December 27, 2020

yearender: things we read in 2020

Note: Share your best reads in the Yearend survey—still open! Thank you in advance. :)

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Manila, 27 December—One of the few bright spots of this year was the amount of reading I surprisingly pulled off. Some favorites:

• The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite - [entry] Lesbians who are into astronomy, writing and embroidery, what else could you ask for? Slow burn beautifully written. Felt a lot like Portrait but in book form. [Kindle]

• The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon - [entry] Oh to be able to read this book again for the first time—it’s that good. Lush world-building! Dragons! Complex female characters! Queens! Women warriors! And a breath-taking slow burn queer romance at the heart of it. What a fantastic quarantine read. This definitely helped me get through initial pandemic anxieties. An exquisite escape in book form.

• Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed - [entry] Warm as a hug, tender and funny and heartbreaking and insightful.

• The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski - [ongoing] Got this book as a Christmas present (thanks, love). So so good. Review forthcoming probably, but I’m trying to delay finishing it haha.

Some of the online reads this year that moved me, in case you haven’t come across them this year:

• The poem Atlas by UA Fanthorpe

  Caroline Bird @CarolineBirdUK

  ‘There is a kind of love called maintenance/ which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it’ - U.A Fanthorpe

  January 22nd 2020

  430 Retweets1,456 Likes

• What is ‘time-blindedness’ and do you have it? via The Cut

• That discomfort you’re feeling is grief via Harvard Business Review

• The poem Atlantis by Eavan Boland

  aria aber @AriaAber

  she was truly one of our best. how is this sonnet even real

  April 28th 2020

  2,091 Retweets8,221 Likes

• Mourning the Letters That Will No Longer Be Written, and Remembering the Great Ones That Were via The New York Times

• This piece of fandom meta about The Old Guard.

• This Kate Winslet profile by The Hollywood Reporter

• Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet via Technology Review

• This poem by Sue Hyon Bae

  Caroline Bird @CarolineBirdUK

  ‘After the threesome, they both take you home’ - Sue Hyon Bae

  September 5th 2020

  92 Retweets438 Likes

• “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation via BuzzFeed News

• Your ‘surge capacity’ is depleted—it’s why you feel awful via Medium

• The Incredibly True Story of Renting a Friend in Tokyo via Pocket

• A heart is not a nation via Book Forum

• Hanson is facing a mutiny from its own fans via VICE

• The good enough job via Refinery29

• Do You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score? via New Republic

• The Year We Lost via The Atlantic

It’s been quite the year for thought-provoking pieces. Par for the course, I think, given how 2020 panned out. Hope you find something interesting and useful from my list, at least :)

Did I miss anything? Taking recs via the Yearend survey—still open! Thank you in advance.

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Thanks for making it this far.

XO,

K