My Favourite Books of 2019

The end-of-year (and end-of-decade) lists have been floating around for weeks now, but I like to wait until the last minute to write my own list. I usually get a chunk of reading done during the holidays at the end of the year, and you never know whether your favourite book of the year will be the last one you read.

Without really meaning to, I raised my reading goals bar by finishing 131 books in 2019. (My previous high was 119 books in 2017; page-count-wise, though, I only just beat my 2016 high by a mere 8 pages.) I originally expected to read 80-ish books, hoping that I’d spend more time writing and read a little slower, taking my time with the books I chose. That didn’t happen. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know. I fed myself a steady diet of library books, streaming off my holds list and into my home, nearly half (half!) of them published in the last year or two.

I’m still writing short summaries of each month’s reading in the newsletter, which has prevented me from forgetting about what I read as quickly as I used to. Maybe that made it harder to pick my favourite books this year. So many of them seemed to have more or less the same impact on me — I remember some things about them but they don’t really cling to me. Maybe that’s the effect of reading too many contemporary books — they get a bit flat after a while. And maybe that’s why I don’t have many novels on this list?

Regardless, here we are: my favourite books of the year, in no particular order:

How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell. How to resist the economy created by social media and our phones, and how to pay attention to the natural world in spite of all the steel and concrete built on top of it.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer. An excellent read to follow How to Do Nothing because it’s all about being more aware of nature and about Aboriginal ways of seeing the world and about gratitude and reciprocity and kindness.

The Library Book, Susan Orlean. Exceptional nonfiction about public libraries and reading and Los Angeles and America. I wrote about it earlier this year.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Yiyun Li. A book about depression and suicide and reading and writing. I also wrote about it earlier this year.

Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood. Ugh, this was so much fun to read. It’s the kind of book that makes me ashamed of my own writing. I’m so boring and bland! Nothing I write is funny or interesting!

Normal People, Sally Rooney. I also enjoyed Conversations with Friends, but I enjoyed this one more. Two people wrangling their messy relationship over the course of several years.

Red, White & Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston. I read a bunch of fun romance novels this year, but this was my favourite. Super fun and cheeky with all the British and American politics but also the end made me cry a bit?

On the Come Up, Angie Thomas. An engrossing novel about a tough, complicated teenager trying to navigate her dreams while struggling with expectations from the different worlds she belongs to.

The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso. A memoir about illness and recovery. I’ve read a lot of her work but have been saving Ongoingness for later and now, remembering this book, I wonder why I’ve waited so long.

The Art of Dying Well, Katy Butler. I hate thinking about death but it also fascinates me. Probably the same as everyone else. This is a useful book about the practical aspects of death and dying, with lots to think about.

My Year of Living Spiritually, Anne Bokma. There were some things I didn’t like about this book, mostly the quality of spiritual tourism (of which I am guilty myself …), but there was a layer below all that that I really connected to, in part because I have a few things in common with the author.

I’m still hoping, for 2020, to read fewer books more slowly. Fewer books from the library, more books I already own, and more old books — specifically, books published before I was born. In any case, all I really care to do is to keep reading.