2020, huh? I don’t think I need to expound on that particular dumpster fire except to say that I feel lucky to be someone who has managed to read/listen to books pretty much as normal throughout it all. Books – and writing about them – have provided a much-needed escape from everything going on “out there”, and there have been times this past year when I don’t know what I’d have done without them.
So, what was I reading/listening to in 2020? Well, according to Goodreads (which shows an average rating of 4.1 stars overall), I read and listened to 269 books in total (which was 30 fewer than 2019) – although I suspect that number may be slightly higher as I sometimes forget to mark any re-listens I do. But just taking the new reads/listens, I listened to almost as many books as I read – 52.9% ebook and 47.1% audio, according to this new spreadsheet I’ve been using, and almost three-quarters of the total were review copies.
Of that total there are 77 5 star books, 152 4 star books – by far the biggest category – 36 3 star books and 6 2 star books. (Books sorted by rating.)
The 5 star bracket includes those titles I rate at 4.5 but round-up (which I equate to A-); the 4 star bracket (B) includes the 4.5 star grades I don’t round up (B+) and the 3.5 star ones I do round up (B-), the 3 stars are C+/C/C- and so on. Of the 77 5 star ratings, only around 17 are straight A grades in terms of the story (in the case of audiobooks, sometimes a 4 star review will get bumped up because the narration is so fabulous), so the rest of that 77 are A minuses or audiobooks where A and B grades combined to rate a higher overall total. Looking back at my 2019 Books & Audio post, those numbers are fairly consistent, although I didn’t have any one stars or DNFs in 2020, which isn’t a bad thing!
The books that made my Best of 2020 list at All About Romance:
Reviews are linked in the text beneath each image.
As usually happens, I always have a few “also-rans”, books I could have included if I’d had the space:
If you follow my reviews, you’ll already know that in 2020, I awarded more top grades than ever to a single author, which isn’t something that’s ever happened before; sure, I give high grades to some authors consistently (Sherry Thomas, KJ Charles and Meredith Duran spring to mind) but those have been one every few months or per year – not nine in a single year! So, yes, 2020 is, in my head, the Year of Gregory Ashe 😉 I could have chosen any number of his books for these lists as they’re all so very good.
Sadly noticeable by its (near) absence on these lists – historical romance. I said in my 2019 post that the amount of really good historical romance around had been declining for a while, and although there were some excellent historicals around in 2020, they were fairly few and far between. Many of the best came from Harlequin Historical – Virginia Heath’s Redeeming the Reculsive Earl is a lovely, funny and warm grumpy-reclusive-hero-meets-breath-of-fresh-air-(and neuroatypical) heroine, while Mia Vincy continues to demonstrate her mastery of the genre with A Dangerous Kind of Lady, a sexy, vibrant, not-really friends-to-lovers story in which the leads embark on a difficult journey of self-discovery while coming to realise how badly they’ve misjudged each other. The “modern” historical is a term being coined for novels set in the more recent past, and Asher Glenn Gray’s Honeytrap, the love story between an FBI agent and Red Army office that spans thirty-five years, would proibably have made my Best of list had I read it in time. Annabeth Albert is a big favourite of mine; Feel the Fire is book three in her Hotshots series, a second-chance romance that just hit the spot.
Audio
When I struggled to read something – which fortuantely, didn’t happen often – I could usually find something in audio that suited my mood, plus the fact that there are still back-catalogue titles coming out of books I haven’t got around to reading means that audio is always my preferred method of catching up! I listened to a lot of pretty good stuff over the year, but for my 2020 Favourites for AudioGals, I stuck to titles to which I’d given at least ONE A grade (usually for the narration) and nothing lower than a B+.
So that was 2020 in books and audio. I’m incredibly grateful to those authors and narrators who continued to provide me with such great reading/listening material through what has been an incredibly trying time for all of us; I know some who have really struggled to get words on a page this year, and I just want to say that you’re worth waiting for and I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.
As for what I’m looking forward to in 2021… more of the same, really – lots of good books! There are a number of titles I know are coming up in the first part of the year that I’m really excited about – the third Lamb and the Lion book from Gregory Ashe – The Same End – is out at the end of January, and I’m also eagerly awaiting new adventures with North and Shaw and Theo and Auggie. Then there’s book three in KJ Charles’ Will Darling Adventures, Subtle Blood, at least three (squee!) new books from Annabeth Albert, including the fourth Hotshots book; and a new instalment in Jordan Castillo Price’s long-running Psycop series (Other Half) due out in January, although I’ll be waiting for the audio because Gomez Pugh’s incredible turn as Victor Bayne is well worth waiting for. (I really must catch up with JCP’s ABCs of Spellcraft books, in audio, too!). There’s a new book in Hailey Turner’s Soulbound series coming soon, a new instalment in Jay Hogan’s Southern Lights series, and later on, I’m hoping Josh Lanyon’s The Movie Town Murders will be out this year – I need more Sam and Jason! – and I’m looking forward to new books in her Secrets and Scrabble series. I’m looking forward to more from Lucy Parker, Loreth Anne White, Garrett Leigh, Rachel Reid, Roan Parrish… There are new books slated from many of my favourite authors and narrators, and I’m looking forward to another year of great reading and listening.
I’ll be back this time next year to see if my expectations were fulfilled!
Caz's Reading Room 
How did I miss your enthusiasm for Gregory Ashe? I am off to see what my library has. I do agree that historical romances seem to have declined and I am also becoming wildly intolerant of anachronisms. Actually, it was a historical mystery I just finished in which the author used the word “clueless” twice in a WWI setting. On page 2, so she couldn’t even have captured my interest sufficiently to make me try to overlook it.
Lucy Parker is a breath of fresh air and it will be interesting to see what her next book is like. I liked Spoiler Alert but found it a little overhyped. Maybe I just got tired of all the online fandom.
Sad news yesterday about Sharon K. Penman’s death, one of my favorite writers of historical fiction.
Oh, no – I hadn’t heard about SKP – what a sad loss 😦 Her The Sunne in Splendour is stil one of my favourite HF titles.
As to Gregory Ashe… well, IMO there isn’t anybody writing at the moment who does what he does so incredibly well. His books are gritty and can be violent and he does like to put his characters (and his readers!) through the wringer, but he writes messy, complicated relationships so well, and his characters are always fully-rounded, flawed individuals that leap off the page. His books might be too angsty for some, but I love it. (And hate it at the same time!)
As for historicals… sigh. Even the big name authors are turning out below-par books; and as for the new crop, the only one I’m enthusiastic about to have emerged in the last couple of years is Mia Vincy. Evie Dunmore is good, but hasn’t qutie hit the A-grade mark yet – her books have worked really well up until around the three-quarters mark and then something happens to make me downgrade them a notch. But maybe she’ll get there. In general though, yeah, it’s a sea of middling-to-dire 😦