TOP TEN TUESDAY | FAVE BOOKS I READ THIS YEAR

I had some very high highs (and some pretty low lows, but fortunately that’s not what we’re here to discuss!) in my 2019 reading. There are several books that have been added to my all-time faves, and a lot I highly recommend that you check out! Here are the top ten:

Non-Fiction:

         

Natives was one of the best books I read this year. It was engaging, interesting and very educational. Poverty Safari took me on a journey through the life of a person who grew up in one of the poorest communities in Scotland, and what that experience did to his family, his health and his future. Though it deals with a specific place and time, so much of what is discussed her has much wider application and is so important. Locking Up Our Own is a book I wish everyone in the USA would read. It deals with race and incarceration, but also looks at the historical decisions and policies that have led to the current system, and all the many things that are wrong with it and that stack the deck against young black men in particular.

Memoir:

           

It’s no secret that I’ve been struggling with both mental and physical health in the past few years. My Lovely Wife In the Psych Ward deals with the former, Patient deals with the latter. The two combined were the perfect set of books to help me put my own situation in perspective, find some common experiences, and teach me a lot about survival, relationships and making the best of a big pile of crap. Bedsit Disco Queen is Tracey Thorn’s memoir of her life before and after becoming a musician. It’s written with humility, introspection and no small amount of passion for her craft. (Her second book, Naked at the Albert Hall goes into much more detail about the last in that list, and is also one I highly recommend.) I especially loved the audiobooks read by the author – I find her reading voice as wonderful as her singing. Raising Demons is the second of Shirley Jackson’s memoirs about raising her four children (and her husband, who is the least mature and most stroppy of the bunch). I adore her wit and sense of humour, her willingness to admit her failures and to choose to see the funny side of tragedy. Her memoirs have helped me feel like I’m part of a club of flumoxed and overwhelmed mothers that go back through the ages, probably to the beginning of time. It’s nice to feel like my constant feeling of being completely frazzled is actually part of a much larger legacy.

Fiction:

       

These three books are completely different, but all three kept me entranced as I read, kept me turning pages well past my bedtime, taught me something about human nature and have stuck with me well past finishing them. Daisy Jones is probably the easiest of the three to read, but the format and character development made it deliver much more than a fun reading experience. Girl, Woman, Other is, in my opinion, the book that should have won the Booker Prize solo this year. It’s ambitious, innovative, and large in scope. But it pulls it off, and then some. It tells several interconnected stories, mostly of women, mostly black women from or living in the United Kingdom through the past hundred years or so. It’s high praise when I say every person’s story kept me interested. There was none of the usual boredom while getting through less interesting perspectives. And the writing played with form to create deeper meaning without crossing over into being pretentious or overly obfuscated. I can’t recommend it enough. Lanny is a much slimmer volume, but likewise plays with form and style in ways that creates a deeper sense of place and community than would have been possible with traditional narrative prose. There’s one section in it I didn’t like, but for the most part I thought it was brilliant.

Those are my top reads of the year, though there are several runners-up. I’d love to hear which books stood out to you this year – out of the books you read, not necessarily those published in 2019 (though happy to hear about those too!). Have any of you read these? If so, did any of them make your best-of list for the year?

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly link-up feature created by The Broke and the Bookish and hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every week TTT has a different topic, and everyone who links up has to create a link of ten items that fit that topic. To see past and upcoming topics, go here.