Shit, Actually is hilarious, timely, and honestly just the kind of great content we all need in 2020. And you don’t have to have seen all the movies to enjoy the book!

The Shadow King is a difficult read that has gorgeous sentences. It refuses to look away from the violent truths of a period of history that’s little known by the rest of the world.

Home Fire is a quick but hard-hitting read about xenophobia. It’s a raw, emotional, expertly crafted novel that asks readers to examine their own morality.

I found Actress to be beautiful on a sentence level, but it felt just okay to me overall. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t feel as connected to it as I’d hoped.

Brutal, raw, and incredibly told, The Glorious Heresies will grab your heart when you’re not looking and then crack it wide open. I can see why it won so many prizes.

Kept Animals is an incredibly paced, gutting novel about growing up, fitting in, navigating class, and the reverberations of choices and trauma.

How to Be Both is a fascinating novel broken into two parts, which can be read in any order. I enjoyed it and I’m eager to read more Ali Smith.

Reading this book felt like sinking into a pile of fall leaves wrapped in a plaid blanket with candles lit and a mug of hot apple cider. I haven’t read Practical Magic, but it seems like a fantastic prequel.

Is Rape a Crime? is a scorching, no-holds-barred work that’s part memoir, part investigation into a society that refuses to treat rape like the felony that it is.

Approachable but with significant depth, Transcendent Kingdom is contemporary literary fiction at its finest. I really, really enjoyed it, even though it was a tough read at times.

White Tears/Brown Scars is a thoughtfully researched, convincingly argued, incredibly important book that should be required reading for white people everywhere.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is devastatingly incredible, but also technically challenging and possibly the most emotionally difficult book I’ve read. But incredible.

The New Wilderness is an immersive, quietly excellent book about survival, motherhood, growing up, and the beauty of the world around us. I really liked it.

So You Want to Talk About Race is a solid, foundational book about antiracism with even more depth than the title implies.

May We Be Forgiven is about a man who finds a sense of family after his brother suffers a violent mental break. It was well-written, but not quite my favorite.

Reclaiming Her Time is an upbeat, vibrant biography of Maxine Waters that’s full of personality. It was a ton of fun to read, and I also learned a lot I didn’t know.

Hamnet — a historical imagining about the death of William Shakespeare’s son — is so incredibly good. So beautiful, so sad, so impressive.

The Tiger’s Wife is so, so beautiful and compelling. This is storytelling at its best, and I’ll be recommending it for probably the rest of my life.