Best Books I Read in 2019
2019 has, both in my opinion and the opinions of many, many lists, been an amazing year for movies, tv, books, podcasts, and music. While I struggled a bit last year to come up with my list(s), this year there is just way too much. I have my own lists of everything else, but I usually feel bombarded by recommendations for movies and tv. TOO MUCH TO WATCH. And don’t even get me started on decade lists. I can’t even begin to put that one together.
So here’s my 2019 list of only books; my first love. Sometimes I feel as if book lists don’t get shared often enough unless I’m reading, like, Entertainment Weekly or The New York Times. Even in my English-y circle. Maybe it’s because I’m out of academia now, I don’t know.
And sometimes I don’t want to know what the best books are that came out this year on those magazine lists; I want to know what books changed the people I know, and why they picked up those titles regardless of whether they were flying off the bestseller list.
Anyway, here is a list of the top ten books I read this year, in the order I read them, but not in an order of favorites. These books left me ruminating for weeks, and many I went back to in order to re-read my highlights or look at certain chapters again. As usual with me, it’s split five and five fiction/nonfiction and an array of genres, so hopefully you can find something you’ll love.
And please — let’s talk about them. I need more convos about books in 2020.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing [nonfiction; 2017]
I read this book for a class I took last year on environmental literature, and let me tell you…some of the concepts discussed in this book, or maybe just extrapolated on in my class, were things I had never heard of or considered before. But that’s a big point of reading, right? I often feel just totally in awe when I read, wanting to go around and shout to people “DID YOU KNOW THIS?” Anyway, this book is an anthropological ethnography about the global commodity chain of the matsutake mushroom. This mushroom only grows in human-disturbed forests; in other words, life is formed from ruin. The book is written non-linearly and more centered around concepts like societal precarity, product/output scalability, globalization, and “what a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet.” These all may sound a bit metaphorical or too academic, but I’d encourage you to give it a chance, because Tsing’s ability to turn commerce and ecology into a tale of environmental renewal is remarkably original and important to our lives today.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler [fiction, 1993]
This is another book I read for environmental lit, but fiction. I went on a date once where a guy said he didn’t read fiction because it “wasn’t applicable to real life.” I almost gasped. I should’ve walked out right then and there. Every piece of fiction I read for this class was a reflection of history, society, people, and anxieties about the future. Parable of the Sower is a classic novel from the incredible science fiction writer Octavia Butler. I was excited to read this because I had always wanted to, but be warned: it’s pretty bleak. I really love science fiction and dystopia, but sometimes it’s hard when this fictionalized world of 2024 is so similar to our own, or to the future ours is most likely headed. As an added layer, Butler’s voice is unique in the world of science fiction, as a black woman who brings her experience of racial power struggles to a future of limited resources; no doubt very real issues today as environmental racism becomes more and more prevalent. Even though the world of our narrator, Lauren, is cynical, its biblical allegory alludes to a world that’s not prophecy, but cautionary tale.
Borne by Jeff Vandermeer [fiction, 2017]
This book is weird. I’ll just start there. I also read this one for my environmental literature class. (Can you tell I was really into this class??) Whereas Parable of the Sower was a world of technology-less survival and bucolic renewal, Borne is a much more technology- and alien-heavy future dystopia. Don’t let that deter you, though, if it’s not your thing. Like the mushrooms in The Mushroom at the Edge of the World, this novel uses “lesser” things (in Borne’s case, a pet alien) to alter our perception of what counts as a “being” and how we categorize these “beings” (as in people, sentient and non-sentient things, the environment, etc.) and the world around us. The veil of a desolate resource-deprived future masks a novel that, at its core, is incredibly compassionate for life. If you read it, power through the first confusing few chapters, which plunges you head-first into an unfamiliar future. It’ll be worth it, I promise.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead [fiction, 2016]
I’ve been hearing about this novel for years, so I picked it up when I came across it at Half-Price Books. Reading it at my house, in the Cincinnati valley, once a major Underground Railroad network, and having once worked at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, was so strange. It made that history feel less escapable; like when I put the book down it didn’t just go away. Because of course it doesn’t, even as a person who history has been kind to. This novel is one of alternate history, where the Underground Railroad is actually an underground railroad. The novel follows Cora and her escape on this network; it has been praised for its blend of realism, allegory, violence, drama, myth, and commentary on contemporary America. It reminds me of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a novel of contemporary refugees escaping through doorways around the world. The magical realism of both novels doesn’t diminish the hardship of both refugee and slave, but rather guides us episodically through lives disrupted and points to how subtle shifts in reality reinterpret co-opted stories.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain [nonfiction, 2000]
I previously wrote about this book in this blog post, if you want to take a look. The tl;dr version is this: I came to Kitchen Confidential for the Bourdain travel persona that I grew up with. He was more of an eater-of-weird-things to me than a chef-chef. But I came away with a wholly shocking, wonderful, and mesmerizing picture of a realist who really loved food, and really loved life. Like Bourdain’s shows, primarily the ones I grew up on (No Reservations and Parts Unknown), his meditations are about much more than food. I’m glad I finally got to read his words for myself. I’m also happy that my amateurish cooking skills and travel bug live on, and I owe a small part of that to him. When the world feels like it’s crumbling, I can now pull out some ingredients and have everything fall back into place.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat [nonfiction, 2017]
I wanted to read this book because I watched the Netflix series of the same name earlier this year, and while it was an awesome travel show with great cooking tips, I wanted more specifics about the fundamentals of these four elements I’d only get in book-form. This book really changed the way I approach cooking by giving me a foundational knowledge of food science and how salt, fat, acid, and heat make great cooking what it is. Even if you don’t like to cook, I would HIGHLY recommend this book (or even just the Netflix show) for the wealth of info but also for the illustrations, stories, and Samin’s warm sense of humor.
Beginner’s Pluck by Liz Bohannon [nonfiction, 2019]
Almost five years ago, I saw Liz Bohannon speak at Ohio State about how to live a life of purpose and impact. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Sseko Designs, a global fashion brand that employs and empowers female students in Uganda to go to college. Most of the ideas she spoke about at OSU are encapsulated in this book’s 14 points, woven in between her crazy life story. I find Liz and this book to be a really inspiring take on “owning your average” and actually doing the things you say you care about. It’s a really great book for me now, as a “beginner” to my career and the life I want to build for myself, but it’s so true for anyone who may feel a bit purposeless — because finding our “passion” is a lie we’ve been fed, people!
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood [fiction, 2019]
This sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale is 34 years in the making, and tackles some of the on-brand issues we’re dealing with today that Atwood foreshadowed decades ago — theocracy to stir up political bases, climate-induced fertility decline, exploitation of women during wartime, extremism in many forms, etc. The plot tackles the next generation of Gileadans as this alternate version of America starts to disintegrate. Atwood said she wanted to explore how dictatorships crumble, seeing it through from its start in The Handmaid’s Tale. She said in a 2017 essay for The New York Times, “Change could also be as fast as lightning. ‘It can’t happen here’ could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.” Although it was nice to have imagined a future to the open-ended last chapter of The Handmaid’s Tale, the plot in The Testaments ties up a lot of loose ends and gives me hope that acts of witness will overcome a life like these handmaids.
Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow [nonfiction, 2019]
I listened to this on audiobook (the first time ever) because everyone on Twitter was saying how good Ronan Farrow is at narrating his own book. He does all kinds of good accents, which isn’t the point, but for sure adds to the drama. This book reads like a thriller, so it’s hard to believe that this is a true story of how Farrow came to break his Harvey Weinstein article in The New Yorker in 2017. For all the depressing, scary stuff about the lengths predators and average people alike go to cover up scandal, there is so much hope — from people who speak up about injustice no matter the personal cost. I would recommend both the book (to highlight) and the audiobook (to hear Farrow tell his own account and hear actual audio of Weinstein being a predator), which you will finish in, like, two days.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and David Gibbons [fiction/graphic novel, 1986-87]
My only experience with graphic novels before this one was Alan Moore’s other famous comic, V for Vendetta, which I read snippets of for my British Fantasy Literature class in London in 2018. My dad convinced me to read it because he was trying to get me to watch the new show Watchmen on HBO, which takes place 34 years after the events of the original story. I’m so glad I read this instead of just watch the 2009 movie version, because the nuance and total mind-fuckery of this graphic novel is WORTH IT. If you’ve never read a graphic novel before, this is pretty much widely considered the best place to start as it’s the greatest graphic novel of all time and one of the greatest novels in general of the last century. I may start a re-read soon, since the details and structure, rather than the plot, are the real stars of this book — you’ll want to go back to see what you missed.
