15 Books that are on My TBR List for 2020
As you may know, I love to read. I’m not picky by how I read; whether it’s physical, kindle, or audio, I don’t mind. At first, I was not too fond of audiobooks; I didn’t understand why people preferred that format of reading(except people who have a disability). Then, I found the right genre and the right time to listen to audiobooks. I figured out that I love to listen to mystery and fantasy books while cleaning up or showering. It’s a great way to multitask. Plus, just like physically reading books, there are a lot of benefits from listening to books. Today, I’m sharing with you 15 books I plan to read or listen to this year. Last year, my reading goal was 24, which I did not reach since I DNF(did not finish) a lot of books(reached it if I included the books I read to my daughter, haha). Plus, I’m also trying to write a novel. So, for this year, I cut my reading goal down to 15.
Queenie:
by Candice Carty-Williams
Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places . . . including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?” - all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
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I’m curious to see how Queenie handles these two cultures. Will she be able to answer the questions that she keeps asking herself?
With The Fire On High:
by Elizabeth Acevedo
Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions—doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.
Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.
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I’ve read great reviews about this book. I’m super excited to read it since it’s about a young woman getting pregnant and making tough decisions. It sounded like a book I would be able to enjoy reading.
Serpent & Dove:
by Shelby Mahurin
Two years ago, Louise le Blanc fled her coven and took shelter in the city of Cesarine, forsaking all magic and living off whatever she could steal. There, witches like Lou are hunted. They are feared. And they are burned.
As a huntsman of the Church, Reid Diggory has lived his life by one principle: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. But when Lou pulls a wicked stunt, the two are forced into an impossible situation—marriage.
Lou, unable to ignore her growing feelings, yet powerless to change what she is, must make a choice. And love makes fools of us all.
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So many people have been talking about this book. I love fantasy books, probably one of my other favorite genres to read, so I’m excited to check this book out.
Kingdom of Souls:
by Rena Barron
Heir to two lines of powerful witchdoctors, Arrah yearns for magic of her own. Yet she fails at bone magic, fails to call upon her ancestors, and fails to live up to her family’s legacy. Under the disapproving eye of her mother, the Kingdom’s most powerful priestess and seer, she fears she may never be good enough.
But when the Kingdom’s children begin to disappear, Arrah is desperate enough to turn to a forbidden, dangerous ritual. If she has no magic of her own, she’ll have to buy it―by trading away years of her own life.
Arrah’s borrowed power reveals a nightmarish betrayal, and on its heels, a rising tide of darkness that threatens to consume her and all those she loves. She must race to unravel a twisted and deadly scheme… before the fight costs more than she can afford.
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I keep seeing this book everywhere, and the cover has a POC(person of color), which makes me excited!! I love checking out books where the main characters have my skin complexion. Plus, fantasy, I must read it!!
The Ninth House:
by Leigh Bardugo
Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.
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The Ninth House will be a different read for me. I don’t think I ever dived into thriller books. It’s a plus that it’s also fantasy. However, this book won a Goodreads award, and a lot of people have been talking about it. So, I figured I should check it out and see if I like it. I love trying out different genres.
Shatter Me:
by Tahereh Mafi
One touch is all it takes. One touch, and Juliette Ferrars can leave a fully grown man gasping for air. One touch, and she can kill.
No one knows why Juliette has such incredible power. It feels like a curse, a burden that one person alone could never bear. But The Reestablishment sees it as a gift, sees her as an opportunity. An opportunity for a deadly weapon.
Juliette has never fought for herself before. But when she’s reunited with the one person who ever cared about her, she finds a strength she never knew she had.
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This book has been on my TBR list for a while. Now that the last book in the series is coming out, I feel like it is time to start reading it!! I have heard nothing but great reviews about this series, so I’m super excited!!
My Sister, The Serial Killer:
by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.
Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.
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The author of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood. I saw a picture of her holding this book in her hands at a book store and decided to add it to my TBR list finally. I’ve been seeing it all over my timeline but haven’t decided if I wanted to read it yet or not(since I’m not that into thriller books).
The Water Dancer:
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children - the violent and capricious separation of families - and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
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I love reading historical fiction. I think it’s one of my favorite genres. But the fact that this is also fantasy is super exciting. I can’t wait to read this book. The cover is beautiful, plus it was apart of Oprah’s book club so I must read it.
Transcendent Kingdom:
by Yaa Gyasi
Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.
Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief - a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
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I enjoyed reading Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing. It was short but so thought-provoking I couldn’t power through it. It was a book I had to take in slowly. I’m curious to see how her follow-up novel, Transcendent Kingdom is. The book comes out five days before my birthday, so I will have an excellent book to read then!
Sorcery of Thorns:
by Margaret Rogerson
All sorcerers are evil. Elisabeth has known that as long as she has known anything. Raised as a foundling in one of Austermeer's Great Libraries, Elisabeth has grown up among the tools of sorcery - magical grimoires that whisper on shelves and rattle beneath iron chains. If provoked, they transform into grotesque monsters of ink and leather. She hopes to become a warden, charged with protecting the kingdom from their power.
Then an act of sabotage releases the library's most dangerous grimoire. Elisabeth's desperate intervention implicates her in the crime, and she is torn from her home to face justice in the capital. With no one to turn to but her sworn enemy, the sorcerer Nathaniel Thorn, and his mysterious demonic servant, she finds herself entangled in a centuries-old conspiracy. Not only could the Great Libraries go up in flames, but so could the world along with them.
As her alliance with Nathaniel grows stronger, Elisabeth starts to question everything she's been taught - about sorcerers, about the libraries she loves, even about herself. For Elisabeth has a power she has never guessed and a future she could never have imagined.
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Sorcery of Thorns was honestly a random purchase since it was only $6 on Bookoutlet. However, after I bought it, I kept seeing people suggest it in a book group that I’m in. So I’m a little excited to read it now.
Loveboat, Taipei:
by Abigail Hing Wen
When eighteen-year-old Ever Wong’s parents send her from Ohio to Taiwan to study Mandarin for the summer, she finds herself thrust among the very over-achieving kids her parents have always wanted her to be, including Rick Woo, the Yale-bound prodigy profiled in the Chinese newspapers since they were nine—and her parents’ yardstick for her never-measuring-up life.
Unbeknownst to her parents, however, the program is actually an infamous teen meet-market nicknamed Loveboat, where the kids are more into clubbing than calligraphy and drinking snake-blood sake than touring sacred shrines.
Free for the first time, Ever sets out to break all her parents’ uber-strict rules—but how far can she go before she breaks her own heart?
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Once I saw this cover and read the synopsis, I immediately added it to my TBR list. I’m already a lover of Asian dramas, so I know a little about Asian culture. So I should enjoy reading this.
The Chosen:
by Taran Matharu
Throughout history, people have vanished with no explanation. A group of teenagers are about to discover why.
Cade is settling into a new boarding school, contemplating his future, when he finds himself transported to another realm. He soon discovers their new world is populated with lost remnants from the past: prehistoric creatures, ancient relics, and stranger still - people. Overwhelmed by his new surroundings, Cade has little time to adjust, for soon he and his fellow classmates are forced to become contenders in a brutal game, controlled by mysterious overlords.
But who are these beings and why did they choose these teens? Cade must prepare for battle . . . because hiding is not an option.
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This book is another random purchase. The cover drew me in, and after I read the synopsis, I figured it would be something different I haven’t read before, so we’ll see if I like it!!
Not So Pure and Simple:
by Lamar Giles
Del has had a crush on Kiera Westing since kindergarten. And now, during their junior year, she’s finally available. So when Kiera volunteers for an opportunity at their church, Del’s right behind her. Though he quickly realizes he’s inadvertently signed up for a Purity Pledge.
His dad thinks his wires are crossed, and his best friend, Qwan, doesn’t believe any girl is worth the long game. But Del’s not about to lose his dream girl, and that’s where fellow pledger Jameer comes in. He can put in the good word. In exchange, Del just has to get answers to the Pledgers’ questions…about sex ed.
With other boys circling Kiera like sharks, Del needs to make his move fast. But as he plots and plans, he neglects to ask the most important question: What does Kiera want? He can’t think about that too much, though, because once he gets the girl, it’ll all sort itself out. Right?
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The synopsis pulled me all the way in on this one. It sounds interesting and something I would enjoy. It seems like a book I would’ve read back when I was in middle school. So I can’t wait to get my hands on this book!
The Hand on the Wall:
by Maureen Johnson
Ellingham Academy must be cursed. Three people are now dead. One, a victim of either a prank gone wrong or a murder. Another, dead by misadventure. And now, an accident in Burlington has claimed another life. All three in the wrong place at the wrong time. All at the exact moment of Stevie’s greatest triumph . . .
She knows who Truly Devious is. She’s solved it. The greatest case of the century.
At least, she thinks she has. With this latest tragedy, it’s hard to concentrate on the past. Not only has someone died in town, but David disappeared of his own free will and is up to something. Stevie is sure that somehow—somehow—all these things connect. The three deaths in the present. The deaths in the past. The missing Alice Ellingham and the missing David Eastman. Somewhere in this place of riddles and puzzles there must be answers.
Then another accident occurs as a massive storm heads toward Vermont. This is too much for the parents and administrators. Ellingham Academy is evacuated. Obviously, it’s time for Stevie to do something stupid. It’s time to stay on the mountain and face the storm—and a murderer.
In the tantalizing finale to the Truly Devious trilogy, New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson expertly tangles her dual narrative threads and ignites an explosive end for all who’ve walked through Ellingham Academy.
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The third book of the Truly Devious series. I randomly decided to check Truly Devious out because I had an audible credit, and I’m glad I did. This series is the reason why I love listening to books now. The first mystery book I got into in a while. I’m excited to hear The Hand on the Wall and hope I enjoy it as much as I did the other two books in the series.
Children of Virtue and Vengeance:
by Tomi Adeyemi
After battling the impossible, Zélie and Amari have finally succeeded in bringing magic back to the land of Orïsha. But the ritual was more powerful than they could’ve imagined, reigniting the powers of not only the maji, but of nobles with magic ancestry, too.
Now, Zélie struggles to unite the maji in an Orïsha where the enemy is just as powerful as they are. But when the monarchy and military unite to keep control of Orïsha, Zélie must fight to secure Amari's right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy's wrath.
With civil war looming on the horizon, Zélie finds herself at a breaking point: she must discover a way to bring the kingdom together or watch as Orïsha tears itself apart.
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I loved Children of Blood and Bone; it was a good book! I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the sequel. I love Tomi Adeyemi, plus she posted my picture of me holding Children of Blood and Bone on her Instagram. I already started reading this book and love it so far. I can’t wait to see how it ends!!
These are all the books I plan on reading this year, and I hope I get around to all of them. I also might read more than this or other books that are on my TBR list. I have a lot of books that are waiting to be read, collecting dust, haha. I’m just the person who has to be in the mood to read a specific genre so if I’m not in the mood for self-help books they will stay on the shelf until I’m ready to dive in. Hopefully, I’m not the only one that does that. What are the books you plan on reading this year? Are there any on this list that you plan on reading or adding to your TBR list? Let me know in the comments!! Thanks for reading and ta-ta for now.