This year, I relished the newfound time beget by the social distancing paradigm to indulge in even more books than usual. To wit, I averaged around 3.7 books per month in 2020 compared to 2.7 books per month in 2019 – and approximately tripled what I achieved each year from 2016 to 2018.

Notably, I also published my first book: the Security Chaos Engineering e-book (non-fiction) published via O’Reilly Media. It’s available for free download if you want to check it out and add some brain-stimulating non-fiction to your reading queue.

If you’re looking for more science fiction, speculative fiction, or non-fiction recommendations, check out my 2019, my 2018, my 2017, and my 2016 reading lists.

Fiction

Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

And Shall Machines Surrender (Machine Mandate Book 1) by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee

Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky) by Rebecca Roanhorse

Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon

Children of Virtue and Vengeance (Legacy of Orisha, 2) by Tomi Adeyemi

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem Series, 2) by Cixin Liu

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

Exit Strategy: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain

Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Trilogy, 2) by Tamsyn Muir

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

The Lathe Of Heaven: A Novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An LGBT and two-spirit sci-fi anthology featuring Cherie Dimaline, Gwen Benaway, David Robertson, Richard Van Camp, Nathan Adler, Daniel Heath Justice, Darcie Little Badger, and Cleo Keahna

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (re-read)

Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel (The Murderbot Diaries Book 5) by Martha Wells

Ninth Step Station by Malka Older, Fran Wilde, Jacqueline Koyanagi, and Curtis C. Chen

Null States (The Centenal Cycle, 2) by Malka Older

The Plague by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Queen of the Conquered (Islands of Blood and Storm, 1) by Kacen Callender

Realm of Ash (The Books of Ambha Book 2) by Tasha Suri

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

State Tectonics (The Centenal Cycle) by Malka Older

The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles by Kij Johnson

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The Time Invariance of Snow by E. Lily Yu

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories by Silvina Ocampo

Non-Fiction

Building Secure & Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing and Maintaining Systems by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Piotr Lewandowski, Ana Oprea, and Adam Stubblefield (I’m honored to have been a reviewer for it!)

The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook (Or: How to Beat the Big Bang) by Luke A. Barnes and Geraint F. Lewis

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain by Nadine Akkerman

Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder

Mechanizing Proof by Donald MacKenzie

Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith by Sam Newman

Venice’s Secret Service: Organising Intelligence in the Renaissance by Ioanna Iordanou