Favorites are bolded. Authors are included for the harder-to-Google books.
1/5 Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin
1/14 Uncanny Valley
1/21 By Night in Chile
1/27 Young China
2/8 A Baker’s Year
2/17 Girl, Woman, Other
2/24 Trust Exercise
2/26 Draft No. 4
3/16 Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
3/18 Palaces for the People
3/24 Chemistry, Weike Wang
4/11 Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
4/19 Song of Achilles
5/1 Moby Dick
5/9 American War
5/16 How to Relax, Thich Nhat Hahn
5/26 Carry On, Jeeves
5/29 Inner Game of Tennis (wrote about it here)
5/31 Days of Distraction
6/8 The Glass Hotel
6/8 Siddhartha
6/21 Writing Down the Bones
7/11 Invisible Man
7/12 The Fifth Season
7/28 Department of Speculation
8/1 Mama Day
8/10 American Spy
8/14 The Dance of Intimacy
8/19 And Then We Grew Up
8/22 Tomorrow in the Battle Think of Me
8/29 Utopia Avenue
8/31 Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One
9/6 Severance, Ling Ma
9/7 Last Night in Nuuk
9/13 Summer, Ali Smith
9/18 No Hard Feelings
9/21 Big Friendship
9/30 News of the World
10/3 Burnout, Anne Helen Peterson
10/9 Make Time
10/9 China in 10 Words
10/12 An Unnecessary Woman
10/14 Mating in Captivity
10/17 First, Break All the Rules
10/18 Intimations
10/24 Disappearing Earth
11/1 The Guest Cat
11/3 The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp
11/7 China Dream
11/8 Weather, Jenny Offill
11/13 Winesburg, Ohio
11/25 Made to Stick
11/25 The Practice, Seth Godin
11/25 The Mezzanine
11/29 Drive Your Plow
12/3/20 How to Decide, Annie Duke
12/13 The Art of Asking
12/19 The Jakarta Method
12/26 Hamnet
perspective check!
Of these 59 books…
- 58% were by women
- 36% were by POC [having this as a binary is way too blunt, but it gives me a rough sense]
- 19% were published 20+ years ago
other stats
- 58% were fiction, of which 70% were for book clubs.
- Book club reading accounted for 41% of my overall reading last year
- Of the nonfiction books, my biggest categories were creativity/writing (6), relationships (4), and work (4).
You can also read 2019’s roundup, energetically assembled before the pandemic:
Carrie Tian 