Hello,
friends.
Hi.
My name is Sanne.
And today we're going to take a little trip through memory lane.
We're going to go back to,
let's say the end of 2020.
Today I'm going to be sharing with you my favourite 10 books that I read in
2020.
Now,
is this a year late?
Yes.
Did I record this video in January of 2021 for the first
time?
Yes,
I did. I edited it recently,
and it was fine,
but I just wanted it to be me from now,
actually talking about these books.
Just so you know what the vibe is?
We've got some magic.
We've got some fantasy.
We've got some nonfiction.
We've got a few pandemic related things and a graphic novel.
So I think I'm gonna start with this one.
The Water Cure.
This is actually a proof copy.
As you can see from the title not being on the front that was given when I was working at Penguin.
That sounded right up my street.
And it's kind of like Educated meets The Handmaid's Tale
meets The Virgin Suicides came out in 2018 and it's about three
sisters who live on this little island with their mum and dad,
and they've been told something toxic is happening in the outside world,
so you can't go there.
Then their dad goes out to get supplies and he doesn't come back,
and things kind of slowly start falling apart.
It feels very raw.
There's a quote on the front that says a pinch of Shirley Jackson.
It is creepy.
There are all these tests that these sisters kind of have to go
through and,
like,
dip each other under the water,
hurt each other in certain ways.
So I say if you have,
a super weak stomach and it's probably not for you or if you want to book where you know like
100% of what's going on all the time and this is not for you but I was
really,
really intrigued by this.
The author's new book is more Handmaid's Tale-y
called the Blue Ticket. I have that as well,
and I'm going to read that way at this is this was totally up.
My street. Seels weirdly like a good beach read.
Maybe controversially,
this is a weird one because I enjoyed it but didn't love it.
But then the more I think about it and the more I let it sink in.
It definitely fits in the top 10 of the year because it's very memorable and it is
The Secret History.
So I read this for a digital book club that I set up in the run up of me writing my
book club journal, which I do have here as well.
Here it is.
And I was writing a chapter on doing digital book clubs,
so I wanted to host one and get a bit of experience from that.
And a few of you came to that and it was really fun.
And you picked The Secret History as the book to read.
I've had this on my shelves for so many years.
I've even had a different edition passed through my shelves at some point again.
It's a Penguin book.
I got it from work.
This could have remained on red on my shelves,
probably for many more years to come,
so it was a really nice push to read it.
I think you probably read it in maybe August or September.
It is a total cliche to read this in autumn.
Dark academia,
etcetera, set at a university where you kind of have this outcast student who is your
protagonist,
who meets a group of mysterious classic students who take this course by professor that
only lets a few people in the course. He manages to find his way in. It feels like such
a memorable story and something that you feel like has just
existed forever.
It's dark,
it feels almost disconnected from the real world.
But I am really,
really glad I read it,
and I could see myself.
Rereading it in the future,
even though I didn't give it five stars,
Okay,
something a bit lighter, On a Sunbeam by Tillie
Walden is a beautiful graphic novel.
It is also absolutely massive,
and I first spotted this in Gosh Comics,
which is a great graphic novel and comic shop in London,
And I kept seeing the name Tillie Walden pop up everywhere,
and usually when I'm in bookshops,
where they have smaller graphic novel shelves I've kind of browsed through most of them and read the ones that I'm interested
in the spotted.
t,his,
I guess,
a few years ago it's been on my radar ever since then. I ended up getting it from the library,
and I got it out again to show you,
and now I need to return it.
It's a beautiful adventure story, love story.
It's a story about two young girls that meet in school,
and then they get separated.
Then the main character works for what is kind of a construction company in
space,
And she still wants to know what happened to this girl she loved in school.
Just a lovely cast of characters.
There's a lot of play with colour when it comes to figuring out what timeline you're on.
Sometimes graphic novels.
It's hard to find a certain depth,
and I think,
especially when you have someone who both does the illustration in the storytelling.
Sometimes one of them feels a bit weaker.
But that's definitely not the case with Tillie,
and I'll be reading everything she's done.
I think I might be very close to already having done that. I enjoyed this so much
and it just feels like a little, a little piece of art.
Now we're going to do to pandemic novels.
Feel free to skip if that is not your jam.
I made a video in the first months that Covid was starting talking about why I
am reading apocalyptic novels, pandemic novels.
I found it a good way to kind of think about it,
scenarios that were even worse,
kind of thinking about how people respond to this.
Obviously,
it's an incredibly unique time to be able to read books like this.
Just something I've gravitated towards.
And this is a book I had on my to read list for years and years.
A booktuber recommended this to me probably eight years ago or something like that.
I can't even remember her name.
But I picked this up in a bookshop about two years ago and finally read it,
and it is written around,
I think,
just after the Day of the Triffids,
which is another apocalyptic book.
But by John Wyndham,
which I absolutely love. There everything turns out, I don't want to see.
It turns out all right,
it's not great.
But this is just a very bleak depiction,
written in the fifties of what could possibly happen if a disease wipes out all
grass and crops.
There are so many relevant
comparisons and scenarios with what happens now.
There's a great modern introduction by Robert McFarlane,
which was written in 2009.
We live in an age of epidemics foot and mouth,
bluetongue,
avian flu,
SARS, infection routes,
restriction zones,
surveillance areas,
mass inoculations.
We have become fluent in the language of contagion. It follows a family as they try and
escape London,
get to the countryside and hopefully have a place where they can survive.
all of this and it is incredibly bleak, it is the worst of humankind coming out.
But it still has that weird thing that's like the opposite of,
like,
epic adventurous that some of these British sci fi novels have,
I'm reading the War of the Worlds at the moment.
And there's a lot of similarities where it's just a guy going,
Oh,
I better try and make my way out of London.
I'll steal this car. In a way that also feels quite realistic.
Quote on the front says 'Bears comparison with Lord of the Flies',
which,
yeah,
I would definitely say is correct,
really interesting read,
and I'm hoping to read a lot more in the same genre also from this time period,
and this is almost more on my list as literature that I was
studying.
That's why I appreciated it.
It's fine writing,
but as a piece of history,
I found it more interesting.
Then we've got Severance.
By Ling Ma.
I've seen this do the rounds quite a lot,
as the pandemic book that people are recommending has written a few years before the pandemic.
And it is about a young woman who lives and works in New York in
publishing and an airborne virus slowly starts
spreading and people started abandoning their jobs.
She decides to keep going to her job.
And a lot of this book is also about office culture.
Very interestingly,
have a few books lined up that are about office culture and sort of having been in the working world for 10 years and,
having had several office jobs,
I have become more and more interested in reading fiction books that deal with that and capitalism and things like
that. It has a slightly absurdist angle,
just the fact that she keeps going to this job even though it keeps emptying
out.
You do also get a peek into the further future where it's a
lot more apocalyptic,
but a lot of this was really similar to what happens,
you know,
during the Covid pandemic,
there's the classic like abandoned New York atmosphere,
but also there's just bits of her daily life.
I was going to say Ocean's 11.
That's not what it is.
If you like Station Eleven,
then I'd recommend this.
This is a great Halloween read.
I read this last year during Halloween.
I'd already read a few of the stories,
but I decided to do like a full read of it.
It is The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night by Jen
Campbell,
Good friend,
author and fellow booktuber.
It goes without saying the cover is
absolutely beautiful.
This is a short story collection featuring lots of creepy stories and
fairytales.
It ranges from a more kind of black mirror-ish vibe to a more fairy tale.
vibe, It has a really good variety of,
story length.
How intense the stories are,
the different topics.
It's beautifully written,
and it transports you to all these different scenarios in these different worlds.
There's a great Frankenstein quote in the front,
which really sets the tone.
It is true,
we shall be monsters cut off from the world.
But on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
Let's do some nonfiction audiobooks.
I have been listening to more and more audiobooks,
especially this year,
but also last year,
and one of the books I read was a book that I don't know if I would have picked up as
quickly.
If it was a physical book,
so did the audiobook.
instead,
from the library,
it is The Five, The Untold lives of the Women killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie
Rubenhold
There's this habit of kind of glorifying Jack the Ripper,
and I don't know that much about true crime.
But I do listen to My favorite murder.
That's kind of the only true crime I seek out.
There's always the conversation around,
not forgetting the victims.
You really get the full stories of their lives,
the lives of their parents,
the environment that they were in, the decisions they had to make.
It gives so much amazing historical context.
So if you're interested in historical fiction in general or in history,
this is a no brainer,
and I thought it was so,
so good.
Then I also read Black and British by David Olusoga. If you've seen it in a bookshop,
it is actually massive.
And again it was a great one to listen to an audio.
I think it was about 24 hours.
As the title indicates,
it kind of takes you through the history of black Britons,
starting at ancient Greece and giving you a lot of historical context,
then kind of slowing down and zooming in on individual people's lives and court cases
and things like that.
It talks about slavery also brings in some of the US.
And similar to The Five.
It drops you in these points in history that you might have certain ideas about.
Or maybe that you haven't been taught about at all.
Absolutely,
just like vital reading.
I'm considering getting the physical copy as well,
so I can like flick through particular chapters easier.
And I'm actually also trying to find a Dutch equivalent of this because there's a very similar
colonial history.
So I'd love to read more about the Dutch side of that as well,
because again we weren't taught that much about it in school. Then we have some similar topics
in Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age,
which I ordered from an independent bookshop at the beginning of the pandemic
and read really,
really quickly.
It's not my usual kind of book,
but everyone was singing its praises.
And so I picked it up,
and I'm really glad I did.
We also ended up doing a book club about this one.
It's about a young black woman called Amira,
who babysits for a white family.
The mother is called.
I think we were discussing this in the book club AlIx or Alix.
She has a young daughter.
And one evening,
when Amira is in a grocery shop with the young girl,
um,
someone accuses her of having kidnapped the baby,
and that is kind of the event that sets off the whole story.
It has so many topics and interwoven in it.
It's about privilege
It's about white saviourism
so some people have described as a page turner some people have described as a thriller.
I I don't know if I describe it as a thriller. Stylist,
said: bites into the zeitgeist,
then spits it out with gusto.
Very good conversation starter,
And I'm really keen to see about Kiley Reid
writes next. Last book of the bunch, Scythe by Neal
Shusterman.
Well,
not this one,
but the whole trilogy.
So I read Number two.
The Thunderhead and the Toll
completing the trilogy,
one of the first trilogies I've completed in many,
many years.
And I just loved everything about this.
It was being hyped up a lot,
and I was a bit hesitant.
Initially,
I did have this review copy.
I've read other books by Neal Shusterman.
I was like,
OK,
I'm going to give this a go.
This is one of the few occasions where I would use the comparison.
That's like,
if you like the Hunger Games you'll like.
this. It has a lot of similar dynamics.
There is a lot of corruption.
There is a lot of interesting world building,
and the story is set in a world where no one dies because of technology.
It means that there are too many people in life doesn't seem to have that much value.
And so there are people who are kind of like judges who are called
Scythes,
and they go around and randomly kill people.
And of course you can only become a Scythe if you don't want to be one for obvious reasons.
And it's about two teenagers who get chosen to be Scythe
apprentices and then sort of rise up in that world.
It goes all over the place,
and it has,
like,
10 plot twists per book.
That all makes sense somehow,
but still really surprise you.
I do think the last one was the weakest.
I enjoyed the second one a lot.
Enjoyed the first one a lot, as a trilogy as a whole.
I absolutely loved it.
I couldn't recommend it more.
I know you've already been told to read this so many times,
but please do. So that is it for my top 10 books of
2020.
I'll be back with my top 10 books of 2021. Doei!