Not to toot my own horn, but living a sedentary life this year had a literary payoff: I more than doubled my low-bar goal on GoodReads reading 24 books, rather than my guesstimate of 10. Below are the best* of the bunch**, and holy smokes, were they good. (All book titles are linked to Bookshop.org. I make no money off these links — I simply want you to buy indie or support your local library!) The Vanishing Half  Finishing this book broke my heart. After months idling on the waitlist, I borrowed this as an ebook from my library, and lost myself so thoroughly in the overlapping narratives that I was startled — and deeply chagrined — to flip a page and end up at acknowledgments. Surely I still had 20% to go! It’s the kind of book that deserves intensive reading sessions to appreciate the careful spin of prose, but I devoured a page or two whenever I had a moment — waiting for the coffee to percolate, in the procrastinating moments before hauling out of warm …