I read exactly one (1) generalist nonfiction book all year. Normally I am a huge sucker for the kind of books that do the rounds on the podcast circuit—pop-science, sprawling anthropological syntheses, whatever self-help thing is zeitgeisty. Now I still buy them, but I can’t summon the enthusiasm to actually get past the first chapter.

By way of contrast, I had no problem with narrative nonfiction and memoirs. I even managed a few hefty textbooks. But anything outside of specific object-level learning, I don’t want to know about.

In a possibly related development, this was the year I fell in love with the short story as a format. Literary fiction has always felt like a raw deal. I’m incapable of persevering through a book the size of a brick in the hopes that I will maybe be able to extract some obscure payoff (I’m on my third rejection of Brothers Karamazov). But a 20-page short story? I can deal with that, no matter how dense the prose or self-indulgent the author.

I think I read about 200 short stories this year, of which, several make the cut for my favourites below…

Over the last couple of years, my reading time has mostly been chewed up by research for my own book. So it came as a great relief to find myself with much more scope to read for pleasure in 2020.

My favourites of the year are a mixture of classics that were so good that I have no choice but to include, along with some lesser-known works where I might actually be able to add a useful signal…