GCBC - Hello Sunshine Book Club Books - Part 2 - 2019 selections

In case you missed our previous post about Hello Sunshine, it’s the name of Reese Witherspoon’s book club.  My friend Sarah and I are in a 2 person book club composed just of us which we call GCBC (short for Grand Central Book Club, since that's where we used to meet for lunch to discuss our picks).  Among the books we read together, we generally like to read Reese's picks (one of us more obsessively than the other).  In that first blog, we discussed the Hello Sunshine picks through 2018; today we’ll tackle the 2019 picks. 

Jen's Top 10 Books of 2020

So excited to share my top 10 favorite books I read in 2020 with all of you!  Once again I read a ton of books, which means this is really the cream of the crop - basically the top 5-6% of what I read - and was super, super hard to narrow down to 10.  This year there were 4 books which I gave a 5 star rating to, and 17 books which I gave 4.5 stars to.  And that doesn't even include the tremendous amount of books which I gave 4 stars to and would still heartily recommend to you.

For anyone who isn't already familiar with my lists, I've been creating top 10 lists of books I read at year's end all the way back to 1999, long before I had a blog, and sharing them with my friends.  These are books I read in a particular year, not necessarily books published that year, though most of these books were in fact published in 2020.

Here's my list for 2020, in alphabetical order by author's last name.

Hope and Other Punchlines by Julie Buxbaum

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

The Searcher by Tana French

The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing by Allison Winn Scotch

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

Read on for more about these books!

Anticipated books of 2021

 As if I didn’t already have a backlog of years worth of books to read (I'm a self-confessed book hoarder), one of my favorite things to do besides reading is to see what books are due to be published that I want to read, so I can add them to my never-ending to read list, request them from Netgalley, get on the library waitlist for them, etc.!  And it looks like 2021 is going to have a lot of them!  So without further ado, the 2021 books I’m most looking forward to, listed in order of currently scheduled publication date, listed in parentheses after the title and author of each book.

 

5 Star Review: American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

I have another 5 star quality book to recommend -  just my 4th of the year - American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.  This is not an easy book to read, nor a fun one, but it was incredibly, incredibly powerful.  This book grabbed me from the first page, and didn't let go until I finished. 

GCBC: Hello Sunshine book club books - Part 1 - 2017-2018

 As you may know, Reese Witherspoon created her own book club a few years ago, called Hello Sunshine.  And my friend Sarah, the other member of my 2 person book club GCBC and partner in crime (if the crime is reading and making lists of books to read), and I have been reading all or most of the selections.  Some are better than others - I think Reese also picks books because she wants to adapt them, not necessarily because they’re the best books.  But she’s also definitely introduced me to some books I might not have read otherwise.  We were going to do a blog about all the books, but there are so darn many we realized we should split them up.  Consider this part 1, covering from when Reese started the book club in June 2017 through December 2018. 

Sarah adds: One of the things I love about Reese’s book club is that she only chooses female authors and goes out of her way to pick books from diverse authors and stories that empower women. 

World War I Fiction

In honor of Veteran's Day, today's post is about World War I fiction.  Yes, you read that right - I said World War I!  There is a plethora of great World War II fiction and I know a lot of people love to read it - I'm one of them and in fact I read enough of it that I could probably write a second post just updating my post on World War II fiction from Veteran's Day 2 years ago.  But believe it or not, there are actually some really good novels about World War I which I’ve read in the past few years as well, and I thought it would be interesting to showcase those.  And I think because I've read less books on World War I, I find them really interesting and even learn a lot from them - in fact I often find myself going on the internet to learn more during/after reading them because World War I is kind of confusing.  So here are the novels I most recommend about World War I.

Science Fiction

I recently received a request for my recommendations for science fiction books. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I actually love science fiction.  It was pretty much the bulk of what I read as a teenager, but now science fiction represents a relatively small fraction of the books I read.  But I am always on the hunt for good new science fiction, and I definitely have some good ones to recommend!