Our reading list in 2020, like the rest of our lives, was colored by the triple whammy of pandemic, racial justice protests and the presidential election. But given the unpredictability of these 12 jam-packed, crisis-filled months, how did the thinkers, researchers, preachers and their publishers of the books we clung to know to furnish us with such timely analyses? As several of the authors of the most interesting books have noted, the answer is all too grim: In many cases, we only reaped what we had long sown. But among our favorite histories, travelogs and memoirs below, there are as many solutions as there are jeremiads, and books as fun as they are enlightening.