Tale of two cities by Charles Dickens

Another book that held value on a revisit. The suddenness of the revolution really appealed to me and so did the characters so beholden to their destinies. It seemed a far more relevant book than I had gone in thinking.

2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

I read it a while ago and didn’t particularly remember it fondly but was pleasantly surprised by the power of observation and implicit warmth. It will definitely be a book I read every few years.

1. Themes and Variations by David Sedaris

This tiny essay by David Sedaris was easily the most entertaining thing I read this year.

That’s it! Over to another year of reading.