The Best Books I Read This Year
It’s time for my favorite annual post: my birthday-eve reflections on what I’ve read and learned this year, highlighting the best books I read during the 12 months from one birthday to the next.
It’s year three of doing this, and as I do every year, I lament not having started earlier. And not just so that I’d have the name of the YA novel with a pink cover and many mentions of eucalyptus that I have been trying and failing to remember for decades now (anyone?). Keeping a book journal is like having a yardstick for your brain. You look back on it years later, see the growth from season to season, and relive what it felt like to see the world from that viewpoint. It’s rich and it’s wonderful and you should do it.
Previously, I’ve shared my reading list and recommendations on Facebook, but this seems like a much better home for them. If you’re interested in seeing what I read and recommended in years 23 or 24, let me know and I’m happy to dig them up.
I’m doing something new this year. I’ve learned to synthesize a little better (all the writing and all the reading certainly helped); I’ll give you my top books of the period first, then post the whole list, starting with the ones I most enjoyed and finishing with the ones I could barely get through, then give you some general stats for the year.
Just because a book isn’t one of my favorites doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading, and my ranking system is relatively unscientific (unlike my ranking of world-class Lima restaurants). My top books are just the books I most often clutched to my chest and sighed over, the ones that made me rearrange my day to allow for maximum time with their characters, and the ones I most wanted to put in your hands.
The Best Books of Year 25
(Fullest of disclosures: if you read my article for The Everygirl on women authors to read, the first seven of these may be familiar; I drew my recommendations for that article from this year’s reading. The others are either written by men or are books I read after my deadline to finish that article passed.)
- The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. We’ve got a newly-widowed 19th-century British amateur naturalist, which should’ve hooked you already, but we’ve also got a dutiful local vicar with a penchant for philosophy. I think of it as a much more interesting Scarlet Letter (no offense, Nathaniel Hawthorne) mixed with The Jungle Book.
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I loved this book before I heard one of my favorite Spanish-language feminist cartoonists (okay, perhaps my only Spanish-language feminist cartoonist? Check her out HERE) list it as the best book she’d read recently at a Buenos Aires bookstore’s meet-the-author chat for her latest book, but her endorsement definitely proves how great it is. It’s a multi-generational story starting on the Gold Coast of Africa and ending in modern-day California, tracing the impact of slavery, imperialism, racism, and justice over time.
- Still Lives by Maria Hummel. Take shocking, conceptual, violent, feminist art and mix it with abject greed and a too-curious prim-and-proper gallery catalogue editor and you’ve got a literary thriller that’ll make you wonder what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite art museum. Also a very good exploration of modern-day LA.
- Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang. Have you ever been a teenage girl? Then this book is for you. I’ll tell you no more but this: Zhang has clearly read every single one of our diaries, knows every single one of our deepest desires and fears and mistakes, and has found a way to turn it all into one of the best pieces of literature I’ve ever read.
- The Pisces by Melissa Broder. Sexy! Weird! Thoughtful treatise on adulthood and loneliness and expectations and confidence and relationships! Leave your expectations at the door and let this book lick at your ankles like saltwater, let it climb higher and higher, let it take you under and let it drown you, just a little bit. You’ll emerge reborn.
- Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. This book is an adventure story, but it’s not all about flights of fancy and harrowing sea journeys and visits to faraway lands. It’s also about diving into the morality of slavery—our eponymous main character being a slave on a Caribbean sugar planation—and our search for meaningful lives. It’s arresting and beautiful and captivating in equal measure.
- Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan. Three generations of an Irish Catholic east coast family, one (then two) beachside cottages, half a dozen mother-daughter relationships, and a hot priest: welcome to Maine. It may look like a lurid lakeside read and while you’re welcome to read it lakeside (I did!), it goes far beyond its fluffy cover to teach us something about our relationships with our parents and ourselves.
- Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran. Have you been following the humanitarian crisis at the U.S. southern border? This book imagines a situation that feels ripped from news coverage: a Mexican mom crosses the border illegally in hopes of a better future, she finds one and creates a good life for her and her American-born son, things go wrong, and the son is the middle piece of a tug-of-war between a well-meaning San Francisco couple desperate to be parents and his birth mom who’s no longer allowed in the United States. It’s haunting and beautiful and makes you think about parenthood, blood, and borders really mean.
- They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib. Who knew Colombus, Ohio was the birthplace of music journalism? Abdurraqib mixes extremely eloquent reflections on life as a teenager in a small town, life as a black man in America, and life as a person who’s been in love, been let down, and been scared with commentary on the music and musicians that have shaped our country, from Fall Out Boy to Marvin Gaye. I felt like I was in those sweaty mosh pits with him, and he made me think about music and meaning in ways I’ve never been inspired to before.
- Becoming by Michelle Obama. I had to wait 32 weeks to check this book out from the library and that massive demand means there’s a good chance you’ve already read it, but if you haven’t, do it. Now. Our former First Lady is eloquence and honesty in their best forms.
- Circe by Madeline Miller. I did a final project on The Odyssey for 9th grade Honors English where I made a scrapbook as if I was Odysseus. (Weirdly enough, I found it when I was home for Christmas this year and have photos, so I’ll include the page about Circe below.) This book takes the Circe stories of The Odyssey and blows them up into the richest, lushest, most thoughtful scrapbook of all time. The descriptions of the natural world and of the toil of emotions born by a minor goddess feel so real that you could reach out and feel them. Such a beautiful homage to a world-famous story, and one that’s a million times more accessible and enjoyable without losing any of the weight.
The Good Books of Year 25
The list below is ranked in order of how much I liked the books. I’d like to write more recommended books pieces in the future, so there’s a good chance you’ll see more in-depth reviews of this next set in other outlets; keep an eye out.
- Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfeg
- Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
- The Broken Kingdoms by NK Jemisin
- Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
- Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo
- Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
- The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
- Sourdough: A Novel by Robin Sloan
- Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple
- Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
- The War of Don Immanuel’s Nether Parts by Louis de Bernières
- The Vacationers by Emma Straub
- A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
- A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
- Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
- Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
And the Okay-to-Bad Books of Year 25
All of the above books I proudly recommend as a good use of several hours of your life. All of the below books I can’t extend the same endorsement to. They are in order from fine, just not something I’d actively recommend, to not very good.
- How to Write a Semiautobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
- Rosalie Lightening by Tom Hart
- The Gunners by Rebecca Kauffman
- An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
- The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior
- Biloxi by Mary Miller
- The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Transcription by Kate Atkinson
- Neon in Daylight by Hermione Hoby
- I’m Fine and Other Lies by Whitney Cummings
- Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
- The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
- The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
- Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart
- Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
- Paris for One by JoJo Moyes
- Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
- The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillery
By the Numbers
Our lists above combine to come in at 59 books; that’s a few less than last year (63) but still more than the year I started doing this (my 23rd year saw me reading 40 books). And pretty impressive, if I can say so myself, considering that much of my travel time has been with Diego, so I don’t have as many opportunities to curl up in a window seat and read for hours on end.
73% of those books were written by women—41 different women, to be exact. (Last year I read 37 women authors, the year before 22.)
10 of those 59 books, or 17% of what I read this year, were non-novels: three essay collections, three memoirs, a nonfiction book about abortion, and three short story collections. I did better on diverse reading choices last year, when 14 of my 63 books, or 22%, were non-novels; the first year I tracked came in at 15% non-novels (six vs. 40). Though I track my overall goals by calendar year, not birthday year, my goal for 2019 was to read three books a month, with one of those three being a non-novel; I’ll get there so long as I read squeeze two more nonficction books in before the end of the year.
Epilogue
Read. Read on your commute, read before bed, read when you first wake up and want to reach over and scroll through Twitter for eight to twelve minutes even though you know you’ll get nothing out of it but a general sense of malaise at the state of the world and two new good memes to share. (The malaise is not the way to begin a new day and the memes will still be there after breakfast.)
Reading has made me smarter, funnier, more patient, more creative. Now that I’m writing more and more, reading has become more of a focused exercise for both sides of my brain; I’ll find a passage I love and worship it, getting inspired to create one just as compelling, and I’ll also chop it up and break it down and figure out why it worked so well. Reading is therapy (though therapy is still worth it), reading is joy, reading is diving into humanity and all its messiness and coming out better for it.
If you want to start reading more but don’t know where to start, shoot me a note and I’ll send you personalized recommendations! Happy birthday to me and happy birthday to you.
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