the best & the worst books I read in 2020 | 🤢💩🏆🤩

It's almost the end of the year 2020. It has been  such a crazy year for me and i'm sure everyone has had a lot to go through. i'm sure we will all  remember this year for years to come because this year was not easy for any one of us. This  year brought us all together even when we were quite far apart from each other. i feel like this  year I learned more about the people around me, our community, our society, humanity, more  than I've ever done before. If it wasn't for this pandemic, i don't

feel like i would have read  The Brothers Karamazov this year. So this pandemic definitely gave a boost to my reading. In today's  video I want to share with you all the best books I read in the year 2020 and also some of the worst  books i read this year. I will be doing end of the year tag as well in which I will be discussing  all the books I read in the year 2020 in more detail but today I just want to focus on some of  the best reads of the year and some of the worst. I'm going to start thi

s video with the worst  books I read this year; i want to do that so I can go over them as quickly as possible, so that i  can move on to the good part of the video. i have three books which disappointed me this year.  I'm not sure what it was exactly about these three books which disappointed me. These three  books were out of my comfort zone, all three of these authors were new to me. Maybe I went in  with some preconceived ideas about their works. Whatever the reason might be, i did not enjoy

  reading these books. So let's talk about the first book which i did not like and it was Ethan Frome  by Edith Wharton. This is an american classic; in fact all three of these books are classics,  which i did not like. I did not like Ethan Frome because i felt like the writer was trying too  hard. I felt like the writer was trying to prove that she was a great writer and in doing so she  was losing the effortlessness which makes a book great, in my eyes. I know many people love this  book! this

is the classic, there are a lot of people out there who have nothing but good words  to say about Ethan Frome but for me it felt a bit short, in fact this is the lowest book i rated in  2020. i gave this a two star rating on goodreads. This is also a very short book, um just a hundred  pages long and i feel like all the books which disappointed me this year were short books. One  of my favorite books of all time is Animal Farm by George Orwell and that is a short story so i'm  not against short

stories per se but i felt like this could have been so much better. The story  was so dramatic and it felt like again the author was trying too hard and i'm not sure what  i'll feel about Edith Wharton's other works; I've read the summaries of some of her other books  like the House of Mirth and i feel like, you know, i might like those ones better than i liked  this one. i feel like her books have this theme of being sad and dramatic. Many of you guys  have suggested her other works to me in t

he comments and i definitely plan on reading  some of her other works before i give up on Edith Wharton. I definitely plan on reading  the House of Mirth, Summer and The Buccaneers; I've heard was an unfinished work which she wrote  and I've seen a television series for that, which was really good, so i do want to read that someday  but her novella Ethan Frome didn't do much for me. i might also read The Age of Innocence which won  her the Pulitzer prize, so there are definitely other works by t

his writer i want to read and i  feel like you know the short stories or novellas might not actually portray the writer in the best  light sometimes, so i definitely plan on reading a bit more of Edith Wharton but Ethan Frome was  definitely a disappointment. The second book which i want to talk about is Bonjour Tristesse  by Francois Sagan; it is a modern french classic, it was just 100 pages long but i did not  like the story. i do believe that the writing was very simple and sort of poetic ev

en because  of its simplicity but the story-line just did not resonate with me. i haven't read a lot of  french classics; i have only read The Black Tulip by Alexander Dumas and i feel like this is  the second french classic I've read and it wasn't um what i was hoping it would be. Somebody  messaged me the other day suggesting french classics, i do really want to read french  classics! i mean, i want to read Les miserables and I want to read Emile Zola. i'm pretty sure  there's no comparison be

tween Dumas and this book; i might really enjoy other french classics,  for all i know, i have no clue. If somebody was to start reading french classics; what would  you suggest they read first? you know, something simple but interesting and intriguing. I feel  like I need to slowly acclimatize myself to french classics before i dive into some major works  in french. So i would be open to suggestions, i would love to hear them. This book i got  from an old bookshop and i might return it back bec

ause i feel like i'm never going to read this  again. The third book which disappointed me was John Steinbeck's The Red Pony; it is also  a relatively modern classic. It is written by an american writer and this was the first  time i was reading Steinbeck. The countryside in america was what was explored in this book;  the writing again was fine, the stories were weird; i mean, they felt like you know just your  average, normal day, country side stories but then there was something really twiste

d in them which  just threw me off. This young 10 year old boy gets a present and then something really creepy  happens and it was just told in such a normal way, i'm not sure what to make of that. I have  read a lot of creepy weird books this year but this one was just too twisted for me even  though that was done in such a subtle way, it just felt odd. The way this 10 year old  boy tortures animals, i don't feel comfortable reading about stuff like that. Maybe his  other books are not as bad,

i'm not sure. Steinbeck is one author i'm not sure i'll enjoy.  I will try and read more books by Edith Wharton but i'm not too sure about John Steinbeck. i gave  this one a three star because i did really like the way he was telling stuf,f i did really like  his writing style but the stories were just odd; that's that's one word to describe this book;  it was odd. Now that i'm done with the worst books I've read this year let's move on to the  good stuff; i read five books which i rated five st

ars this year. i read eight books which i  rated four star this year. i loved all the five star books i read this year but i also genuinely,  really enjoyed some of the books I've rated four stars but in this video i'm just going to talk  about the books which i rated five stars. so the first book which i gave a five star rating to this  year was David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. i was actually surprised that i really enjoyed this  book because i felt like i was not going to enjoy David Copp

erfield; first, the name just puts  me off; it's a guy's name and i knew that this was written loosely on how Charles Dickens life  as a kid. it's semi-autobiographical, in a way. I really enjoyed his other books; i loved Little  Dorrit because the main character was female. i did not enjoy Great Expectations because  it was all about a young boy called Pip and i felt like this might be a bit similar to that  because it was called David Copperfield. i knew that the whole story would revolve arou

nd this  guy but i actually really enjoyed this book. I felt like it had so much more to offer than  Great Expectations. What i loved about this book was all the other characters beside David  Copperfield because all those characters pushed him towards being the best version of himself.  David learned from these characters. Some of these characters who were super funny, eccentric.  The whole book was just hilarious but sad as well. Many of the characters in this book had a very  troubled life bu

t the way Dickens talks about how they deal with their troubles was done in  such a comedic and, you know, Dickensian manner. I really enjoyed reading about their struggles  and how they coped with it because Dickens wrote about them in a very interesting way. Let  me share a few good quotes from this book; "there can be no disparity in marriage  like unsuitability of mind and purpose. "There is nothing that we have in common" said  Annie. "I have long found that there is nothing. If I were than

kful to my husband for no more  instead of for so much, i should be thankful to him for having saved me from the first mistaken  impulse of my undisciplined heart." There are some really meaningful conversations happening  in this book in between all the funny parts and i felt like that made this book stand apart from  all the other books i read this year. The second book which i absolutely loved this year was  The Cranford Chronicles by Elizabeth Gaskell. i have read Wives and Daughters; I've l

oved  reading that book. i love North and South. i wasn't a huge fan of Mary Barton; i found that  book all right but i did really enjoy the Cranford Chronicles. I read this at the very beginning of  the lock-down and i was feeling so low. This book was about people coming together for each other,  it was about people helping each other out, even when, you know, times were hard and i felt  like that part of it resonated a lot with me because we were in a lock-down. I wasn't  able to go out from

my house to meet people, there was something really sweet about this  book. It was about people in a small town, living together, their you know daily activities,  how they were interlinked, how they gossiped about each other but their hearts were pure.  I feel like there are very few books which can show the purity of human nature the way the  Cranford Chronicles did. There was a similarity between this book and some of the books by Thomas  Hardy because his books are about country folk, who le

ad very simple lives as well but their  hearts are pure, their intentions are good and i loved reading this; it was such a breath  of fresh air. The next book which I absolutely loved was The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli;  this is written by an Italian writer and it was originally written in the Italian language.  This was the only non-fiction i read this year and i absolutely loved it! One of my  goals for the next year is definitely to read more nonfiction and in order to achieve  that i have

been buying more non-fiction. Coming back to The Prince, this was  very short, it was just 125 pages long; it was very very different from what i  usually read and you guys have an idea of my comfort zone when it comes to reading;  I love reading fiction and I read classics from the Victorian era. It is sort of like  a manual for a new leader; this guy wrote, i'm not sure about their names, but this guy  wrote this book from a prison and he gave it as a present to the leader of Italy at the tim

e;  that's what i remember from this book. The way he talks about dealing with people, how to you know  manipulate leaders around you, how to take care of the army, how to use it for your own benefit;  some really cool tips in there and it says that, you know, many leaders read it; it is said that  Cromwell read it, Napoleon Bonaparte read it, Stalin read it." It also has some darker aspect  to it and i feel like that can be misused and have been misused in the past and some of those  points mig

ht not be useful in today's world or won't work as effectively but a lot of the  things that Machiavelli talks about in this book are actually really good. So it's definitely worth  a read and if a person like me, who is not really fond of talking about politics or anything of the  sort or armies or battles or anything like that, if i really enjoyed this, then i'm sure you  guys will too because the leader or the prince doesn't have to be the leader of a nation; it  can be a leader of a company,

it can be a leader of, you know, a business. You don't have to think  of it in the bigger picture, you can just take the points from this book and use them in your life,  wherever you know they fit. So i really enjoyed this book, I wasn't expecting it to be as  good, so this was a surprisingly good read for me this year. So the next book which i really  really enjoyed reading this year and i feel like it just was a benchmark, which i reached, um it  was the book The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor

Dostoevsky. The year I read War and Peace by Leo  Tolstoy, i felt like that was an accomplishment and then reading The Brother Karamazov  was pretty similar to that, it felt like i achieved something this year, after i  finished reading the Brother Karamazov. It took me two months to read it almost, loved  every bit of it. It was a very philosophical story. It was deep. It was weird but it was  very, very thought provoking. Dostoevsky wrenched out emotions from me which i did not  knew existed;

i was sad, i was worried about these characters, i felt like i was transported  into their world when i was reading that book and it was a very different world from where i live  in but i was there, you know. Even though this book was worlds apart from where i live, from  where i come from but i felt for these characters and i feel like Dostoevsky accomplished that in  a very very wonderful way. I wasn't expecting to love it as much as i did because even though  it is a Russian classic it's ver

y different from Tolstoy's works. It's a thriller. It's  a mystery. It has pages and pages about deep philosophical stuff, which i never read about  but i was fascinated by when i was reading it. It felt very fast paced even though this is very  long; more than a thousand pages of this but the thrilling parts of this book were very fast paced.  There were some parts about the church which just, which i basically did not understand much of but  the parts which i did understand were very good. The

story is about three brothers and their  father. The father Fyodor Karamazov was a weird guy and then you would expect his  sons to be as weird as him but his sons are actually very sensible men; there's Ivan who  is an intellectual person, then there is Alyosha who is a very religious guy and the third one  was Metiya who is very aware of his feelings ,especially towards women. So you feel like  you know these characters and you read the next hundred pages and you're just like whoa, that  guy

just changed completely because there are so many aspects of a person. You cannot define a  person by a few characteristics and that's what Dostoevsky is trying to explain in this book; for  example, let's take Ivan; he is an intellectual but he also has other parts of his personality;  he's also a guy who can fall in love, he also has you know a philosophical side, a religious  side to him. There are parts of his personality which are clashing with each other and that clash  of philosophy and r

eligion is what defines Ivan as a person. i can ramble about this book for ages  but i don't want to do that because i have already talked about this one a lot. i'm going to link  all my videos in which i talk about The Brothers Karamazov down below, so if you are interested you  can check out my reading vlogs, my review about it but definitely, definitely a stunning book. i  wouldn't have read this book if it was not for this pandemic and the last book which i absolutely  loved this year was Th

e Plague by Albert Camus; this book was originally written in french.  this translation is by Stuart Gilbert. I believe there is a new translation of the plague coming  soon as well. i read this book because this was a classic about a pandemic, not about  a pandemic but about an epidemic but i absolutely loved this book and if you haven't  read it so far, i highly highly recommend that you read it now! unlike my usual favorite  books this was very different it was about this town in which an epi

demic of a disease  breaks out. That town goes into quarantine, how the people react to it, the people in the  town initially don't believe that things are as serious as they are or they don't want to  believe. The characters in this book go through all the emotions which are pretty similar to what  we all went through during this COVID pandemic and the disease which spreads in this book is actually  a fictional disease, you know, it doesn't actually exist. In order to explain how good this book

  was i would like to share a few passages from the book; "From now on it can be said that plague was  the concern of all of us. hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening  around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible  and no doubt he would have continued doing so but once the town gates were shut, every one of  us realized that all, the narrator included, were so to speak in the same boat and each would  have

to adapt himself to the new conditions of life. Thus, for example, a feeling normally as  individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which  all shared alike and together with fear the greatest affliction of the long period  of exile that lay ahead." This book was mind-blowing and it described  the emotions of the people so accurately Albert Camus was a genius! he knew  about how people would react, how they would feel, what would go on in a situation l

ike this  and he wrote it, i don't know years before this pandemic. He wrote it because he was inspired  by an epidemic of cholera in Algeria, if i'm not wrong. I'm glad that you know, his words are  preserved in the form of writing because this will be a benchmark for all the books  which are written about pandemics; all the fictional books which are written  about pandemics. i know there are a lot of non-fiction on the market right now about  pandemics. i was absolutely blown away by this and

i'm so glad i read it and i  highly highly recommend it to people; read the plague! you will not be disappointed  even though it's a sad book but it just, it's, it's just... read it! it's really,  really good, trust me on this one! so those were all the books which i wanted to  talk about. i had some great reads this year, i also had a few terrible ones. i had a really  good reading year, i'm very happy with what i read because i read some really, really good books; i  stepped out of my comfort

zone and i'm very happy about that. i enjoyed a lot of books i read this  year and there were very few which i did not like; i'll be talking more about all the books I've  read this year in my future videos and let me know if there is any specific video you guys  would be interested in. That's it, i hope you guys enjoyed this video and i'm going to see  you all in my next video very, very soon. Bye