I Read 67 Books Last Year. These Were My Top 15.
I went back to ceramics today after a month away. Our studio was closed for August so that our teacher could put in new shelves — long stretches of raw wood twice as tall as I am — and plan our curriculum for this upcoming year and go on vacation in Italy, where each day her family ate lunch with one set of friends and dinner with another and their half-Italian son received “300 gifts a day.”
Before they left, she buzzed her long chestnut hair for the first time in 15 years while her son watched.
“Shall I do your hair, too?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. His eyes followed her fingers, gripping the buzzer, as they grazed his tight blonde curls.
He looked at her when the last curl fell. His lower lip quivered, rippling like a boat’s wake. But his mom was not crying, so he did not cry. She’d taught him how to be beautiful — and now she was teaching him how to be brave.
I wasn’t there for this story. Or the long Italian lunches. But I’ve now spent a year studying ceramics with my teacher. When she moved to a new studio across town, I followed. I’ve met her husband, the Italian, with whom she shares the new space — he is a carpenter; he built the new shelves — and her son, whose nanny brought him by our early-afternoon classes so we could gush over his party trick, ojos de luz, which is when he stares skyward and bats his long eyelashes, blushing on command.
So when she shares scenes of her summer as we massage clay into cabezas de buey and center them on our wheels and pull them into cylinders, I can imagine them. I can feel the breeze on her newly-exposed skull. I can hear the handsaws and mosquitos buzzing on long, sweaty studio afternoons.
I started taking ceramics classes exactly a year ago when my mental health was as bad as it’s ever been.
At that point, I couldn’t get through a two-hour class without crying. The thoughts in my head were swirling and scary and insurmountable, and leaving the house for a few hours was itself a big win. I didn’t have space for other people’s stories. I was trying to wrestle through my own. I didn’t pick up a book for a month, which is the longest I’ve gone without reading since I learned how to do it.
I believe in making meaning through reflective rituals more than I believe in anything. I’ve spun my self around them like a skein of yarn. The time spent writing this annual essay about what I read over the last 12 months are some of my favorite hours each year.
Now, 30, looking back at the last year of my life in books, I realize that I feel safe in stories again.
People say reading is an escape, but it’s never really felt like that to me. Yes, books are ways to get outside of my own head — but with the goal of getting into someone else’s. To truly engage with a book, I need to be open to the unknown, the uncontrollable. I need to believe that I can handle whatever its pages hold.
I can, now. I’ve been able to for a while. I read less books in 29 than I did the year before because I had to relearn how, but it’s never been about the numbers.
It’s about the stories.
I lived a good story this last year, full of challenges and setbacks and magical guides. And a few dozen beautiful plates.
Here, my right hand scraped raw by a new-to-me clay and five new-to-me books stacked on my nightstand, I feel open to and excited for the stories — and the ceramics — to come.
Let’s look at what I’ve read last year, and vitally, what I most recommend you to read, too. Thank you, as always, for spending some time charting life with me through these pages.
The 15 best books I read in year 29
- Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. No book has ever made me feel so viscerally. In this short piece of autofiction, she captures love, obsession, and heartbreak so convincingly that I had to call a small intervention with my writing group to make sure I wasn’t feeling all those things myself.
- The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro. It’s like the Nobel Prize committee knows what they’re doing, or something. Munro is an international treasure. I savored this short story collection over six prose-soaked days; that’s all the self-control I could exercise in the face of her genius renderings of real life, with its commiserate joys and miseries.
- Second Place by Rachel Cusk. I read five of Cusk’s books this year, and two of them are on this list. I will read everything she ever writes. Her Outline trilogy is genius (more on this in a second), but this standalone novel about making art, gendered expectations in a relationship, and how places can hurt and heal us is the one I couldn’t stop thinking about.
- Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. This novel is perfectly woven. Each character — and there are 12 of them, which a lesser novelist could make a mess out of — is rendered richly and convincingly, from a mother-daughter pair testing the limitations of open communication to a bevy of creators navigating how money impacts their art.
- Kudos by Rachel Cusk. This third novel was my favorite of Cusk’s linked trilogy. Each book is a collection of connected conversations navigated by one central character who is not present so much as bobbing up over and over again farther and farther from shore, marking where it gets too deep to touch. This one focuses on a literary festival and features my favorite character of hers, a teenage boy on the autism spectrum who has the most erudite take on religion I’ve ever read.
- Monsters by Kim Fu. This was the first book I finished this year, on a balcony watching darkness settle over the Nile. The setting was a stunner and so were these stories, full of plots that whirled around in patterns that felt familiar but still surprised. Imagine a hangover, but a delicious one. I got to interview Fu for my newsletter Ow But Wow last year and she was a delight.
- First Person by Ali Smith. I love Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. (I read Winter this year and loved it; I started Spring last week and think I’ll love it, too.) But her short stories are freakishly inventive, and they’re what make this list this year. My favorite of this collection is about the sexist Benjamin Button-esque toddler a character accidentally picks up in a grocery store and has to figure out how to re-abandon. Delightful to read, I promise.
- A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio. I read this book, which takes place mostly in a too-crowded apartment in central Italy, mostly on a too-crowded beach in the south of France. Pebbles dug into my back but I couldn’t move because I needed to know what happened to the young girl sent back to the parents who gave her up when something happens to her adoptive mother. You need to know, too.
- The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty. This book won the National Book Award in 2022 and I read it thinking it would thus be good. It was great. The plot is about a loner trying to defend her small Indiana town from developments — or is it about how the systems that act on her, from the American foster care system to a predatory drama teacher to a random act of violence spurred by grief left alone to fester, force her into a defensive position in the first place? The prose alone is worth the read.
- Trust by Hernan Diaz. I read this book for my book club here in Valencia, and it’s ideal for discussing with other readers. Its four linked narratives, all loosely picking apart what it means to be a self-made billionaire, are tight, convincing stories on their own, and are genius all together. It makes you doubt and question and gasp, and it’s one of the most rewarding novels I’ve read this year.
- I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel. “The newest, freshest, most brutal voice I’ve read in ages,” I wrote in March, upon finishing this racing, eerie novel in a single day. Patel articulates thoughts I will not go on the record as having. She turns Instagram and whiteness and farmers’ markets inside out, rips apart their threads, and restitches them into garments that itch and must be worn. Read her.
- Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. I wrote Dederer a message after finishing this book of critical essays on “bad” people who make “good” art (i.e. Picasso, Hemingway, Polanski, Plath) and said this: “Thank you for writing something so sharp and including so much of yourself in it.” It’s that blend of convincing thesis (which, in short, is that there are no “monstrous” artists, only the systems that sustain them) and poignant personal stories that makes this a must-read for me.
- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I’ve never loved Hemingway. Old Man and the Sea was such a drag, and then the womanizing alcoholism on top of that? (Dederer taught me to separate the man from the work, but what if the work is bad?) But then I read this essay collection before I went to Paris for the first time — I am nothing if not prepared to romanticize — and damn, was I wrong. The experiments in form, structure, and voice are rich and rewarding. How he writes about Hadley makes me believe in love. (Sad how that ended, but that’s showbiz, baby.) It’s a writer’s memoir and I loved it. (I’m 50 pages into Death in the Afternoon and it mega-blows, though.)
- Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey by Florence Williams. Some of the best, most accessible science writing I’ve read in years. She does the “I’m going on a quest to figure out this very human experience that my readers will know, too” extremely well. It reminded me of Why Fish Don’t Exist, which I read and loved last year. It also reminded me of The Shapeless Unease, a similar personal-scientific memoir (about insomnia) that I read and didn’t love this year.
- Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill. This is a gorgeously rendered autopsy of a marriage and the revving ghost that jolts it back to life. It’s sad and beautiful. It’s your smartest friend telling you a story you’re riveted to despite knowing how it ends.
And the other 51
As always, there are more books that made me think or that I would return to or that I would recommend to you other than the 15 above, but we’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Want to read about Jesus’s creative wife? About a college professor chaining up her coworker in a botched seduction attempt? About chasing grief through an old French writer’s household accessories? About the way we forget people we used to be in love with one inside joke at a time? The list to come has a tale for you!
(There are, of course, skips below, too, including the book that, in my private book diary, I described as “so thoroughly and completely uninteresting I feel cheated by the blurbs on the back cover.” Unlike my top list, these lists are ordered by when I read them, not how much I liked them. So choose wisely. Or write me first.)
- 1-15 above!
- Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
- Coventry by Rachel Cusk
- Foreverland by Heather Havrilesky
- The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
- The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
- Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
- Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
- Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
- The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
- How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
- Barkskins by Annie Proulx
- South and West by Joan Didion
- Away from Her by Alice Munro
- Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
- Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto
- Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
- Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian
- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatila
- Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
- The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
- Writing by Marguerite Duras
- A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Dominique Barbéris
- Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny
- Winter by Ali Smith
- Outline by Rachel Cusk
- Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
- Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
- Tacky by Rax King
- The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
- Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DK Lawrence
- Sea Change by Gina Chung
- Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux
- Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer
- The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey
- Before You Go by Tommy Butler
- Paris in Love by Eloisa James
- The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
- Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
- Optic Nerve by María Gainza
- Transit by Rachel Cusk
- The Flaw by Antonis Samarakis
- Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King
- Greek Lessons by Han King
- Los Besos by Manual Vilas
- A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
- Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
- The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
- Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
- Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov
By the numbers
I don’t keep track of these numbers during the year, but I like to check on them at the end to see if I’m reading from a wide range of perspectives.
Total books read
By gender
- 29th year: 79% women
- 28th year: 76% women
- 27th year: 72% women
- 26th year: 85% women
- 25th year: 73% women
- 24th year: 63% women
- 23rd year: 55% women
By race
Restated from last year: race is a social construct but for the reason stated in the intro to this section, it is important for me to measure.
- 29th year: 30% people of color
- 28th year: 38% people of color
- 27th year: 61% people of color
- 26th year: 34% people of color
- Did not track for years prior
By type
- 29th year: 31% non-fiction (aka not-novels; poetry, memoirs, essays all count)
- 28th year: 31% not-fiction
- 27th year: 32% not-fiction
- 26th year: 22% not-fiction
- Did not track for years prior
Everything is arbitrary
Jigs was making my birthday cake. Piles of cocoa and powdered sugar slumped like snow drifts against the bowl. “What does starting a new decade feel like?” she asked as she beat the buttercream smooth.
“Arbitrary,” I answered.
Birthdays don’t hold any inherent meaning in themselves. What makes me different on the first day of 30 versus the last day of 29?
This annual essay tradition isn’t based on reason, either. What makes the books I read over the last 12 months a set worth examining? What makes the books I chose as my favorites worthier than the rest, especially when my sample size was far from significant or systematically selected?
Meaning has to be ascribed. To birthdays and to traditions both literary and confectionary. To artistic practices producing wonky bowls and paragraphs alike.
This tradition matters to me because it helps me recognize all I felt and learned and grew in one arbitrary collection of days. I have been a reader as long as I’ve known who I was. Whoever I next become, a reader I will remain.
Love you. See you in a year,
KP