Goodbye 2020: My Favorite Books of 2020! The Best of the Best + Honorable Mentions

To seek escape from 2020, I found a lot of comfort in good books.

Granted, last year gave me my lowest average rating for books, which I’ll be talking about in my end of year reading wrap-up next. But! Today is not for negativity! (I posted about my least favorite books of 2020 already—check out here.) Today, I’m only bringing positivity and talking about my favorite books of the year!

I am terrible and don’t allow myself to truly love many books, but there were so many 2020 reads that I really enjoyed and wanted to highlight, even if I didn’t love them enough to call them favorites. So in the post, you’ll see my 7 honorable mentions (haha…), and my top 4 books of the year!! All of these books touched me in some way, and I would recommend all of them.

Goodbye 2020: My Favorite Moments of This Very Terrible Year!

Can you believe it’s already time for the end of year posts?

I don’t know how to feel about the fact that in a little over a week, this trashfire of a year will be over. On one hand, it’s a relief to know that we can have a fresh start in 2021, but at the same time, I have a deep fear that nothing will change—whether it be COVID specifically or our political systems in general—and it feels so overwhelmingly heavy to carry that.

I don’t like to list out my accomplishments, no matter how great or small, because it just ends up allowing my brain to find more reasons to hate myself. And that’s especially true during an absolutely terrible year like 2020, when a large accomplishment is having survived. What I think is much healthier is to reflect on the more positive moments that took place, the things that happened that made the year a tiny bit better. Obviously, most of these were not enough to completely cancel out every bad thing in 2020, but… they provided a little bit of joy to me, and that’s what is important to me.

This post is going to be much shorter than my usual posts, because it—unsurprisingly—was difficult to think of a multitude of memorable, positive moments from this year. But I have some other fun end of year content planned that’ll hopefully make up for it!

9 Things/Tropes I Will Always Love in Fiction + Some of My Favorite Books with Them!

I have no brain cells to spare, so we’re doing an unoriginal post!

I’ve always wanted to a post talking about my favorite fictional tropes and never had the chance to. But after finishing She-Ra and losing my mind in the DMs with my friends, I realized how many tropes it involved that I loved, so I thought, why not do this post as a convenient way to just lose my mind about She-Ra on my blog!

Not all of the things I’m going to talk about are necessarily tropes, so that’s why I just said “things” in the title. It’s also very important to note that I was strongly tempted to just include “gays” as one thing and then provide no detail whatsoever, but I held back to give you… actual content.

(I also attempted to list 10 things instead of just 9, but as stated before! No brain cells.)

Click for BLM resources.

• sign petitions
• text/call/email people
• stream these videos (ad revenue will be donated, don’t skip ads!)
• donate to the George Floyd gofundme
• donate to the Gianna Floyd (his daughter) gofundme
• donate to the Breonna Taylor gofundme
• donate to the Ahmaud Arbery gofundme
• donate to these bail funds, research local ones near you too
• donate to these organizations
• donate to small Black businesses that were destroyed
• support Black-owned businesses
• protest, if you can be safe/healthy! wear a mask, tips on overall safety
• I put together a list of just a few YA books by Black authors to read on Goodreads

ARC Review: A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat // The Thai Book of My Heart!!

Let me tell you a story.

It’s not very interesting, but we’re gonna roll with it!

One day, all the way back in 2018 when I was a gross little thing, I found out about a Thai-inspired Middle Grade fantasy releasing in 2020. I think I might have teared up about the Thai rep or done something else equally pathetic (I say, as if I don’t cry over not being in Thailand).

It felt like such a long time to wait for a book that I thought would steal my heart, but now that day is FINALLY here!!

Today is the day I will convince you to read A Wish in the Dark at least some time in the future or die. Because I need to make as many people read this beautiful, godly book, and understand why it makes me so happy beyond Thai rep. It’s a phenomenal book and I genuinely am so excited for the whole world, especially young (Thai) kids, to be able to read it now.

3-Year Blogiversary Q&A: Part 1!

It’s been 3 years since I started blogging.

It’s so strange to say that (it makes me feel old even though… I am a baby), to think that I’m going into my third year of blogging in this community. I’ve changed and grown so much throughout these years, and blogging has contributed to that.

You all mean the world to me, and I can only hope to one day repay every one of you for your kindnesses. It’s very surreal to me, and though there have been rough spots and I still struggle with some things, it has been an amazing three years and I’m so grateful to still be here with your support <33

I decided today to just go ahead and start my Q&A, instead of another post like I usually do, since it’ll be split into two parts! If you’d still like to ask questions, you can comment them below or submit them here!!