My 2020 Reading List

2020 was an interesting year to say the least. My 2020 reading list totally reflects that in that the books I read ranged from the historical to the political to self-help to Pacific Island stuff. I was lucky enough to have traveled early on in the year and found a few cool books while in Indianapolis (namely, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War by Stephen Towne), I also have been working on cataloguing my home library to which I’ve added quite a few titles this year thanks to online library book sales.

I started off 2020 finishing a book that I had started the previous year, the first title on the list by James Horn. I then got into a few self-help / motivational readings which I really found enlightening and then delved back into my early American and English history that I so love!

As the COVID-19 pandemic kicked in towards March, looking back at my 2020 reading list, I noticed that my penchant for politics and economics kicked into high gear and I read a few titles in that genre. That need was also bolstered by the 2020 election which did not go the way I had hoped.

One of the best books I read this year, and perhaps in the last 5 years, is Ben Buchanan’s The Hacker and the State. It was a 2020 release and was inspired by his talk on C-SPAN earlier in the year. Peter Wallison’s book Hidden in Plain Sight is another read I’d highly recommend. His book is on economics, or as I like to call it, “conspiratorial economics.”

The book titles below with links will take you to Family History Foundation book reviews. Enjoy learning more about those titles from my 2020 reading list!

• Horn, James. 2010. A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic Horror of the
Lost Colony of Roanoke. New York: Basic Books.

• Pritchett, Price. 2020. You Squared: A High Velocity Formula for Multiplying
your Personal Effectiveness in Quantum Leaps. Dallas: Pritchett.

• Allen, James. 2018. As A Man Thinketh. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine
Books.

• Towne, Stephen E. 2015. Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing
Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland. Athens: Ohio
University Press.

• Cooper, William J., Jr. 2000. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf.

• Bergreen, Laurence. 2007. Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.

• Wilson-Lee, Edward. 2018. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. New York:
Scribner.

• Grant, James. 2019. Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian.
New York: W. W. Norton.

• McCullough, David. 2019. The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers
Who Brought the American Ideal West. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Buchanan, Ben. 2020. The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the
New Normal of Geopolitics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

• Bernanke, Ben S. 2015. The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its
Aftermath. New York: Norton & Company.

• Kirk, Charlie. 2020. The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the
Future. New York: Broadside Books.

• Wallison, Peter J. 2015. Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the
World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again. New
York: Encounter Books.

• Savas, Theodore P. and J. David Dameron. 2010. The New American
Revolution Handbook: Facts and Artwork for Readers of all Ages,
1775-1783. New York: Savas Beatie LLC.

• Bridgeford, Andrew. 2005. 1066: The Hidden History in the Bayeux
Tapestry. New York: Walker & Company.

• Robb, Graham. 2014. The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of
Celtic Europe. London: Picador.

• Stone, Leesa Clark. 2019. The Rap Reiplinger Story. Honolulu, Farknocker Publishing.

• Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. New
York: Cambridge University Press.

• Schütz, Albert J. 2020. Hawaiian Language: Past, Present, Future. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.

• Loomis, Albertine. 1998. Grapes of Canaan: Hawaii 1820, The True Story of Hawaii’s Missionaries.
Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

• Loomis, Albertine. 1976. For Whom Are The Stars? Revolution and Counterrevolution in Hawaii,
1893-1895. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.