My 2018 Year in Reading

My original 2018 goal was 48 books, which I reached by May. In the fall, I made a stretch goal of 150 books, which I also reached in December. 84% of my books were by women, 50% were by POC authors and 28% were by LGBTQ authors, including 4 books by non-binary authors and 5 by trans authors.

I really don’t like poetry by straight men. I tend to gravitate toward confessional poetry by women of color and/or queer people.

I still don’t love most short story collections, but I do tend to prefer ones that have a bit of magical realism or fabulism about them. (Actually I already knew this, but I somehow feel obligated to keep trying to read outside this box).

I really love fragmented memoirs and memoirs that play with form.

I was much more likely to give up on a book if I borrowed it from the library than if I bought and paid for it. I didn’t start borrowing from the library until August, so I completed almost everything I started before that time. This is probably why there is only 1 star book after August and two 2 star books after that time (and one I probably would’ve given up on if I hadn’t read the other 3 in the series).

Once again, Sally Rooney reigned supreme in my heart. I got a copy of Normal People shipped from the U.K. (it comes out in the U.S. in the spring) and read the book in just a couple of days. Objectively this book probably is better than Conversations with Friends, and I think more people will appreciate it, but Conversations with Friends is still one of my favorite books ever. That said, I still absolutely loved this book. I pre-ordered Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon on the recommendation of Brandon Taylor and was not disappointed in this book delving into adultery, religion, and marriage. Rounding out my top three was the very strange, very hypnotic White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. I can’t believe it took me this long to read her work, but I’m looking forward to more.

I finally read a Toni Morrison novel (Beloved) and adored it. I think all this time I was worried I wouldn’t “get” her work and I was afraid to find out, but I’m glad I finally took the plunge. The writing is stunning, especially the stream-of-consciousness section in Chapter II beginning with the mother’s perspective (“Beloved, she my daughter. She mine.”) and ending with Beloved’s (“I am Beloved and she is mine.”)

Also garnering 5 stars from me were a couple of smutty (lol) novels: Monsieur by Emma Becker and The Mirror in the Well by Micheline Aharonian Marcom.

Other novels I really enjoyed this year and highly recommend include Zoey Leigh Peterson’s Next Year for Sure, Naima Coster’s Halsey Street, Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble, and SJ Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies.

Also noteworthy, to keep up with the HBO series, I finally started the Neapolitan novels and will continue them in 2019.

Another year of not loving short stories as much as I wish I did. But Fen by Daisy Johnson and What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah were standouts for me. I also read Carole Maso’s Aureole, which did not feel like a short story in the traditional sense but was filled with beautiful prose. I would also recommend How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs.

Almost all of the nonfiction I read this year was memoir, and I don’t regret it a bit! Absolutely loved Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, which has received a lot of much deserved praise this year. I also loved Elissa Washuta’s My Body Is a Book of Rules. Washuta tells her story via SVU dialogue, footnotes, a Match.com profile, a bibliography, diary entries, and more. Rounding out my favorite memoirs this year: Katherine Angel’s Unmastered (about desire), Joseph Osmundson’s Inside/Out (about a breakup), Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians (about grief), and Toni Bentley’s The Surrender (about #buttsecks).

Other interesting memoirs and narrative nonfiction that I would recommend include Myriam Gurba’s Mean, Leah Deterich’s Vanishing Twins, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, and Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men.

Thankfully, the rest of my year in YA was fine. I continued Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns series, and though I still wish she had stuck with doing a trilogy, I’ve loved the books nevertheless and can’t wait to read the conclusion. Like everyone else I also read The Poet X and the hype is well-earned! I also picked up Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones. I enjoyed the first one a lot (and it has a fantastic opening), but it was really the second in the duology (Shadowsong) that wrecked me in the best possible way and is my second favorite book on the year. I actually predicted the ending early on in the first book, and yet I was still sobbing by the end thanks to the strength of Jae-Jones’s writing.

And a few more highly recommended in the 4–4.5 range: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary People, Yesika Salgado’s Corazón, Nichole Perkins’s Lilith but Dark, Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal, Chase Berggrun’s RED and Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us.

My reading goal for next year is 120 books. Poetry made up nearly half of my books this year, but because I am trying to save money by using the library, my poetry reading is likely to suffer. NYPL doesn’t carry as much as I would like, and when they do, they’re often in-library use only. Also, I would like poetry to make up a smaller percentage of my read books and go back to reading more prose (70/30 ratio is the goal).

Some 2019 releases I’m looking forward to

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian
Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Soft Science by Franny Choi
Careen by Grace Shuyi Liew
Disintegrate/Dissociate by Arielle Twist
Wilder Girls by Rory Power
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Adele by Leila Slimani
Willa & Hesper by Amy Feltman

That said, The Millions’s 2019 Most Anticipated Books hasn’t come out yet, so who knows what books I’ll be reading next year!

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