My 5 Favorite Books of 2020 / Patron-Only Early Access

The books that made me think/feel the most during 2020 were 1. For whom the bell tolls- Ernest Hemingway 2. Voices from chernobyl- Svetlana Alexievich 3. The Inseparable twins - Anatoly pristavkin 4. The only story - Julian Barnes 5. The dark forest - cixin liu Honorable mention: Glamorama by bret easton ellis

- 'My Struggle Book 5' by Karl-Ove Knausgård. - 'Apeirogon' by Colum McCann. - 'The Dragon and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West' by David Kilcullen. - 'The Practicing Stoic' by Ward Farnsworth. - 'The Wild Places' and 'The Old Ways' by Robert Macfarlane.

1. The Last Samurai - Helen Dewitt 2. War and Peace - Tolstoy 3. A Naked Singularity - Sergio de la Pava 4. Hard-Boiled Wonderland - Murakami 5. Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann

A great list Mr Sargent. My favourite reads of 2020 were: 1) Stoner 2) The end of an affair 3) Silence 4) The little stranger 5) A moveable feast Honorable mentions: Carol, Butcher's crossing, True grit and Hiroshima

1. Heart of Darkness by Conrad 2. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky 3. Slaughterhouse-Five 4. The Invention of Morel 5. Death in Venice

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson 2. Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev 3. The Peregrine - J.A. Baker 4. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov 5. The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell

1. Collected Fictions - Borges 2. Story of The Eye - Georges Bataille 3. Crash - J G Ballard 4. Satantango - Laszlo Krasznahorkai 5. Crime & Punishment - Dostoevsky

1: atomised michel houllebecq

Great lists to be found here - always nice to add to my already insane wish list! Hard to narrow it down to 5, but here goes: 1. The Morning Star - Knausgård 2. The Book of Eels - Patrik Svensson 3. Septology (III-IV, so cheating a bit) - Jon Fosse 4. A Book of American Martyrs - Joyce Carol Oates 5. The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

I only discovered this channel in 2020 and now, looking back, can't believe how many of my favourites came from here. Thanks Cliff, it really does what it says on the tin! Best of the year for me were 2666, Autobiography of Red, Hurricane Season, Slow Days Fast Company, Infinite Jest, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Pale Fire and finally - for a swift, visceral trip into the wonderfully weird - Flames by Robbie Arnott.

To Be honest I spent a lot of 2020 with mostly entertainment literature. I was most entertained by Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. This series made me happy as nothing I have read in years.

Great list, Cliff, thanks for sharing. My favorites were Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, Serotonin, Ducks, Newburyport, and Pachinko. All excellent. Oh, and The Invention of Morel. Cheers!

1. Stoner by John Williams 2. Alraune by Hans Heinz Ewer 3. Seretonin by Michel Houellebecq 4. Hamlet by William Shakespeare 5. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I read many non-fictions too this year 1. The Black Swan + Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) 2. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) 3. Maldoror (Comte de Lautréamont) 4. Odyssey (Homer) 5. The Rational Male (Rollo Tomassi)

1- A Heart So White, Javier Marias 2- Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami 3- Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado De Assis (Flora Thomson-DeVeaux translation) 4- Mountolive/Clea, Lawrence Durrell 5- Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

I was lucky enough to catch up on all the reading I should have been doing, and here are my five! (Found a lot of these through you, so thanks a bunch!) 5) My Struggle by Karl Ove Knaussgard (I'm including all six as one, but the sixth entry is my favorite). 4)A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar 3)Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis 2) Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (Richard Freeborn translation) and 1) Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Some others would be Confessions of a Mask and Life for Sale by Mishima, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Norwegian Wood and The Elephant Vanishes by Murakami, Going to Meet the Man by Baldwin. It's always kind of a fight in me about which of these is my favorite, and the list would probably look different if I wrote it another day

1. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. 2. On The Heights of Despair by E M Cioran. 3. Captain Beefheart: The Biography by Mike Barnes. 4. Nature's God (Historical Illuminatus vol. 3) by Robert Anton Wilson. 5.True Grit by Charles Portis

1. 'Nuestra parte de noche', Mariana Enriquez (not yet translated into english) 2. On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sabato 3. Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor 4. The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe 5. Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky

1. 2666 by Roberto Bolano 2. A Heart So White by Javier Marias 3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 4. Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders 5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Honorable Mentions: Confederacy of Dunces, Infinite Jest, Never Let Me Go, Don Quixote, Child of God, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Corrections. (Way too many honorable mentions, but it was a good year for reading.) Looking forward to many more great reads in 2021!

Fiction in no order: The Blood of the Lamb, De Vries A Heart So White, Marias Silence, Endo Too Loud A Solitude, Hrabal An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Aira

1. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) 2. The Fifth Head of Cerberus (Gene Wolfe) 3. Story of the Eye (Georges Bataille) 4. The Peregrine (J.A. Baker) 5. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) Honorable Mentions: Dubliners (Joyce), Michael Kohlhaas (Von Kleist), Churchill (Andrew Roberts)

Mine was: 1. ”The road” by Harry Martinson (swedish noble prize winner) 2. ”Moby Dick” Melville 3. ”The man WHO planets trees” Jean giono 4. ”Hamlet” Shakespeare 5. ”How to read and why” Harold Bloom