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.

10 Books I Want More People to Read and Appreciate

In today’s episode of “I make a book list out of pettiness”…

There have been some people in the book community complaining about “underrated books” that no one else has read… and then those books turn it out to have 100k ratings on Goodreads and are NYT-bestselling books. So today, I thought I would talk about books that actually haven’t gotten as much hype as they should have that I really wish more people read!!

Most of these have under 5,000 ratings on Goodreads, and it was so depressing to see that some of my absolute favorites had only 2-3,000. And even then, there are many books on my TBR that have less than 700 ratings—which is why this list is more about books I want more people to read versus underhyped books (since there are books that are more underhyped than these).

You might have already seen these books mentioned on my blog before, because I’ve talked about quite a few of them many times before and no one listens to poor me… but hopefully now that will change!!

(Fun fact: most of these feature books about/by QPOC! Aka read more QPOC!!)

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

50+ YA Books by QPOC About QPOC that You Should Have on Your TBR, Especially for Pride Month!!

It’s that time of the month again…

…and by that I mean it’s time for me to list some book recommendations for Pride Month and beyond!!

I made a similar post last year, about books with intersectional queer rep, but a few of those were by white authors. Because of semi-recent discourse on book twitter concerning bad QPOC rep by a white author, I decided that this time I’d focus on books about QPOC by QPOC, because it can’t get better than that!! The QPOC experience is often hard to understand unless you’ve lived it yourself, so these ownvoices stories are incredibly important.

I haven’t read all of these books, but my point in including all of them is to show that there’s a wide selection of books that you can pick from that aren’t by white authors and aren’t about white people. And especially during Pride month, when people will pick up white m/m and ignore everything else—by ignoring QPOC, specifically Black trans people, you are ignoring the very origins of Pride.

When I began reading LGBTQIAP+ books, I started with a lot of white m/m books. These were books that were heavily promoted and hyped in the community, and though it was on me to put in the effort to find more diverse books, it was also on all the people hyping those books who refused to branch out. So I hope this post can help you to find new books that will add a lot more variety (and actual flavor) to what you read. It’s never too late to start diversifying your reads!!

25 Books by Asian Authors to Read, Especially for Asian Heritage Month!!

Yes, I’m sure you’re ALL shocked by this post and did NOT see it coming!!

Today I’m here to stay on brand as always and recommend some books by Asian authors with Asian characters! These are perfect to read for any time of year, but especially in the month of May since it’s Asian Heritage Month and a great way to celebrate Asian voices is to read them.

I’ve talked about a lot of these books before, especially in this post recommending authors of color, but I never recommended them for Asian Heritage Month before so I thought why not! These are definitely not all the Asian books I’ve read, so be sure to check out my 2018 and 2019 posts as well. (It makes me happy to see how much bigger my lists have gotten.)

Most of these I’ve read since last May, so they’re “new”, but I have a tendency to, ah, talk about the same books… so everyone act surprised at certain books on this list okay! I’m talking about The Poppy War… Fang Runin fan club will be started by me.