Deliberate reading list

Today is December 27, 2019 and I’ve read 14 books to date this year. While I’ve sought to get some range or shift directions with genres and tones through the year, this was the first year I set out with a deliberate goal: do not read any cis white men this year.

After an “ouch, the racism is grossly overt” start in a Christie mystery I found up my block, I went on a pretty good roll for most of the year. I really slowed down in July, August, and September. Work got hectic, and my brain felt overheated which made reading for pleasure or interest a lot harder.

In order:

• Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery
• Michelle Obama’s Becoming
• Ta-Nehisi Coate’s We Were Eight Years in Power
• R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries
• Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
• Emma Straub’s The Vacationers
• Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
• Busy Philipps’s This Will Only Hurt A Little
• Caroline Kepne’s You
• Lili Anolik’s Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
• Carl Sagan’s Contact
• Elizabeth Warren’s This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class
• Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
• Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

14 books done of this year.

Details:

6 fiction
8 nonfiction, mostly essay collections

7 white women
4 women of color
2 black men
1 white man

— k cool (@katelikestoread) December 27, 2019

My only exception to my goal was reading my spouse’s favorite novel, Carl Sagan’s Contact in late summer. With a thoughtful and very moving second half, I shed some tears at the ending and felt it was a good exception and enjoyed discussing it with my partner.

The two titles I didn’t enjoy: A Caribbean Mystery was wrong at the time and only aged worse. My craving for a who-dun-it and the speed were the only things that had me finish it. Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. had weak writing and would have been a better story out loud over drinks (or in conversation as I got to see at Books Are Magic on Smith Street in Brooklyn where I picked it up). The writing left a lot to be wanted, it was more memoir than biography, and the pacing very irregular.

The rest of my books were gifts, if mostly hard on the heart and mind for very good reason. To spare some length and extra rumination, I’ll share two favorites.

I felt privileged reflecting on my life’s experiences and in generosity of Hanif Abdurraqib’s candor in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. He addressed a range of topics for life in the suburbs itching to get away listening to punk music, as well and struggles and successes around suicidality. He’s also a black man in the American midwest. Very contemporary and candid, he moved me effortlessly between many emotions.

Possibly my new favorite work of fiction (I can be quite fluid and emotional around this as a declaration), I am so struck by the intensity, subtlety, and characters in The Incendiaries. I felt very seen as someone who has often sought community and shelter in others, if not through religion. The self-reliance and distrust of one of the protagonists was devastatingly and reassuringly familiar. The ignorance and good intention of the other is too common and easily manipulated in young men. Brief and sharp and all that it needed to be. I plan to revisit this book again. It’s contemporary and I want to keep it top of mind, especially through 2020.

I had a large number of books I haven’t gotten to yet that I hoped to learn from this year, but I still have four days to go if this post helps me become extra ambitious. I hope it’ll be energizing due to this rather than the anxiety that the calendar can bring me when I set goals.

Biggest shifts I noticed? I read essay collections for the first time in… a very long time. I found the sectioning and greater themes bundled together very satisfying and similar to the experience of a great album. I also read less fiction than nonfiction, a real rarity in my reading diet.