It’s mid-February which means I’m overdue for my year-in-books post. It’s been about five years now since I started keeping track of each book I read, after a friend recommended GoodReads to me. This year, instead of just keeping a list of titles, I had a goal to practice writing about what I’m reading. I set out to write something, at least one sentence, about each book I read in 2018, and now have a google doc 30+ pages long with notes, observations, etc. I do think it helped with remembering the books I read; I can read a bit manically at times, and this practice served to counter and calm that a bit.

Another reading goal for last year was to read more poetry, and serendipitously an acquaintance introduced me to Pome*– a daily newsletter by Matthew Ogle that contains just one poem in your inbox, at the start of each day. (Which helped me to read many more poems!)

And finally: for the first time in my (adult) life, I read as many books written by women as by men, and they surely did not disappoint me. So crucial, so obvious. I feel like I’m catching up, stocking up on women’s voices to return to and recommend and reference moving forward.

The list of books I read in 2018 is below, with some that I particularly enjoyed and learned from in bold. (Past reading lists here: 2017, 2016, 2015)

• Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
• Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler
• Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe, Dawn Tripp
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
• The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine, Sue Monk Kidd
• The Complete Poems of Sappho, translated by Willis Barnstone
• Autumn, Ali Smith
• Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, Anne Lamott
• Winter, Ali Smith
• Salt, Nayyirah Waheed
• The Lotus-Born: The Life Story of Padmasambhava, Yeshe Tsogyal
• The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion, Elle Luna
• Your Story is Your Power: Free Your Feminine Voice, Elle Luna and Susie Herrick
• The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough
• The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles
• Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
• The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber
• Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, Heather Ann Thompson
• Torch, Cheryl Strayed
• Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics, Carol Lee Flinders
• Why Not Me?, Mindy Kaling
• American War, Omar El Akkad
• At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst, Carol Lee Flinders
• On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, Adrienne Rich
• The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Eknath Easwaran
• What is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything, Rob Bell
• Poems by Emily Dickinson (Series One), Emily Dickinson
• The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse: A Book for Creators, Michael Gungor
• Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story, Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor
• Love Poems, Pablo Neruda
• Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, Lawrence Weschler
• The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen: Opening Your Eyes to Wonder, Lisa Gungor
• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed
• A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind, Siri Hustvedt
• The Tibetan Buddhism Reader, edited by Reginald A. Ray
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver
• Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science, Mike McHargue
• Tibetan Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction, Matthew T. Kapstein
• Swing Time, Zadie Smith
• Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
• A Celebration of Sex, Douglas E. Rosenau
• Interior States: Essays, Meghan O’Gieblyn
• Sara Berman’s Closet, Maira Kalman and Alex Kalman
• Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay
• The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, Eric Foner
• So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo
• Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life, Emily Sagoski
• I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown
• There There, Tommy Orange
• Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, Mary Oliver
• How to Not Always Be Working: A Toolkit for Creativity and Radical Self-Care, Marlee Grace
• New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World–and How to Make It Work for You, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
• Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Lauren F. Winner
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
• Money Diaries: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Your Finances… And Everyone Else’s, Lindsey Stanberry
• Having Wings: Poems for Advent, edited by Amy Bornman
• Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

 

*now on hiatus! Another good poem-a-day option: The Slowdown podcast with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith