Hi everyone, it's Vanessa. I'm here to record my favorite nonfiction reads of 2020. I'm really excited to make this video. I actually had to read a lot of great nonfiction this year, though it was sporadic at times, and I didn't necessarily have the best nonfiction November. Let's get into it. I have a list of the top 10 books that I read that are nonfiction this year out of the about 70 nonfiction books total that I read this year. I will start from number 10 and go up to number one and number 10 is Open Book by Jessica Simpson. This is a book that really surprised me because of how genuine and vulnerable Jessica Simpson makes herself out to be here. I've read quite a few celebrity memoirs in my time. None of them ever really deliver all the way. They always feel like they're keeping you a little bit at arm's length just to protect themselves and their privacy. This book was really juicy. It had so much interesting information about a time period that I grew up in and definitely celebrity gossip that I was well versed in. I love how she talks about so many hard topics like sobriety, having children and marriage and grief and losing people, how the media sees you too as a celebrity sometimes. It didn't feel like she was writing this book to make me feel a certain way. It felt more like she was writing this book to get this all off her shoulders. Number nine on my list is Anti-Solosho by Andrew Morant. This is a book that looks into the alt-right and alt-light movements and how people proliferate on the internet. What that attention on those people means for how they rise and how they gain more followers to their ideas. This is also an interesting look into a lot of the techno-utobians. So the founders of Facebook, Google and Twitter, how all of those grand ideas for a social networking platform meant to unite people. It's actually being used for the opposite. This is a book that taught me a lot and this is also a book that gave me definitions to specific things that I'm witnessing and for that I really valued it. Book number eight on my list is The Body Papers by Grace Talucin. This is a collection of essay memoirs dealing with a variety of topics including grief and trauma, immigration and family. So there's a lot of different topics here but they're woven in a way where you really feel like you get to know Talucin and her family. This is a book for people who grew up with the sentiment that family is everything but also that your family is not perfect and sometimes your family causes you pain. It was just a really vulnerable and heartbreaking book. It's a hard book but it's a book that I I really loved reading and I really felt like Talucin was just opening herself up to me and I really appreciated that. Book number seven on my list was one that I read almost at the end of the year and that is Notes on the Silence Sing by Lacey Crawford. This is a book that focuses on Lacey Crawford's sexual assault at a very prestigious boarding school in the New England area during the 90s when she was about 1415 and the reactions that the school community had to her and the reactions that they had to her assaulters in comparison. How this is something that happened decades ago but obviously the thing that happened to her is not something that happened in a vacuum. It's actually as a result of things that were happening in the whole school and how the school shamed people that stood up to talk about these experiences and also how they worked really hard to silence these people including Lacey. This is a book that is really emotional and really explicit in its descriptions so it's not a book for everyone but it's definitely the most damning book that I read about sexual assault in a long time and I love the writing style of the author. She does have kind of a quality of lyricism and poetic and flowery language that I liked reading. It was also really wonderful on audiobook and it's narrated by the author. Book number six on my list is a mind spread out on the ground by Alicia Elliott. Alicia Elliott is a toscarrora author from Canada and she grew up in the United States and kind of was between New York and that area so a lot of the things that she talks about I think are still valuable for Americans to read. And though she does focus a lot on Canadian ideas and politics this is a book of essays that focused on a variety of topics such as nutrition and food, sexual assault, poverty, family and having a difficult family. It also has essays about extrajudicial killings. The way that she puts thoughts together was amazing to me. She'll be talking about something and then she jumps to something else in the next paragraph and you're thinking to yourself like what does this have to do with what we're just talking about you're kind of jumping around and then what she does is she somehow collects her thoughts and puts these threads that seem to you as like completely different to each other somehow weaves them together in a way that explains her main point. That's what I would say about this book is that she knows what she wants to say. Definitely a book that I recommend everyone read and I'm so glad that I read it this year. My favorite part about this book that is still still memorable to me is how it talks about how corn is everywhere. The reason for that being like the United States government bailing out farmers to just mass produce this corn. How it's not necessarily like a good thing for our bodies but still it shows you the power of the government and making policy that affects how we eat. Book number five on this list is a knuck at midnight by Brittany K. Barnett. This is a book that focuses on the author and she is a corporate lawyer based out of Texas. She wrote this book to talk about some of the cases that she's been involved in where she's tried to get people off from life in prison without the possibility of parole over first-time drug offenses because of mandatory minimums on a lot of these drug offenses during the time that this happened in the 90s. It made it so that these people basically can never get out of prison and she has been so important to the pardoning of a lot of these folks and it's just her story of like why this is important to her her connections in that world and her telling the stories of the people that the drug war has forgotten. This is a really inspiring and powerful read and I definitely would recommend two fans of Brian Stevenson. Book number four on my list is In The Dream House by Carmen Moriama Chato. This is a book that really took me by surprise. I expected to like it because of all of the books that I was hearing but it's a book that I found just so creative and it's execution that I was thoroughly impressed. It's a book that is very honest about its depiction of queer relationships and how the queer relationship that Carmen Moriama Chato was in was abusive. I also just loved how she took this idea of aspects of literature and to describe different parts of that relationship. It's a book that broke my heart reading it but it's definitely felt so important for me to read. Book number three on my list is Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller. This is a book that focuses on so many topics. That's one of the most charming things about this book is that it's looking into a man who lived a long time ago and was a classifier of creatures. It's also a look into his really messed up look at the world. He was a proponent of eugenics for example and also his connections to a lot of people that drive the book into like a true crime bent. That was really interesting but ultimately what this book is is a memoir about this author who was obsessed with this person and uses this kind of like as a proxy to talk about her own burgeoning identity and sexuality and also how she looked at her father. I think what makes this book so special is how she writes this book. It's a book that feels very melancholy and has like this musical quality to it. It's a book that feels effortless like she just spit this out and it just came out like that and it's a book that made me feel like she let herself be so vulnerable to us. Audio book experience really amazing and definitely I would recommend book number two on my list is how we fight for our lives by Said Yisheens. This is probably no surprise to you because I read this book early in the year and I've been talking about it ever since. It's the only book that made me cry in 2020. It was one of those really special books where the author is going through his coming of age and telling us about it in a memoir but does it in a way that is poetic, beautifully written and has a way of putting himself in these moments that are fraught with tension and with violence and with self-hate. Seeing him grow through that to know what is important to him and also to see the connection that he has with his mother was also beautiful in this book. This felt like a really cathartic book and I think that might be why I cried because I felt like I went on this journey with him throughout the whole book. I just felt like he trusted me enough to share his story that she can tell that something that I really like in memoirs is when it feels like the author has truly been like here as all of me see me for who I am exactly. All right and finally my favorite nonfiction book of 2020 is Saigon by Fouke Tran. This is my favorite nonfiction book of 2020 for a variety of reasons. I think what I settled on is that this book discusses the immigrant experience in a way that I feel is very resonant with my experience, particularly how in this book we meet Fouke Tran moving to the United States with his family after the Vietnam War to a really white town in Pennsylvania. It's about him wanting to fit in so badly. It's this divide between his parents and him because as he came to the United States so young, he's already Americanizing himself so quickly versus his parents who are still used to the customs and traditions from Vietnam. It's something that if you're a first-generation kid who came here really early in your life, you will really connect to that. The way that he talks about his father and how his father sees America is literally to a T how my dad sees America. I just felt like I connected to that even talking about like language learning and how his dad is practicing his English is something that I also saw in my life too. Another thing that makes this book so special is how self-deprecating and funny down to earth it feels. It feels like it's this kid who's really smart, tried really hard in school, tried hard to make friends and he's still kind of an outcast in a way. He's noticing these little microaggressions happening in his life having to do with race and not that his parents ever see any of that or think that any of that is true. It's him persevering through all of that and knowing where it is that he wants to end up in life. Again, I think I loved it so much because I connected so much to it but I think that anyone who reads my words would find lovely things in here as well that they would also enjoy. If you haven't read it or hasn't been on your radar, definitely do some research on it and see if it might be for you. And that is it for me and my top 10 favorite nonfiction books of 2020. If I've inspired you to read any of these, please let me know in the comments or if you have any recommendations based on the ones that I talked about in here. Also, let me know in the comments and I'll see you in my next video. Bye bye.