Year-End Book Wrapup 2019

My goal this year was to read 70 books and to complete the Read Harder Challenge. Achieved! You can see all my Challenge books on last-year’s wrapup post.

This year, I read 93 books: 65 by women, 26 by men, one by a nonbinary author, and one by a “xenofeminist collective.” I also added a fifth California library (San Bernardino) to my list, but honestly the Los Angeles Public Library is the best one. If you're a California resident who is ever in the Los Angeles area, and you check out ebooks, pick up a library card.

Top five books of the year:

1. Sounds like Titanic

I have tried to evangelize this book to everyone I know, yet somehow have not succeeded! It is amazing. A fantastic story, so well-written. Absolutely fell in love with this one.

2. Circe

In sharp contrast to Sounds Like Titanic, I feel like everyone I know has read and loved this one! And if you haven’t you should. An erudite, feminist, and oh-so-satisfying retelling of a familiar Greek myth. Song of Achilles is also very good, but Circe is a masterpiece.

3. The Great Believers

This one is very personal for me, as it strongly echoes the life of my biological mother in the 1980s. I have never met or spoken to her, but I’ve read some of her correspondence, and she lost many very close friends due to AIDS. This book is highly acclaimed and I do recommend it, but acknowledge I have personal reasons for appreciating it as much as I do!

4. Optic Nerve

Already the Tournament of Books is so much better than last year’s, when I liked almost nothing. This year I’ve already read a handful that I really like, and discovered Optic Nerve, a wonderful book in vignette form about the meaning of life and the meaning of art. Looking forward to discussing this in the Tournament!

5. Convenience Store Woman

I think this discovery was courtesy of the Read Harder Challenge in the category “A translated book written by and/or translated by a woman” (although Optic Nerve is by an Argentinian woman and would also have qualified). This is a wonderful, quirky novel from Japan about a woman who works at a convenience store and is at one with the life of the store. Fabulous.

Honorable mentions: The Testaments, Stag’s Leap, Looker, Eliza and Her Monsters, The One, Evvie Drake Starts Over, We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, The Bees, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Fleishman Is in Trouble


Bottom three books:

I now give up on books if I don’t like them, for the most part, so slim pickings for bottom of the year.  I'm proud that I manage to do this; for a long time I was a completist and I had to learn that life's too short! Anyway, I have a list of “meh” but only three that I disliked enough to list here:

1. The Xenofeminist Manifesto

This is as pretentious as you might think a book written by a “xenofeminist collective” might be. This was a Read Harder Challenge book and a gift from a loved one, so I stuck with it. But alas, it was dumb.

2. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell  

I loved the premise of this, and then it ended up being so much white male privileged patriarchal bullshit.  This made me mad.

3. The Lifeboat

This one could have been great too, I was waiting for an awesome unreliable narrative twist, but instead it just dragged and was endlessly boring.

Next year my goal once again is to read 70 books and complete the Read Harder Challenge. I secretly want to read 100 since I got so close this year, but that seems like overkill. As usual, I’ll be updating this post as I get through the challenge and use a label on my posts so you can follow along. Any recommendations for these categories are welcome!

Here are the categories:

Total: 24/24

[X] A YA nonfiction book: The Borden Murders
[X] A retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, or myth by an author of color: Ash
[X]  A mystery where the victim(s) is not a woman: A Lady's Guide to Etiquette and Murder
[X]  A graphic memoir: Quiet Girl in a Noisy World
[X]  A book about a natural disaster: The Fires of Vesuvius
[X]  A play by an author of color and/or queer author: Yellow Face
[X]  A historical fiction novel not set in WWII:  The Mirror and the Light
[X]  An audiobook of poetry: Gmorning, Gnight
[X]  The LAST book in a series: Sleeping Murder
[X]  A book that takes place in a rural setting: Real Queer America
[X]  A debut novel by a queer author: London Calling
[X]  A memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own: Unorthodox
[X]  A food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before: Meal
[X]  A romance starring a single parent: Midnight in Austenland
[X]  A book about climate change: New York 2140
[X]  A doorstopper (over 500 pages) published after 1950, written by a woman: Midnight Sun
[X]  A sci-fi/fantasy novella (under 120 pages): Story of Your Life
[X]  A picture book with a human main character from a marginalized community Parker Looks Up
[X]  A book by or about a refugee: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
[X]  A middle grade book that doesn’t take place in the U.S. or the UK: The Lacemaker and the Princess
[X]  A book with a main character or protagonist with a disability (fiction or non): Five Feet Apart
[X]  A horror book published by an indie press: Horrorstör
[X]  An edition of a literary magazine (digital or physical): Witness
[X]  A book in any genre by a Native, First Nations, or Indigenous author: Robopocalypse