I Read 72 Books in Year 28 — These Are the 14 You Should Read, Too
I spent the last minute of 28 and the first minute of 29 wet and naked and surprisingly not cold.
“This is 20 percent for the checkmark of it all,” I’d told Cam as we walked towards the cab, my arm hooked around her shoulders like a parenthesis, hers tucked around my waist.
(I’d promised myself I would swim in the sea every month of the year — a ritual to celebrate having figured out how happy it would make me to live in a place with regular access to sun and water and then moving there, and also to celebrate being wonderfully, gloriously, painfully alive — and it was the second-to-last day of the month, so time to get in an August dip was fast expiring.)
“And 80 percent for how it will feel: beautiful and witchy and meaningful,” I finished.
Cam laughed and slid into the taxi behind me. She is the kind of friend whose commentary makes everything funnier and whose touch makes a whole room feel safer, better, more alive, and there was no one I would’ve rather shared a backseat with through dark roads on our way to the dark beach.
Once we made it, I stepped out of my shoes and let the sand squelch under my feet. We shucked our clothes onto stacked off-white loungers and slipped my bag between the slats.
I looked at my phone before leaving it behind, balanced like ballast on the plastic strips of a chair. 11:56. We’d made it just in time for me to say goodbye to one year and start another from the water, floating too deep to touch and deep enough to feel it all: weightless and buoyed, surrounded and alone, limitless and entirely contained.
We stayed for a while. Prayed. Pulled water through our arms. Told stories. Hugged. It was rich with meaning and rebirth and it was also just two bodies floating in salty water in front of a line of spotlights glowing paper yellow.
I keep track of what I read each year for the same reason I want to be in the sea once a month this year, including and especially at a midnight-adjacent hour on a post-thunderstorm birthday eve.
Both practices fulfill the type-A and the meaningful-experience-seeking parts of me at once. Creating a channel for reflection and then sending myself down it is deeply satisfying. It’s useful and generative and surprising and scary and rich and never not worth it — for current me and future me and others, too.
A long intro to say: I once again read a lot of books and wrote down what I felt about them. What they taught me.
A short closing to say: I once again bring the best of them here, to you, proffered like a plate of peak summer fruit. Eat from it with me, won’t you?
The 14 Best Books I Read in Year 28
I always struggle to not have these lists — or my goals check-ins — dripping in recency bias. I know that reading has felt different in the last few weeks. More capable of shattering me. I also know myself, as human and as reader, well enough to know that this, like every feeling, no matter how infinite it seems, will end. Sometimes books will feel like a blunt lance, sometimes like a needle, still other times like the gentle undulation that ripples across the mattress when someone sits down on the other side of the bed.
Always books, when they’re good, will make me feel.
These are the 14 books that made me think and feel and pause, mouth open and incredulity spiking, during this year of life. Presented with full partiality:
- The Collected Stories by Amy Hempel. This book — which is actually four collections of short stories — will echo in my head forever. It will be the ghost that floats down the hallways of my brain long after I’ve forgotten the names of everyone I’ve ever loved. References to it will show up, unbidden and sometimes unintentionally, in all of my stories and essays to come. A single image from a single story of hers kicked off the longest piece I have ever written (it’s currently 10,000 words). She is masterful and I am deeply changed by reading her. There is nothing more to say.
- The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser. I started this memoir-in-essays in New York two weeks ago, and I knew two chapters in that this book would be at the very top of my list this year the way that you meet someone and know they will ruin your life a little bit and decide to let them but it was never really a choice. The last book I felt this way about was A Little Life in 2016.
Then Hauser lost me in the second and third sections of a four-section book and I worried I had misplaced my taste — until she came back near the end with two back-to-back essays that were good enough for me to want to do nothing else but read and reread them despite the fact that I had spent 27 hours awake and was in a middle seat, on a plane experiencing turbulence, with my neck gone stiff like paper mache and my brain sludgy. I was so tired that if I looked away from the page too fast I got dizzy, but also all I wanted to look at was the page, full of lessons and values I didn’t realize anyone else had, yet alone had perfectly expressed.
(“There are permutations of grief and of love you can only carry for yourself. No one can tell you when to release them. No one can tell you what it will feel like to live without them.” / “There was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds but no one can survive denying their own needs.” / “I can’t NOT do this.”)
I am in my wallop era and this book walloped me. Laying next to Tracey on a New York Sunday morning the day after I bought this book, I took a picture of the last page of the first essay and sent it to my sister and cried, and now I am sending the whole thing to you, but especially the essays “Blood: Twenty-Seven Love Stories,” “The Two-Thousand-Pound Bee,” and “The Fox Farm.”
- Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob Walberg. A very different kind of collection than Hempel’s, this set of absurd and romantic and absurdly romantic short stories reads like the cleverest instructor in your MFA program sent his students a bunch of prompts and then outwrote them on every single one. There are at least three stories that can and should — should, should, should — be read out loud, including “The Up and Comers” and “You Want to Know What Plays Are Like?” I brought one of the stories to my writers’ group to pick apart how it worked and see if we could recreate the magic; I laughed out loud; I loved.
- The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. My four-word summary of this book is “a fucking EXCELLENT yarn,” caps true to my original book diary. This stunning, complex timewarp of a novel is about a woman who sets out to fly in a circle (an orthodrome, if we’re getting fancy) around the entire world — but it’s also about dreams and the cost of pursuing them, especially when they mean defying expectations set for us by others. She writes war and sex and reinvention and shrooms and LA better than anyone. I made myself read this book only in the park, in carefully-metered-out-afternoons sprawled under a palm tree, to draw out my appreciation of its gifts; it is meant to be savored.
- Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton. This is what I wrote upon finishing this essay-collection-slash-memoir: “Honestly one part of my brain thought about not putting this on here because I want to write a book like this one day and would rather have readers imagine it sprang forward fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s forehead but actually it will be equal parts Dolly and Melissa Febos and half a dozen other writers I love.” But now I’ve told you so you know. If you are a woman who has experienced the powerful, worldbuilding magic of loving other women in friendship and sisterhood, or if you are anyone of any gender and any emotional status who can access at least a wisp of a sense of humor, you should read this.
- When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister. I wrote a love letter to this book on Instagram and Ilona responded to it and we corresponded briefly about New York, and the fact that she’s as cool as she is has nothing to do with me being absolutely floored by this book and now imploring you to read it. I don’t know where I first got the rec from — @ Meg was it you? — but I put it on hold at the library and it showed up in my Kindle checkout like a snow day. I kept holding it away from my face when I was reading it, trying to make eye contact with other people around me on the train, just to make sure I was alive, that this was real, that I get to exist in the same timeline as a story like this. It is about 9/11 and loss and motherhood and mental health, so fair warning that it can get heavy, but it feels like Ilona is there with you the whole way, trudging a path through the snow and breaking the crust so you can follow and just marvel at the beauty blanketing the world.
- Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. This book is part essays, part spellmaking, part whimsical imagination, part deep feeling and seeing and writing down. You know how if you take all the little leftover bits of crayons and melt them in a muffin tin you get a magic disc of technicolor capable of transforming a page with a single stroke? This feels like a book written with the sharp edge of that disc. It is run-on sentences and incredibly imagery and lots and lots of vulnerability, and if you are willing to be a little weird (ha) and knock about inside someone else’s loneliness and love for a while, you will be rewarded. I finished reading it with Sean reading over my shoulder sitting at the base of the lookout tower at the Cliffs of Moher, the sea crashing beneath us and teens making TikToks in front of us. Jenny would’ve loved everything about that scene.
- The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathanial Ian Miller. It’s 1916. A Swedish man named (you guessed it) Sven leaves the big city (you guessed it) of Stockholm to live on a remote Arctic fjord. Stuff happens to him. A lot of it is tragic. A lot of it is beautiful. All of it is gorgeously rendered, with place divinely blooming into being on the page. I have never read a novel that was so internal — Sven is alone for much of his time, and a lot of the action takes place in his head, or in this placid-yet-high-stakes microcosm of his tiny hut, greasy with kerosene fumes and bear fat — yet so fascinating. It will remind you that love and connection and good books and nature are, in fact, everything. Can you tell by now why I loved it?
- Autumn by Ali Smith. I had to think hard about whether I would put this novel on my top list. It’s stunning, yes. It makes you work for it, though. The intro is hard to get past, and the political commentary is thick, but she is a ridiculously good, once-in-a-lifetime type of talent, and what she can do with literally any scene — a reality show about antiquing, a reflection on the current state of liberal arts education, a backyard chat with a neighbor — is magic. I’m going to finish her whole seasons series, but slowly. Let’s see next year if the seasons to come live up to my favorite one.
- The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam. Unmatched creativity. The novel as form is meant for this kind of play, commentary, exploration. Tahmima reflects on partnership, tech, morality, and the places those things intersect, and I will travel to that cross-section with her any time. I read this early in 28 — it was my fifth book of the year — and to help me expand on my original notes, I looked up her Wikipedia just now. Apparently this is her fourth novel and the only one to not make the “notable works” section of her biography? What the fuck will that mean for me and my admiration for her when I go read the others? I will report back, of course.
- Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner. I love Paige for many, many reasons, but one of them is that she reads books I love and then talks to me about them. She read Crying in H Mart and wasn’t absolutely smashed and then salvaged by it the way I was. Maybe you won’t be either. Maybe you have to have lost your mom for this memoir about the obligations and limits of family and the salvation of art and food to feel the way it does to me. I hope, then, for you, that it won’t. But if you have space to read about grief, Michelle will hold your hand there.
- Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. This book starts off as a biography of a biologist who, in being a white man who made a career of taking things from their natural habitat and pinning them into his story, is well-deserving of some criticism. But he’s also deserving of heavy admiration for his commitment to seeking in the face of not one, not two, but three natural disasters that destroyed his life’s work. The book becomes a cautious exploration of optimism, and then a bit of a memoir, weaving in Lulu’s own story — and her own journey towards rebuilding when lightning strikes and fire burns and earthquakes shatter your foundations.
- Under the Glacier by Hallidór Laxness. The premise of this Icelandic novel is that a bishop’s emissary — referred to EmBi throughout in a way that will make you smile the first time and then smile harder every subsequent reference — is sent to investigate a wayward parish and the pastor-slash-handyman who is (maybe) running it into the ground. In so doing, EmBi explores faith (and its limits), nature (and its power), and the inevitability of humans to look for — and struggle with — meaning. I did not love the ending, but I loved the voice that brought me there. It is weird and wonderful. Stirring and surprising. Full of ridiculously run-ons. Extremely clever, often insightful, and worth the ride despite the way it ends.
- Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney. I planned an entire weeklong party around the worlds that Sally creates; this book had to make the list. To read this novel feels like spying on your smartest friends. Like whipping your head back and forth during a tennis match played by Hope on one side and The Futility of Continuously Seeking Human Connection (coached by Logic) on the other. Like sitting by the pool at a European villa with an Aperol spritz in hand, dry and bubbly and a tiny bit sweet.
And the other 58
Presented in chronological order. (Almost nothing would be in the other below if it wasn’t. Particularly 15, and 19, and 22, and more, but it feels mean to continue this bit.)
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
- Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel
- Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour
- Brood by Jackie Polzin
- The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
- El Viento Que Arrasa by Selva Almada
- Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore
- Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall
- A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J Maas
- I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
- The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang
- Dava Shastri’s Last Day by Kirthana Ramisetti
- Objects of Desire by Clare Sestanovich
- With Teeth by Kristen Arnett
- Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
- Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W Moniz
- The Last Book Party by Karen Duke
- A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J Maas
- Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
- A Little Hope by Ethan Joella
- Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
- The Five Wounds by Kirsten Valdez Quade
- Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola
- This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon
- Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford
- Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis
- Brown Girls by Daphe Palasi Andreas
- La Hija de La Española by Karina Sainz Borgo
- Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner
- The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
- I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Watkins
- In the Country of Others by Leila Slimani
- My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley
- What My Mother And I Don’t Talk About edited by Michele Filgate
- The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson
- Huaco Retrato by Gabriela Wiener
- The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris
- Love Poems by Anne Sexton
- The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
- Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor
- Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
- Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
- Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
- Point Omega by Don DeLillo
- Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
- There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsmura
- Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke
- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald
- Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan
- All About Love by bell hooks
- Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui
- Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
- Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
By the numbers
I never do this math until I write this reflection. I only review it at all to see if I’m reading a decently wide selection of things.
I believe that books, especially fiction, are one of few things that can expand your empathy enough to love someone else better. So I want to be learning from a range of others. Let’s see how I did.
Total books read
By gender
- 28th year: 76% women
- 27th year: 72% women
- 26th year: 85% women
- 25th year: 73% women
- 24th year: 63% women
- 23rd year: 55% women
By race
Once again: race is a social construct but for the reason stated in the intro to this section, it is worth it for me to measure.
- 28th year: 38% people of color
- 27th year: 61% people of color
- 26th year: 34% people of color
- Did not track for years prior
By type
- 28th year: 31% not-fiction (everything but longform fiction counts, is how I usually calc this; hi short stories and memoir along with traditional nonfiction)
- 27th year: 32% nonfiction
- 26th year: 22% nonfiction
She’s long-winded but she made it: bye for now
I wrote the top part of this piece on my actual birthday and in the days following it. I wrote the middle and end a week later. I’ve never been this late in posting this end-of-year recap, and if that lateness impacted your life in a negative way, I’m sorry. I promise I spent that time doing things that were entirely worth it — namely loving and being loved by the best people I know.
They love me so they wrote things down for me. In cards, on title pages, in my house’s guestbook, in various messaging apps.
I read them and they weren’t books but they filled me all the same. The power of words is unlike anything else.
I thought I was a words of affirmation girl before the last week and a half and now I know I am.
Though God help me, I’ll take all the quality time and the physical touch and the acts of service, too. I want it all, all the time. And I want to give it back.
I suppose that’s what the page has always been for me: a place to go and say things, and also a place to listen and learn, and also a hug, and also a gift, and also a sacrifice, and also a space that’s wide and welcoming and always open that you’ll never be priced out of and that you can slip into whenever you need. The page is every form of love all at once and I will never stop being grateful for it.
I hope my most-recommended pages become those special spaces for you, too.
If they do — call me and tell me about it?
xo,
Kath
P.S. My sister sent me this on my birthday. It’s meant for me — everything in it is me and her and our love in a way that I can feel like the earth under my feet — but maybe you need to hear it, too. Maybe you need to Mad Libs your own version. To find yourself in someone else’s words. The shortest and best story of all is this: I love you.
You are the brightest light in any galaxy, you are sunshine and you are a good book on a rainy day. You are every hydrangea I ever see and every big blue body of water. You are my best friend, my extended self, and I wish nothing but all of the goodness you are to be returned to you in some way.
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