2019 End Of The Year Book Summary

A year ago, I made a New Year’s Resolution to read a book a week for 2019. I started out with a resigned notion that this “one-book-a-week” resolution was likely to peter out after two, three weeks tops. But here we are, at the start of 2020, with fifty-two books read. I definitely wasn’t always on top of my reading and missed a couple weeks, but to my credit, I made up for it by cramming 6 books into the final week of 2019. I don’t know if I can definitively say I enjoyed myself through and through, but this was undoubtedly an eye-opening experience.  

 From books about snow as a scientific and cultural phenomenon (23) to memoirs of a child soldier who fought in a civil war (12), these fifty-two books spanned a wide range of genres, lengths, and styles. Personally, among these books, I particularly enjoyed the short story collections I read (5, 7, 13, 16, 27, 40, 41, 43) as well as works of investigative journalism that had a focus on the AIDs crisis across the world (1, 24). My favourite author was by far Joan Didion–her essays never once failed to demonstrate her ability as a brilliant writer with a fairly-deserved position as an icon in the American literary canon. I’ve further italicized books that I strongly recommend. 

We’re at the finish line; I’ve made it through– but I’m also not likely to try this again in 2020. This is not for the fact that reading is almost always time-consuming and sometimes tedious, but rather because reading a book a week left me little time to fully appreciate (or even understand) many of them. I felt that I wasn’t giving many books their due justice and it’s safe to say that I have a significant amount of books that I plan to revisit in 2020. I’ve attached the list of books I read below. 

These books aren’t in ranked order, it’s simply in the order in which I read them 

  1. After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Douglas Foster, 2012)

  2. The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Heather Morris, 2018)

  3. Becoming  (Michelle Obama, 2018)

  4. What If It's Us (Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli, 2018)

  5. Stranger than Fiction: True Stories (Chuck Palahniuk, 2004)

  6. Educated: A Memoir (Tara Westover, 2018)

  7. A Guide to Being Born: Stories (Ramona Ausubel, 2013)

  8. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Bryan Stevenson, 2014)

  9. Rubyfruit Jungle  (Rita Mae Brown, 1973)

  10. Where the Crawdads Sing  (Delia Owens, 2018)

  11. Gilead  (Marilynne Robinson, 2005)

  12. A Long Way Gone : Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Ishmael Beah, 2007)

  13. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Haruki Murakami, 2006)

  14. The Happiness Hypothesis (Jonathan Haidt, 2006)

  15. When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi, 2016)

  16. Florida (Lauren Groff, 2018)

  17. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (Phil Knight, 2016)

  18. Hillbilly Elegy  (J. D. Vance, 2016)

  19. Hey Kiddo (Jarrett J. Krosoczka, 2018)

  20. I am Malala (Christina Lamb and Malala Yousafzai, 2013)

  21. Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2013)

  22. The Serengeti Rules (Sean B. Carroll, 2016)

  23. Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration (Giles Whittell, 2018)

  24. And the Band Played On (Randy Shilts, 2007) 

  25. Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future (James Delingpole, 2012)

  26. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (Alan Lightman, 2018)

  27. The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (Anthony Marra, 2015)

  28. Between Shades of Gray (Ruta Sepetys, 2011)

  29. The Ragged Edge of Night (Olivia Hawker, 2018)

  30. Homo Deus (Yuval Noah Harari, 2015)

  31. The Island of Sea Women (Lisa See, 2019)

  32. Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015)

  33. Tokyo Ueno Station (Miri Yu, 2014) 

  34. Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2006) 

  35. Till We Have Faces (C. S. Lewis, 1956) 

  36. This is What Inequality Looks Like (Kian Woon Kwok and Youyenn Teo, 2018)

  37. Home (Toni Morrison, 2012)

  38. Franny and Zooey ( J. D. Salinger, 1961)

  39. Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural Anthology (Edited by Mary Frosch, 2007)

  40. Nine Stories (J. D. Salinger, 1953) 

  41. The Vizier’s Elephant (Ivo Andrić, 1948)  

  42. The Yellow Birds (Kevin Powers, 2012)

  43. Slouching towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion, 1968)

  44. Catch 22 (Joseph Heller, 1961)

  45. The Call of the Wild (Jack London, 1903)

  46. White Fang (Jack London, 1906)

  47. Quesadillas: A Novel (Juan Pablo Villalobos, 2012)

  48. A Tale for the Time Being (Ruth Ozeki, 2013)

  49. The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015) 

  50. Her Body and Other Parties (Carmen Maria Machado, 2017)

  51. We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama (Barack Obama, 2017)

  52. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985) 

Clara Rominger '21