2019: My Year in Reading

Goodreads tells me I have read a total of 18,309 pages across 58 books in 2019. Numbers do not tell the whole story, though. There have been years when I have read more, yet less satisfactorily. This year has been a relatively good year in reading, with a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, a number of new writers I will definitely explore further, and a couple of spectacular works I will treasure for a lifetime. So without much ado, here are my top reads of the year, in no particular order:

1. Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines: I adore Jamie’s writing. This one has her doing her trademark lyricism on Scotland, its landscapes and seascapes. The essays are poetry in prose form.
2. Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future. The disaster from the trenches. Horrifying beyond belief.
3. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. We are in a mass extinction period in the earth’s history and Kolbert tells us why and how, in her irony-laced low-key style. Doomsday it is, for sure.
4. Tara Westover’s Educated. Grit, fortitude, courage. A memoir of incredible power.
5. Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. My favourite fiction read of the year. Incredibly geeky, totally original.
6. Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid My Caste: Stories. Stories of caste inequity and life in the margins. Stories that need to be told over and over.
7. Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman. Ephron’s smart writing tackling women and ageing strikes close to the bone.
8. A A Gill’s Lines in the Sand: Collected Journalism. A great introduction to AA Gill and his wit, empathy, wisdom.
9. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. A long, compelling, scary read

There were more notables: Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, his Esquire essays on addiction that seem so ahead of its time; Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries, a romp through ‘80s New York publishing, perfect reading for a celebrity junkie like me; Madeline Miller’s Circe, great characterization and a riveting retelling of a Greek myth; Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, tales from surreal modern day Russia; Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a touching tale set in Chechnya that made me tear up in parts; Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, bite-sized pieces of Proust, a man I will never read in my lifetime; Bakewell’s How to Live, again, digestible pieces of Montaigne, another man I will never read.

There were disappointments too - Ted Chiang’s science fiction (I should never attempt this genre), Ghosh’s Gun Island (even Ghosh can go wrong!), Ian McEwan Machines Like Me, Stella Gibson’s Cold Comfort Farm, Michael Dirda’s Book by Book.

But the good ones more than made up for it.

So, goodbye 2019. Thank you for the words. They made my year.