I’ve been keeping track of every book I read for the last four years. Over half of the books I read were for a review site that I volunteer at under a pseudonym, so I omitted their titles from this post for privacy reasons.
The number of books I read overall was somewhat smaller than usual. I started plenty of them, but I didn’t finish as many as I normally do.
The number of biographies I read increased dramatically. It’s fascinating to read about how other people lived their lives. I was especially interested in how they handled failure and other life challenges. You can learn a lot about someone by seeing how they fixed problems in their lives that seemed insurmountable.
My poetry numbers were down. I normally love this genre, but I had a lot of trouble finding good stuff to read in it this year.
Everything else seemed to stay roughly even. They vary a little every year, of course, but they felt pretty constant to me.
Here is the final list:
Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs
“A Girl from Yamhill” by Beverly Cleary
“Sins of the Family” by Felicity Davis
“Balls: It Takes Some to Get Some” by Chris Edwards
“Hidden Lives” by Margaret Forster
“Beautiful Child” by Tory Hayden
“Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things” by Jenny Lawson
“A Child Called Hope” by Mia Marconi
“Empty Hands” by Sister Abigail Ntleko
“Mary Janeway” by Mary Pettit
“Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence” by Doris Pilkington
“Writing My Wrongs” by Shaka Senghor
“Unsweetined” by Jody Sweetin
“The Game Changer: A Memoir of Disruptive Love” by Franklin Veaux
“Raising Ryland” by Hillary Whittington
“A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles” by Mary Elizabeth Williams
History
“The Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson
“The Day the World Came to Town” by Jim Defede
“How to Be a Victorian” by Ruth Goodman
“The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson” by Gregory Klages
“The Indifference of Tumbleweed” by Rebecca Tope
Mainstream Fiction
“Midden-rammers” by John Bart
“Christmas Rose” by Marjorie Farrell
“My Notorious Life: A Novel” by Kate Manning
“I Will Send Rain” by Rae Meadows
“Noah’s Child” by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Poetry
“Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” by T.S. Eliot
Science Fiction and Fantasy
“MaddAdamm” by by Margaret Atwood
“Troll Bridge” by Neil Gaiman
“Woman on the Edge of Time” by Marge Piercy
“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling
“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” by J.K. Rowling
“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” by J.K. Rowling
“The Martian: A Novel” by Andy Weir
Science and Medicine
“Too Much of a Good Thing” by Lee Goldman
“A Life Everlasting” by Sarah Gray
“The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health” by David R. Montgomery
“How to Clone a Mammoth” by Beth Shapiro
“Push Back” by Amy Tuteur
Sociology and Psychology
“Our Iceberg is Melting” by John Kotter
“Fast Food” by Andrew F. Smith
“Hair” by Kurt Stenn
“The Novia Scotia Home for Coloured Children” by Wanda Taylor
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