Starting a new tradition this year: the annual listing (with a few short reviews) of books I’ve read in the past year. I’m hoping that this will spread the reading love a little, and keep me accountable to regular reading in my post-MFA/post-student life. Honestly, I had to check my Goodreads account (for the uninitiated: like social media for readers, and essential to anyone with a Kindle who likes to track their yearly reading habits) just to verify which I’d actually read in 2019 and which I read at the end of last year. I do a lot of reading over Christmas break and between semesters, so sometimes one year blends into another. Some of these were required reading for my MFA, which might explain the few oddball selections (Eat The Apple, for example) that I wouldn’t have read by my own choice. Take these not as wholesale recommendations, but as a record of what you can do in a year when you’re working part time, have three teenagers at home, are full-time in a graduate program, and managing to sleep 5-7 hours a night. For me, reading is one of the Big Rocks in my priority jar.
Read and Finished:
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education by Susan Wise Bauer
Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back by Jackie Speier
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas
Eat the Apple by Matt Young
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
On Course: A Week by Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching by James M. Lang
God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss and Renewal in Middle America by Lyz Lenz
On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior
There, There by Tommy Orange
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams
What Does the Bible Really Teach on Homosexuality? by Kevin DeYoung
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Started but Didn’t Finish:
Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage by Dianne D. Glave
Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year by Linda LeGarde Grover
Jesus Feminist: God’s Radical Notion that Women are People, Too by Sarah Bessey
A Couple I’m Probably Forgetting About:
Likely three or four books on budgeting, minimalism, WordPress (…Dude, this building-a-site-from-near-scratch is not easy stuff, when you’re used to the spoon-fed version on the free site, lemme tell you), and blogging.
So, there you have it. 2019 in books, approximate count: 18 – 20 finished, a few not yet. Goal for next year: 30 finished books, now that I have All This Time that I’m Not Writing Response Papers.
*Now, with links!
