Current Reading at the end of 2020, a partial list

As the year comes to an end, and everyone else is posting what they have completed in 2020, I’ll share a dozen (OK, a baker’s dozen) of my current books with a few selected quotes that help explain why I read so many books at once.

1. Christmas Stories by Lucy Maud Montgomery

   Characteristic quote:

   It was the dusk of Christmas Eve and they were all in Jean Lawrence's room at No. 16 Chestnut Terrace. No. 16 was a boarding-house, and boarding-houses are not proverbially cheerful places in which to spend Christmas, but Jean's room, at least, was a pleasant spot, and all the girls had brought their Christmas presents in to show each other.
   *Note: This collection is on the app Serial and the Kindle edition on Amazon is at least similar.

2. Last Seen Wearing an Inspector Morse mystery by Colin Dexter

3. The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

   Characteristic quote:

   A dark enormous form ran onto the meadow. No one was in sight…I had the impression that it was a deer…I ran into the grass. There lay a dead deer.…Someone was poaching.

5. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver

   Characteristic quote:

   Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy… “Azure”

6. The House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt

7. Saga, volume 2, by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

8. The Border of Paradise by Esme Weijun Wang

9. Murder on Youngers Creek Road by Gary P. West

10. Elsie Dinsmore by Martha Finley

    Characteristic quote:

    "Dear papa, I am so sorry I have been so naughty," she murmured, leaning her head against the arm of his chair, while the tears rolled fast down her cheeks; "won't you please forgive me, papa? it seems to me I can't go to sleep to-night if you are angry with me."

11. The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang

    Characteristic quote:

    Saina sat behind the wheel of the parked car, a hand-me-down Saab that the house’s previous owner —a widowed theater director who couldn’t take the upstate winters anymore—had left behind along with an attic full of furniture and a shed piled with buckets of unapplied weather sealant.

12. Productions of Mrs. Maria Stewart: Presented to the First African Church and Society of the City of Boston by Maria Stewart

13. Dracula by Bram Stoker

    Characteristic quote:

    Strange and terrible as it is, it is true!

I read a lot of books at once in part because I read for lots of different reasons. I might be working on a project that asks me to review a strangely popular nineteenth century children’s book (#10 above), or I might want to spend half an hour thinking about train tables and an alibi I already know to be faked (#2). I might be reading something with my kids (#3, #4).

But what if I want something else? Well, there’s a poetry collection (#5). There’s a comedic romp that is also a social commentary (#11). And so on.

Some are re-reads, and some I might not finish. I might set one aside and return to it after months or years. I haven’t read So Much Blue by Percival Everett in a sustained way in a long time, and it isn’t on the list above in part because of that, but 2021 could be the year I return to it.