I Read 76 Books in Year 27. These 17 Were My Favorites.
You know that feeling when you realize you’re close to the end of a book and you’re not ready to finish it?
When you’ve sat yourself in the sun porch and made yourself close the book on your finger and wait a few minutes to prolong the inevitable? Or metered out chapters like doses, one every few hours? Or savored pages, looking up from the text every few minutes and staring at a blank wall while the appreciation thrums before forcing yourself to reread the paragraph, trying to keep it with you longer?
There’s something delicious about drawing out the end of something good.
Because once that chapter is over, once that book is finished, the person that you were before you read it, and the person that you were reading it for the first time—those people are gone. You can’t go back.
I keep reading for the same reason I keep traveling.
Both things ground me in the now while also give me space to dream up all that’s to come next. They make me hungry to keep going—to keep reading, to keep seeing, to keep learning, to keep growing, to keep being curious and grateful and hungry and humble. To keep chasing that feeling of contented satiation. Reading, like being in a new place, gives me all good things, all the ways for them to thrive.
And this past year, when travel wasn’t really accessible up until the very end of it—hello, I’m writing this from Portugal, more on that later!—books were especially vital to me.
I read more this year, and more widely. I’m grateful for each of these books and the places they’ve taken me. And now, without dilly-dallying anymore, I’ll tell you what I read (and what I especially think you should read), as well as how it compares to years past. (Wait, one more thing: more of my recommendations than ever before are short story collections, which I think speaks to just how much I was in “savor” mode this year. I loved being able to put them away for a bit and pick them up later to find the same voice telling me about an entirely new set of characters.)
Let’s go.
The 17 Best Books I Read This Year
- Sea Wife by Amity Gaige. I sat on a blanket in a park in Austin in January and had to force myself to close the cover on my Kindle so I wouldn’t speed through this book about a family that takes off to sail around Central America too quickly. It’s ingeniously constructed, jumping around in time and place via extra-curricular first-person texts. It’d be good if were just clever. But it’s also beautiful, with its exacting passages about parenthood and Americanness and politics and the pursuit of truth in art. I can’t read this novel for the first time, but you can, and that is my gift to you.
- The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans. Every short story in this collection will fundamentally change the way you see the world around you, whether in the micro—how strangers can make us reflect on our most intimate relationships—or the macro, like what the world would look like if the government owned up to its centuries of racist mistreatment and whether that’d be enough to fix our society. So inventive, so well-written. The best collection I’ve ever read.
- His Only Wife by Peace Adze Medie. This book drops you in Ghana in the marriage ceremony of two people from very different social classes and lets you rip your own way out. The storytelling, pacing, and plot are best-in-class, and I truly cared so much about the characters that it hurt to finish and leave them behind.
- Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden. Phew. Maybe the most painful read I have on this top list, Madden’s memoir is excellent. I loved how she used time as a character, how she painted realistic but still loving pictures of two problematic parents, and how she chronicled her life, leaving room for the things she hasn’t figured out yet. I would buy this again in hard copy just to be able to highlight it.
- Exhalation by Ted Chiang. The second best short-story collection I’ve ever read. Chiang’s fiction hinges much more on invention—time travel, futuristic technology, medical marvels—but uses that sci-fi bent as a way to investigate very quotidian like parent-child relationships, class, and the failure of memory. It’s dense but very worth the read.
- Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. I thought about trying to read this in Spanish, but my language skills aren’t refined enough to appreciate the shifts and turns in prose, particularly the run-on sentences that sprawl over pages and take readers through a murder in a small Mexican town home to oil workers, sex workers, poverty, and machismo. The humanization here is incredible, particularly as Melchor catalogues the crime from the points of view of half a dozen characters, ranging from a preteen girl to a disfigured alcoholic.
- If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan. “Place as character” is the best description I have of this short story collection that centers around the American south, particularly North Carolina. Each story takes readers to different corners of it: restaurants and houses, jobs and dreams, failed relationships and just-starting ones. It feels like a poetry collection, reads like a novel, and is perfect as collection of short stories.
- The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. I’ve preached about this book before, so I’ll just say here that it’s one of the best examples of ensemble fiction (literally) that I’ve ever come across. I love stories that follow a group of friends as they age and this one does that brilliantly.
- Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. Blindingly insightful (including by sometimes being terribly pedestrian) story about a love triangle that’s a little more complicated than the norm: a man, who used to be a trans woman, might have a baby with his cishet girlfriend, and he may need the help of his ex, a trans woman. This novel made me realize I haven’t read much trans literature and clearly need to change that. Incredible passages on womanhood, parenthood, love and its many traps.
- Lot by Bryan Washington. This collection of short and painful stories tells Houston’s story, from the greasy kitchen of a family-run Mexican restaurant to the late-night exploits of the closeted youngest son who feels like he’ll never leave it. An especially great story focuses on the community in a working-class apartment building and how it unravels when an affair comes to light. Washington is incredible.
- Writers & Lovers by Lily King. A novel that felt like a strong of gorgeous little moments that came together to be the rare double-win: a literary novel that’s still enjoyable to read. An elevated yarn.
- Stray by Stephanie Danler. I already knew Danler’s prose was breathtakingly gorgeous (from having read and loved Sweetbitter), but I didn’t expect her to be able to write a family memoir with such exacting detail. She pins down moments and conversations and places in a way I will probably be trying to emulate for the rest of my life.
- A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. A fantasy novel that reads a bit YA, mostly thanks to the fact that it takes place in a high school for magic teens. But the world-building is so rich and the complicated machinations of plot so intense and the slow-build of enemies-to-…something? is so good that it feels adult.
- Here For It, R. Eric Thomas. Hilarious, clever memoir-in-essays that taught twelve new things about structuring nonfiction projects. I read it during my artists’ residency as a kind of homework, but would’ve enjoyed it just as much with no set agenda.
- My Private Property by Mary Ruefle. I also read this chapbook during my residency and felt fully drunk on the power of incredible rhetoric. I don’t know how to describe this book except to say that Ruefle is the kind of creative who deserves altars.
- The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado. A short story collection that’s part magical realism, part sci-fi, part meditative reflection on latinidad and climate change and growing up. Strong, strong recommend.
- Inside Out by Demi Moore. Pockets of beauty delivered in a masterful structure, from flash forwards and backs to a general sense of mounting thematic takeaways that were really well-delivered. I wasn’t crazy about the very last chapter but otherwise thought this was the best famous-person memoir I’ve read in years.
And the other 59…
Presented in chronological order! Not a force ranking! (‘Cause #20 would definitely not be #20 if it was…) - Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
- Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
- Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
- Luster by Raven Leilani
- Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Well Met by Jen DeLuca
- Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
- Simmer Down by Sarah Smith
- Bestiary by K-Ming Chang
- Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid
- Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
- Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
- The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
- Random Family by Adrian LeBlanc
- China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan
- The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
- How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell
- Memorial by Bryan Washington
- Among the Beats and Briars by Ashley Poston
- The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
- The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V. E. Schwab
- Fleabag: The Complete Scriptures by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
- A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
- Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
- How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong
- Untamed by Glennon Doyle
- Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
- These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card
- Spirit Run by Noé Álvarez
- God Shot by Chelsea Bieker
- The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata
- Saving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West
- The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
- This Close to Okay by Leesa Cross-Smith
- Girlhood by Melissa Febos
- The House of Deep Water by Jeni McFarland
- World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
- Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough
- Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
- The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper
- Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro
- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
- Love is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar
- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
- Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
- Los Ingravidos by Valeria Luiselli
- The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
- A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas
- Eat a Peach by David Chang
- The Night Watchman by Louise Erdich
- Real Life by Brandon Taylor
- Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
- A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas
- A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J Maas
By the Numbers
I’ll keep this part shorter than in years past, with just one introductory sentence: the only reason I track any of this is to hold myself accountable to reading widely, because if I’m looking to books to teach me about the world and all the people and places in it, it’s probably better that I’m not cutting out wide swaths of that.
Total books read
By gender
- 27th year: 72% women
- 26th year: 85% women
- 25th year: 73% women
- 24th year: 63% women
- 23rd year: 55% women
By race
Read last’s year’s recap for thoughts on why race is a social construct but I still think it’s worth measuring.
- 27th year: 61% people of color
- 24% Asian authors; 29% Black authors; 7% Latinx authors; 1% Native American authors
- 26th year: 34% people of color
- 17% Asian authors; 8.5% Black authors; 4% Latinx authors; 3% Native American authors
- Did not track for years prior
By type
- 27th year: 32% nonfiction
- 26th year: 22% nonfiction
See you in the stacks? Your local bookstore? The little free library down the street?
The only thing I like better than reading is reading with friends, so…tell me what I’ve convinced you to read and then let’s please set up a date to discuss it, okay?
and also: year 28 has started off strong with satirical fiction about being a Black man in tech and a queer time-traveling romance and a 600-page sci-fi tome and of course some speculative novels. What else should I be reading?
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