The next of my annual year-ender blogs is my list of what I got through in reading matter during 2020; I’d actually expected to get more reading done what with rolling lockdowns et al, but I think missing a holiday break (where I usually binge-read a bunch of stuff by the pool) contributed to me reading a little less in 2020 than in 2019…
Still, I managed a bunch of SF and thriller fiction, along with a few choice bits of non-fiction. My top books picks for last year were Rowland White’s jump-jet love letter Harrier 809, Amer Anwar’s Stone Cold Trouble and Simon Stålenhag’s moody and evocative art books The Electric State and Tales from the Loop.
Here’s the full list:
Dead Space (Lee Goldberg), Star Trek: Borg (Hilary J. Badler), The Last Best Hope (Una McCormack) Broken Square (Mike Lunnon-Wood), The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard (David A. Goodman), Curse the Day (Judith O’Reilly), The Treadstone Resurrection (Joshua Hood), F-14 Tomcat In Action (Al Adcock), The Chemical Detective (Fiona Erskine), Watch Dogs: Legion Resistance Report (Rick Barba), Harrier 809 (Rowland White), The Electric State (Simon Stålenhag), This is Not a Game (Walter Jon Williams), 100 Deadly Skills: Survival Edition (Clint Emerson), Rocket Science (Ian Sales, ed.), Private Gold (James Patterson with Jassy Mackenzie), X-Planes: Bell X-2 (Peter E. Davies), Private Moscow (Patterson with Adam Hamdy), Tales from the Folly (Ben Aaronovitch), What Abigail Did That Summer (Aaronovitch), Shadow Fall (Alexander Freed), The Revelation of the Word (David Annandale), Morningstar (Graham McNeill), Stone Cold Trouble (Amer Anwar), A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (Alain de Botton), Total Blackout (Alex Shaw), Box 88 (Charles Cumming), Against A Dark Background (Iain M. Banks), The Shut-In (Patterson with Duane Swierczynski), Die Hard: An Oral History (Brian Abrams), So Say We All: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Battlestar Galactica (Mark A. Altman & Edward Gross), Big Damn Hero (James Lovegrove), The Military Techno-Thriller: A History (Nader Elhefnawy), The Janson Equation (Douglas Corleone), Scions of Elysia (Chris Dows), Renegades of Elysia (Dows), Martyrs of Elysia (Dows), Steel Terror (Dean Wesley Smith), How To Cheat At Everything (Simon Lovell), The Black Art of Killing (Matthew Hall), Above the Law: The Unofficial Guide to Star Cops (Paul Watts), Lando’s Luck (Justina Ireland), How To Write Dazzling Dialogue (James Scott Bell), True Believer (Jack Carr), Lions of the Sky (Paco Chierici), 8-Bit Apocalypse (Alex Ruebens), Broken Saints (Alec Worley), Tales from the Loop (Stålenhag), Daedalus (L.J. Goulding), The World of Cyberpunk 2077 (Martin Batylda), Illyrium (Darius Hinks), The Oshkosh Connection (Andrew Watts), Typeset in the Future (Dave Addey), Tiny Planetarium: See the Stars! (Nick Perilli).
