My 2020 in Books

Every year it is my goal to read 50 books, about one every week. With both the first draft of my creative writing thesis finished for school, and the coronavirus pandemic hitting the country in mid-march, I had a lot more time to read this year. I managed to read 96 books this year, ~10 of which were in Spanish. Out of those 86 English books, most were very enjoyable, and I found it really hard to pick my favorites. So this year, I decided to split up fiction and nonfiction into their own categories.

Fiction

The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell

I’ve been reading King Arthur retellings since I was old enough to read. From the “canonical” Once and Future King to the Mists of Avalon’s feminist bend, I thought I had exhausted the power of this story. And then I found The Winter King. This is a “realistic” retelling of Arthur, but unlike works such as the 2004 King Arthur Buena Vista film, realism isn’t just window dressing, but a tool for Cornwell to talk about the characters in new ways. It was never really clear to me in other versions of the Arthurian legend why everything went so wrong. Here Cornwell lays it out clearly: his kindness and political naivity lead to unnecessary infighting among the British.

Throughout all of this is a tinge of sadness. We know how the King Arthur story ends, in part because Derfel…