@doodlyroses

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions (my philosophy being that if you want to improve something about yourself, you just start doing it no matter what day it is) but one of my sort-of goals this year was to write more and to publish maybe one blog post a month.

There are twelve months in a year. I ended up publishing…two posts. The first one was mostly written back in December 2018 so I don’t know if it even counts.

I recently logged into my blog dashboard for the first time in months and was faced with this list of recent drafts, the dates for which at least back up the fact that I tried.

(To be fair, I did record and release an EP this year, so.)

One 2019 goal that I did achieve was my resolution to read 52 new books—one for each week of the year. I pretty much stopped reading once mid-November hit (the end-of-year struggle is REAL) and I still got to 64.

I love reading other people’s book lists, so I thought I would post mine. A couple of notes:

1. This is only a list of the new books in English I read this year. I don’t log re-reads of books I’ve already read, and I also don’t count books I’ve read in other languages.
2. I only log books I’ve finished. There were a handful of books I started and disliked so much I just stopped reading them—they’re not counted in my total.
3. I’ve marked standout books with the star emoji (⭐️). A standout book, to me, is a book that I would want to own in order to read it again and again, as well as one I would recommend wholeheartedly to other people. If you’re looking for book recommendations here, start with the standouts.
4. There are a few books I read this year that I truly hated, and I’ve opted not to share them here, because 1) taste is subjective and I don’t want to discourage people from reading a book they might otherwise enjoy and 2) I don’t want the authors to go all Sarah Dessen on me.
5. This year, I started writing on Patreon, and every week I publish a post in which, among other things, I recommend a book of the week with a short summary of the themes and what I got out of it. Links on the list go to the corresponding Patreon post.

The New Books I Read in 2019

1. Sayako Murata, Convenience Store Woman
2. Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer ⭐️
3. Min Jin Lee, Pachinko ⭐️
4. R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries
5. Mary Beard, Women and Power
6. Leila Slimani, Lullaby
7. Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
8. Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires ⭐️
9. Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow ⭐️
10. [REDACTED] ❌
11. Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island ⭐️
12. Catherine Chung, Forgotten Country
13. Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
14. Anna Burns, Milkman
15. Lisa Ko, The Leavers
16. David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
17. Elif Batuman, The Idiot
18. Ling Ma, Severance ⭐️
19. Anissa Gray, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls
20. Leila Slimani, Adele
21. Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread
22. Bryan Washington, Lot
23. Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift
24. Laila Lalami, The Other Americans ⭐️
25. Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
26. Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry
27. Angie Kim, Miracle Creek ⭐️
28. Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers ⭐️
29. Helen Hoang, The Bride Test
30. Sally Rooney, Normal People ⭐️
31. Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
32. Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 
33. Catherine Chung, The Tenth Muse ⭐️
34. Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success
35. Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin
36. Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue
37. Alexander Chee, The Queen of the Night
38. Elana K. Arnold, Damsel
39. David Sedaris, Calypso
40. Sue Burke, Semiosis
41. [REDACTED] ❌
42. [REDACTED] ❌
43. Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time
44. Lisa Rowe Fraustino, I Walk in Dread (Dear America)
45. Jasmine Guillory, The Wedding Party
46. Kristiana Gregory, Cannons at Dawn (Dear America)
47. Kirby Larson, The Fences Between Us (Dear America) ⭐️
48. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others ⭐️
49. Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic ⭐️
50. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
51. Mira T. Lee, Everything Here is Beautiful
52. Amitava Kumar, Immigrant, Montana
53. Madeline Miller, Circe
54. Meg Jay, The Defining Decade
55. Yangsze Choo, Night Tiger
56. Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends
57. Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police
58. Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber ⭐️
59. Chanel Miller, Know My Name ⭐️
60. Sherry Thomas, A Study in Scarlet Women
61. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet ⭐️
62. Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles ⭐️
63. Amor Towles, Rules of Civility
64. Ali Wong, Dear Girls ⭐️

Yes, I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice before this year, and yes I got on a little of a Dear America kick in the 40s. I contain multitudes, okay??

My goal for 2020 is to read more new books than I read in 2019. I’m looking forward to mining other people’s 2019 reading lists for recommendations; feel free to plunder (and potentially judge) mine. Happy reading!