The 2020 Digital Tonto Reading List

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

It’s interesting how often books seem to reflect the zeitgeist, or at least our perception of it. As I prepared this year’s list, I began looking through earlier versions and was struck by how each seemed a remnant from a different age. Undoubtedly, some of that is a product of my own curation, but I do feel that books tap into important undercurrents.

I wrote some years ago that 2020 was shaping up to be a pivotal year, although I had no idea the extent to which it would be. I think it’s safe to say that we all got more than we bargained for. This year has tested us, individually and as a society, in ways we couldn’t have imagined and, in many ways, we fell short.

So looking at this year’s list, I am heartened to see that so many books point the way forward to a new, more promising era in which we begin to solve some of the problems that have been lingering for so long. It seems to me that we are starting to come out on the other side, but there’s a lot of work to do. I hope some of these books help you make some sense of it.

Book of the Year

Each year I pick one or two books that have most impacted my thinking. In most years, it’s pretty easy because there really are one or two that stand heads and shoulders above the rest. This year, however, there were a number of titles that I felt captured…