reading 100 books a year

Some exciting news to round off this year: I have now read 100 books in 2020!

I already wrote about reading 50 books a year when I hit my original reading goal in August; not a lot has changed about my overall reading habits, aside from maybe the volume and pace. I wasn't planning to reset my goal to 100 because I expected my appetite for reading for fun would diminish once I started grad school in September, but I truly underestimated how much the 14-day self-isolation and now my second lockdown since moving to London would make me read more just to stay sane. 

To reflect a bit on what I've read and to attempt to answer the question "do you have any recommendations?", I categorized a few dozen books I've enjoyed over the years for your consideration. Most of these recommendations are fiction, although there are a few nonfiction titles scattered throughout as well. I'm still working on reading more nonfiction in general so I don't have a comprehensive list to draw from at the moment, but I'm hoping to change that in the years to come. 

Let me know if you have any book recommendations for me—would love to hear them! 

books for getting lost in: 

• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin (trans. David Hawkes) 
• The City We Became by N.K. Jemison
• A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin

books to remember, so that we may never forget:

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
• Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

books to feel nostalgic for a past you* wish you had: (*if you're like me, anyway)

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
• Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

books that feel like a fever dream:

• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Godshot by Chelsea Bieker
• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
• Severance by Ling Ma
• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

books to make your jaw drop:

• Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• White Ivy by Susie Yang
• The Rook by Daniel O'Malley
• How Much of These Hills Are Gold by C. Pam Zhang
• My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

books with fascinating protagonists:

• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
• The Idiot by Elif Batuman
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
• Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
• Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan

books that complicate the way you see the world:

• Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
• There There by Tommy Orange
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

xoxo, vivian