My 2020 Reading Wrap-Up

Over the past couple of years, I have documented every film that I have watched and reviewed them all using Letterboxd. As a way to motivate myself to read more, I thought I would do the same for what books I have been reading, using Goodreads as a way to set myself a reading challenge every year.

I initially set my target as 25 books this year, but a few things happened that meant I reached this goal quite early on. Firstly, I had a baby, so this meant that I was awake at silly hours with plenty of time to read. Then, there was lockdown. Because of lockdown, I decided to join Bookstagram and NetGalley and get more serious about reviewing books. So now, instead of reading two books at most a month, I’ve been reading up to ten.

I upped my goal to 60 around halfway through the year, and still managed to pass that by reaching 74 books. This year has really rekindled my love of books, and I can’t wait to start 2021 with this new passion.

Here’s how my 2020 challenge went:

Book Review: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

“Women shouldn’t judge each others lives, if we haven’t been through one another’s fires.”

Written by Lisa Taddeo an published in 2019, Three Women is a non-fiction story that follows the sexual and emotional lives of three women from different backgrounds and regions of the United States. Lina is a suburban Indiana mother who’s stuck in a sexless marriage and starving for affection, Maggie is a seventeen-year-old high school student from North Dakota who finds a confidant in her married English teacher, and Sloane is a successful restaurant owner in the Northeast whose husband likes to watch her have sex with other men.

Taddeo spent eight years writing the book, driving across the country six times to embed herself in the lives of the three women. The result is a portrait of erotic longing, exposing the fragility, complexity, and inequality of female desire with unprecedented depth and emotional power.