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2020 Reading List
I turn 40 years old this year. Some of the books on this year’s list are ones that I’ve read 20 years ago and am rereading for the first time. Others are classics I should have read years ago but never got around to reading. Some are books that will help me get to know the people and places around me and others about places and times far away.
Didn’t Read
I originally had a list of 52 books scheduled for this year. I did not get to the following books. They will either move to my 2021 reading list or to a future list.
Final Rankings
I kept a running ranking as I read each of the 45 books from the 2020 Books of Titans reading list. Here is my final list. This is the list in order of most to least-enjoyable to me. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the overall quality of the book or its importance. Rather, these are the books that moved me, challenged me, or created great joy in me as I read them.
| # | Book | Author |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Bible | |
| 2 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 3 | Crime & Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| 4 | Antifragile | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
| 5 | Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | David W. Blight |
| 6 | Our Hope | Dmitrii Dudko |
| 7 | The Highlander’s Last Song | George MacDonald |
| 8 | The Aeneid | Virgil |
| 9 | Destiny Disrupted | Mir Tamim Ansary |
| 10 | The Romanovs | Simon Sebag Montefiore |
| 11 | The Great Divorce | C.S. Lewis |
| 12 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy |
| 13 | The Power and the Glory | Graham Greene |
| 14 | Hamlet | Shakespeare |
| 15 | Where Crawdads Sing | Delia Owens |
| 16 | Draft No. 4 | John McPhee |
| 17 | The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood |
| 18 | Permanent Record | Edward Snowden |
| 19 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley |
| 20 | The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle | Haruki Murakami |
| 21 | Between the World and Me | Ta Nehesi Coates |
| 22 | Furious Hours | Casey Cep |
| 23 | Life of Wallace | James Paterson |
| 24 | Bel Canto | Ann Patchett |
| 25 | Maus | Art Spiegelman |
| 26 | And Then There Were None | Agatha Christie |
| 27 | Range | David Epstein |
| 28 | Peace Like a River | Leif Enger |
| 29 | The Orphan Mother | Robert Hicks |
| 30 | The Sacred Romance | John Eldredge |
| 31 | Letters from an Astrophysicist | Neil deGrasse Tyson |
| 32 | Teaching a Stone to Talk | Annie Dillard |
| 33 | Struck | Russ Ramsey |
| 34 | David Crockett | Michael Wallis |
| 35 | Bach | Greg Wilbur |
| 36 | Survivor’s Obligation | Joel Thor Neeb |
| 37 | News of the World | Paulette Jiles |
| 38 | The Storm-Tossed Family | Russell Moore |
| 39 | The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes | Suzanne Collins |
| 40 | The Quick Adios | Tom Corcoran |
| 41 | Non Obvious Megatrends | Rohit Bhargava |
| 42 | The Truths We Hold | Kamala Harris |
| 43 | Promises to Keep | Joe Biden |
| 44 | Where You Go | Charlotte Pence |
| 45 | Crippled America | Donald Trump |