top of page
  • kylierwalters

2020 Reading

Updated: Apr 23, 2021



My reading in 2020 is, so far, scattered as ever. Some books I've arrived at clearly looking for something -- such as Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks, and Wilding: The Return of Nature to A British Farm by Isabella Tree. In this set I was looking for dispatches from pastoral living, from lives distant and (at least romanticized in my mind as) pleasant. Some books I've simply had sitting around for months and have picked up because the time felt right. See: The Sun Also Rises, High School.


  1. Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides

  2. Any Human Heart by William Boyd

  3. Crudo by Olivia Laing

  4. Burn the Place by Iliana Regan

  5. You & A Bike & A Road by Eleanor Davis - I highly recommend this book, an account of a long distance bike ride through the American southwest. The book is about so much more, than biking -- traveling as a woman, mental health, border policing, the environment, hope -- and its drawings are soothing.

  6. The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  7. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

  8. Weather by Jenny Offill

  9. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

  10. Writers & Lovers by Lily King

  11. Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith

  12. High School by Sara Quin and Tegan Quin

  13. All About Sarah by Pauline Delabroy-Allard

  14. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

  15. Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison

  16. The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks - I greatly enjoyed this book and feel its British title deserves mention: The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District. This book speaks to the role of literature in our understanding of the environment, education, class, and more, and challenges the canon as a worthy informant for tourists.

  17. Wilding: The Return of Nature to A British Farm by Isabella Tree

  18. Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Painter

  19. Wow, No Thank You.​ by Samantha Irby

  20. How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

  21. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

  22. The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

  23. Heartburn by Nora Ephron

  24. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire

  25. Persuasion by Jane Austen

bottom of page