2019 Reading Review

In 2019, I read 61 books, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, essay collections, and fairly thick tomes. My top 12 are listed below (though I’m cheating an listing all four of The Years of Lyndon Johnson series as one 3,000+ page book). This year included some of my usual interests in economics and tech, but a higher than usual amount of science-fiction-fantasy from Neal Stephenson (The Fall, Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash) and Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys, Neverwhere). Plus, upon review it turns out I totally unintentionally started the year with Handmaid's Tale and ended it with The Testaments.

Long-time friends will recognize this format as my annual reading list post. I’ve started posting reviews of each book I read on Instagram with Caroline under the hash tag #caroninoreads — and I continue to use Goodreads to keep track too.

Let me know what from your list I should add this year. Here are the 12 best books I read last year:

1. The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen)

2. Notes on a Foreign Country (Suzy Hansen)

3. The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Robert A. Caro) - the best being Master of the Senate

4. The Way We Eat Now (Bee Wilson)

5. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari)

6. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Rick Atkinson)

7. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Francis Fukuyama)

8. Calypso (David Sedaris)

9. The Topeka School (Ben Lerner)

10. Girl, Woman, Other (Bernardine Evaristo)

11. Lost Children Archive (Valeria Luiselli)

12. An Improvised Life (Alan Arkin)

Honorable mentions — Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, Cryptonomicon, Power Ball: Anatomy of Modern Baseball; After War: Political Economy of Exporting Democracy; The Upstarts; God: A Human History