My Year in Reading — 2018
2 min readJan 11, 2019
The books I read + loved in 2018.
Note: Books listed are not stack-ranked within their categories.
Top five!
- Pachinko…Min Jin Lee
- Motherhood…Sheila Heti
- Heart Berries…Terese Marie Mailhot
- The Idiot…Elif Batuman
- Tonight I’m Someone Else…Chelsea Hodson
Loved these ones IMMENSELY also
- 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write…Sarah Ruhl
- The Book of Mutter…Kate Zambreno
- Jell-O girls…Allie Rowbottom
- Things Are What You Make of Them…Adam J. Kurtz
- Heavy…Kiese Laymon
- Chasing Old Haunts…Jessie Knoles
- The Sarah Book…Scott McClanahan
- In Their Faces A Landmark…McSweeney’s
- Her Body and Other Stories…Carmen Maria Machado
- madness…sam sax
- Sister Love: The Letters Of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989
- Heroines…Kate Zambreno
- My Body is a Book of Rules…Elissa Washuta
- Gilead…Marilynne Robinson
- Meanwhile in San Francisco…Wendy Macnaughton
- Whiskey & Ribbons…Leesa Cross-Smith
- Open Me…Lisa Locascio
- Outline…Rachel Cusk
- When Women Were Birds…Terry Tempest Williams
- The Self Unstable…Elisa Gabbert
- The Power…Naomi Alderman
- The Pisces…Melissa Broder
- Don’t Call Us Dead…Danez Smith
- Sick: A Memoir….Porochista Khakpour
- Ritual in Blue…Caroline Kessler
- How to Write An Autobiographical Novel…Alexander Chee
- The Days of Abandonment…Elena Ferrante
- The Vegetarian…Han Kang
- The Selfishness of Others…Kristin Dombek
Learned something(s) important from these regarding craft or content
- The Most Good You Can Do…Peter Singer
- The Body Keeps the Score…Bessel van der Kolk
- The Seas…Samantha Hunt
- How to Sit…Tyrese Coleman
- Real Artists Have Day Jobs…Sarah Benincasa
- Your Art Will Save Your Life…Beth Pickens
- Reality Hunger…David Shields
- I Was Supposed to Protect You From All This…Nadja Spiegelman
- Happiness: A Memoir…Heather Harpham
- No One Tells You This…Glynnis MacNicol
- The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self…Jean Shinoda Bolen
- The Verbally Abusive Relationship…Patricia Evans
- Monsterhuman…Kjersti Skomsvold
- In the Blink of an Eye…Walter Murch
- Maps Are Lines We Draw…Allison Coffelt
- This Will Be My Undoing…Morgan Jerkins
- Anatomy of the Spirit…Caroline Myss
- When Breath Becomes Air…Paul Kalanithi
- Animals Eat Each Other…Elle Nash
- The Seven Stages of Money Maturity…George Kinder
Would read again if I could go back in time and re-decide
- Imagine Wanting Only This…Kristen Radtke
- Plainwater…Anne Carson
- [insert boy]…Danez Smith
- Homesick for Another World…Ottessa Moshfegh
- Rosalie lightning…Tom Hart
- Green Girl…Kate Zambreno
- A Manual for Cleaning Women…Lucia Berlin
Reread some favorites from the past & they’re still good
- The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up…Marie Kondo
- An Interrupted Life…Etty Hillesum
- The Amber Spyglass…Phillip Pullman
- On Becoming an Alchemist…Catherine MacCoun