My 2020 Reading Challenge Recap

Well, it has certainly been a strange year! But if nothing else, 2020 has been a fairly good year of reading for me. As always, I participated in the annual Goodreads Reading Challenge, and this was the first time in many years that I easily met my numerical goal well in advance. The pandemic has changed my reading habits significantly, and many of my goals and priorities shifted from what I thought they would be at the beginning of the year. Let’s take a look back at my year in books!

I set the same comfortable numerical goal for this year as I did for last year: 45 books. I finished my 45^th book less than halfway through December, and will certainly squeeze in a few more before the new year. You can check out all of the books I’ve read this year here. I had a bit of a slow start to 2020, in terms of reading, and had a rough transition period when I first started working from home and realized that without a commute I no longer had designated reading time. However, participating in virtual book clubs—especially Romancing the Gothic—gave me the kick in the pants that I needed. Weekly book club meetings motivated me to get on a nearly novel-per-week reading schedule and also pushed me to discover new authors and read outside my comfort zone. In addition to book clubs, the thing that really saved me was audiobooks. Most of my reading time now comes in the form of listening to audiobooks while doing chores around the house. My audiobook intake increased even more once I got a subscription to Scribd in November and was finally able to access popular and recently published books that I would have had to wait weeks for from the library. I’m hoping to take this reading momentum into 2021!

Perhaps my favorite book I read this year was Gideon the Ninth. This book had actually come out in 2019, but due to its popularity it had long waiting lists at the library. So when I got Scribd, this was the one of the first books I downloaded, and I loved it just as much as I expected to. The setting and aesthetics are exquisitely goth, but what truly sells the book is its snarky, queer protagonist Gideon. I’ve already started the sequel, Harrow the Ninth, which came out earlier this year. Speaking of queer, thanks largely to the influence of Romancing the Gothic, my reading has been heavily LGBTQ-oriented this year. We read quite a few queer romance novels for book club, and I particularly loved Cat Sebastian’s The Lawrence Browne Affair and K. J. Charles’s Spectred Isle. Book club also introduced me to several self-published authors, such as Jordan L. Hawk and S. T. Gibson, that I might not have otherwise discovered.

I kept up last year’s trend of reading lots of anthologies (including Unspeakable, Haunted Voices, Women’s Weird 2, and Women Running from Houses), but I completely dropped the ball on reading nonfiction. I only met a few of the goals I set for myself in last year’s post. I did read a few more Gothic classics, and had the added benefit of reading them in a class-like setting with Romancing the Gothic: I finally read Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, I reread one of my old favorites Carmilla, and I read a large swathe of early vampire literature, including portions of Varney in James Grant Goldin’s collection First Blood. However, quarantine really shook up some of my other priorities. I completely dropped my plan to read all the books I borrowed from others, since now I don’t even know when I’ll be able to return them. Also, despite participating in a Harry Potter book club for most of quarantine, I only actually progressed a few more chapters in my reread of the series. That goal is going back on the list for 2021, although J. K. Rowling’s blatant transphobia has dampened my enthusiasm for writing more Harry Potter and the Gothic posts. And—despite telling myself that now is the time to read all the big, thick brick-sized books that I don’t want to carry around on my commute—I never did pick Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell back up. Maybe next year.

While it’s kind of impossible to know what 2021 will look like, I’m going to go ahead and make some goals, knowing that they might change. I’m upping my Goodreads Reading Challenge goal back up to 50, and I’m hoping to keep up my newfound quarantine reading pace, at least into the early months of 2021. I’m hoping to stick with the Romancing the Gothic book club, perhaps even after quarantine ends, and in general to remember how much I love being involved with book clubs and reading communities. I want to make a better effort to make progress on my physical TBR pile while I’m home and staring at it all the time. I want to read even more Gothic classics next year (perhaps some Ann Radcliffe or Maturin’s Melmoth?) and get back into reading more nonfiction.

What are your reading goals for 2021? How did the pandemic affect your reading this year? Did you have any favorite books of 2020? Let me know in the comments!