In 2019, I ended up finishing just forty-eight books for the year. 2019 was a revelation for my personal life and in many other ways, so there was a lot going on. Work was busy at my day job. Creatively, I focused on converting my novel to a novella, which then topped the shortlist honors for a book prize (and which I am now turning back into a full novel again). I traveled. I fell in love. I had failures and made terrible mistakes. I had successes and felt incredibly proud of myself. I moved into a new house. I got rid of half of my book collection. I broke and mended several times. It was a wild, wild year. Through it all, I was reading.
***2019***
Animal Bride by Sara Quinn Rivara
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton
A Mind of Your Own by Dr. Kelly Brogan
Inland by Tea Obreht
Eating the Sun by Ella Frances Sanders
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
The Electric Woman by Tessa Fontaine
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell*
All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven
The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo
Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Periodic Companions by Laynie Browne
Landline by Rainbow Rowell
Flash Count Diary by Darcey Steinke
The Skinned Bird by Chelsea Biondolillo
Witches, Sluts, Feminists by Kristen Sollee
Mating in Captivity by Ester Perel
I’m Happy Just to Be Here by Janelle Hanchett
Figuring by Maria Popova
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Ginger Bread by Helen Oyeyemi
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver*
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Census by Jesse Ball
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes*
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Uprooted by Naomi Novik*
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Just Kids* by Patti Smith
Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence*
Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood*
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson*
Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott*
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson*
My Top Books of 2019 (in no particular order)
Flash Count Diary by Darcey Steinke
Figuring by Maria Popova
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Animal Bride by Sara Quinn Rivara
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
The Skinned Bird by Chelsea Biondolillo
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
As always, the top ten list is a tough one to choose because my reading is so dependent on mood and this changes regularly. But, each of these stood out to me in very real ways. I like that my top ten were all women, but that wasn’t something I was conscious of as I chose them. Darcey Steinke was my writing advisor in my MFA program, but I loved the book for its brilliance, not for knowing her. I read and re-read Chelsea Biondolillo’s book at least three times and will likely read it again (ditto with Animal Bride by Sara Quinn Rivara—which is poetry), so use that information as you will.
I am already two books deep and on my third in this second full week of 2020, but I have a lot of very specific writing targets for my own book this year, so it might be another “shorter” reading list. As always, follow me on IG at @bookandbird if you want to see more about what I am reading and creating. I hope you all have a beautiful, bookish 2020!
