2019 RECAP
In 2019, I challenged myself to read a book a month.
This resolution got me into the habit of reading daily, and allowed me to explore some options I normally wouldn’t. These are the 12 books I read last year.
- Earn It, Mika Brzezinski + Daniela Pierre-Bravo
- Sucker’s Portfolio, Kurt Vonnegut
- How to Be a Person in the Real World, Heather Havrilesky
- Find Me, André Aciman
- Quiet, Susan Cain
- The Woman in the Window, A.J. Finn
- Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered, Karen Kilgariff + Georgia Hardstark
- Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood
- Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Rework, Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson
- Remote, Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson
- I Might Regret This, Abbi Jacobson
AUG. 2019
Whenever a good movie is coming out that I know I really, really want to see, I’ll often rush to find the book and read it before I have the chance to watch the movie. Although this practice has no doubt completely ruined movie experiences for me (Jack Reacher), it’s still one of my favorite things to do. I did this the second I finished watching the Beautiful Boy trailer with Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carrell. It only took me a few weeks to read Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, a father’s memoir about his son’s addiction to meth, and Tweak, a memoir about his experience with meth, written by Nic Sheff himself.
FEB. 2019
When reading about the Golden State Killer, a serial killer, rapist, and burglar who committed at least 13 murders in California in the 1970s and ’80s (I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – Michelle McNamara) – I often need to immediately follow it up by reading something much less dark. For example, a book on how to work more efficiently and succeed in business (Rework – Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson), or an autobiographical story of a woman taking a solo trip around the country (I Might Regret This – Abbi Jacobson).
“I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.”
Michelle McNamara, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
DEC. 2018
Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose was recommended to me by a friend. The name comes from an entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary. This collection of essays is both intensely intimate and extremely observant. It’s one of those books where, every so often, I had to stop and really think about the words in front of me. Here is an excerpt from the Too Much:
“There’s a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about one’s name, or one’s country of so-called origin, or to explain the way you look is generationally and geographically worlds apart from where you were born. Since childhood, there’s been this assumption that I owe strangers an answer when they inquire about matters I myself struggle to have words for, let alone understand.”
Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood
