Online Display: Best Books of 2020

We’re celebrating the best of 2020 – best books, that is! This year’s display features more than 190 titles that appeared on 17 year-end best books lists.* Visit the Best Books of 2020 display website to browse by category (fiction or nonfiction) and format (print or electronic). From the display website you can view a book’s current availability and/or place holds.

Curious to know about the “best of the best”? There were 20 books that appeared on five or more lists:

  1. A Burning by Megha Majumdar
  2. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  3. City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
  4. Deacon King Kong by James McBride
  5. Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X  by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
  6. Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick
  7. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  8. Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
  9. Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
  10. Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V. E. Schwab
  11. Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
  12. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
  13. Memorial Drive by Natasha D. Trethewey
  14. Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
  15. Missionaries by Phil Klay
  16. Real Life by Brandon Taylor
  17. The Searcher by Tana French
  18. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
  19. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
  20. Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Borrowing Books & Audiobooks from the Library

Those of you on-campus and enrolled in the University’s COVID screening program are welcome to visit the library to borrow books from the print book and CD audiobook lists. Either stop by to browse, or place a hold request in the catalog and we’ll notify you when the items are ready to be picked up. For a contactless experience you can retrieve your items from the “open holds cart” in the lobby and check them out to yourself using the self-check.

Accessing E-Books & Digital Audiobooks Online

Everyone in the Bentley community is able to access the titles on the e-book and digital audiobook lists from anywhere in the world with a current Bentley email address and password.

We hope you find something good to read from 2020 while we all await brighter days in 2021! Please contact us if you have any questions or need help using the e-book and digital audiobook collections.


*sources consulted: AudioFile, Bloomberg, Booklist, The Christian Science Monitor (fiction, nonfiction), The Economist, Entertainment Weekly, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, Publishers Weekly, strategy+business, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.