My 2020 Reading List
If Barack Obama can do it, so can I. Here’s what I read, watched, and listened to in 2020. Send thoughts, recommendations for 2021, grievances, and weird-flex-but-OKs to raphy.gendler@gmail.com.
Books
— 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari)
— The Baseball 100 (Joe Posnanski in The Athletic)
— Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Bryan Stevenson)
— Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (Jane Leavy)
— Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling)
— Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer)
— The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (Erik Larson)
— All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)
— The Boys of Summer (Roger Kahn)
— Milkman (Anna Burns)
— Normal People (Sally Rooney)
— The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
— Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (J.D. Vance)
— Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
— Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi)
— Moonglow (Michael Chabon)
— 100 Moments (Joe Posnanski in The Athletic)
— What’s Bred in the Bone (Robertson Davies)
— How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi)
— Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
— Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (Kurt Vonnegut)
— The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (Lawrence S. Ritter)
— Mother Night (Kurt Vonnegut)
— Educated (Tara Westover)
— Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng)
— The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead)
— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
— This Is Where I Leave You (Jonathan Tropper)
— The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (Ben Bradlee, Jr.)
— White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Robin DiAngelo)
— God Is Dead (Ron Currie, Jr.)
— Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High (Melba Pattillo Beals)
— The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon)
— The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, Nov. 8 (Not really a book, I know, but it is long and I read the whole thing. Plus I finished the crossword and only cheated a little bit)
— One car ride from Ithaca to Minneapolis worth (about half the book) of A Promised Land audiobook (Barack Obama)
— In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (Erik Larson)
— Interior Chinatown (Charles Yu)
— All Those Mornings… At the Post: The 20th Century in Sports from Famed Washington Post Columnist Shirley Povich (Shirley Povich, ed. Lynn, Maury, and David Povich and George Solomon)
On my shelf and/or want-to-read list: Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), The Undocumented Americans (Karla Cornejo Villavicencio), Memorial (Bryan Washington), The Final Solution (Michael Chabon), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon), No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (Greta Thunberg), The Last Icon: Tom Seaver and His Times (Steven Travers), The Nix (Nathan Hill), Jacob’s Folly (Rebecca Miller), Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens), The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett), Deadeye Dick (Kurt Vonnegut)
TV
— Unorthodox (Dir. by Maria Schrader, based on the book by Deborah Feldman)
— Tiger King (Dir. by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin)
— Shtisel (Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky)
— Sherlock (Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat, based on the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
— Brooklyn Nine-Nine-some episodes (Michael Schur and Dan Goor)
— Community-some episodes (Dan Harmon)
— The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amy Sherman-Palladino)
— House Hunters-some episodes
— New Girl-some episodes (Elizabeth Meriwether)
— Curb Your Enthusiasm-some episodes (Larry David)
— Broad City (Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer)
— The Great British Baking Show-some episodes
Movies
— 13th (Ava DuVernay)
— Star Wars Ep. IV (George Lucas)
— Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda)
— A League Of Their Own (Penny Marshall)
— The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Podcasts
— Serial Season 1, most of Season 3 (Sarah Koenig, Serial)
— The Daily occasional episodes (Michael Barbaro, The New York Times)
— Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! August 29-now (Peter Sagal, NPR and WBEZ Chicago)
— Nice White Parents (Chana Joffe-Walt, Serial and The New York Times)
— In the Dark Season 1 (Madeleine Baran, APM Reports)
— Harper High School (Ira Glass, This American Life)
— A couple episodes of This American Life (Ira Glass, NPR)
— Boomtown eps. 1&2 (Christian Wallace, Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment)
Music
— Spotify Wrapped: Top 100 Songs (Note: I share the account with my sister; the Taylor Swift and Hamilton is her)
Things I read excerpts of for classes
— The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (Brian M. Ingrassia)
— I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880–1915 (Louis Moore)
— Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Henry Bial)
—Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom (Vincent Brook)
— Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (Noliwe Rooks)
— Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (Susan Ware)
— A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight For Free Agency In Professional Sports (Brad Snyder)
— The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Anthony Abraham Jack)
— Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities (Camille Z. Charles, Mary J. Fischer, Margarita A. Mooney, and Douglas S. Massey)
— Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (Walter LaFeber)
