Books

2021 in reading

A year given to constant googling. A year of reading more posts on Baby Center, The Bump, What to Expect and some anxiety-inducing site called KellyMom.com, far more newsletters from Ovia and Babylist, than I did literary things for my own edification and pleasure. Somewhere in there, I started trusting myself more on the parenting front, started realizing my kid (whom What to Expect would call “my chubby cherub” 🤢) is adaptable, and managed to read some actual books.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Philliips
The Undying by Anne Boyer
The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke
We Do This ’Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo
Little Labors by Rivka Galchen
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy

Started in 2021, may finish in 2022? Time will tell…

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright
Coventry by Rachel Cusk
How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

2020 in reading

Abolition, parenthood, life under capitalism.

(Abysmal attention span in 2020 for anything longer than an article. Read some really great articles though!)

Small Animals by Kim Brooks
Severance by Ling Ma
How to Be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss
The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
Cribsheet by Emily Oster
A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk
Prison By Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar & Victoria Law
The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner

2019 in reading

Late capitalism, the attention economy, chipping away at hardened thinking patterns, America.

Read lots of great stuff in 2019. Aiming for more diversity and more fiction in 2020.

There There by Tommy Orange
Jillian by Halle Butler
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
The View From Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior
1919 by Eve Ewing
Educated by Tara Westover
Normal People by Sally Rooney
The New Me by Halle Butler
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Pure by Linda Kay Klein
White Negroes by Lauren M. Jackson
So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
The Government Lake by James Tate
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
On Immunity by Eula Biss
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Catch & Kill by Ronan Farrow
Certain American States by Catherine Lacey

2018 in reading

Dying, anxiety w/r/t childrearing, belonging/estrangement, Italian people. (And only a couple duds!)

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O’Connell
Big World by Mary Miller
Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley
Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
Back Talk by Danielle Lazarin
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
Those Who Leave & Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante