2019 Reading Roundup

🤠 yeehaw

Circa January 2017 I decided to “get back into reading,” and for some reason was unable to stick with anything but dystopian sci-fi novels. 2018 was largely the same (although seriously hmu if you want sci-fi recs). In 2019, I blossomed into a person who is able to handle multiple types of books. Below are my favorites, loosely organized by theme.

Climate

My “most important” category of books this year was about the environment and climate change.

• The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
• The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption
• Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
• Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

^ all of these books feed into my desire to blow up my life & move to the middle of nowhere in nature. Which is impractical, but I were to do it, I would need to be able to talk intelligently about the things I was looking at (chiefly rocks and clouds) so I did buy some physical books to help out with that:

Capitalism, basically

• The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen
• Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
• Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
• Carceral Capitalism
• Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

Sci-Fi 4ever

• Acceptance (finishing the trilogy)
• The Thing Itself (Kantian philosophy as the basis for bending time and space! What’s not to love)
• Infinite Detail
• Oval
• Borne (yes I love Jeff Vandermeer and will read anything he writes)
• The Strange Bird (yes this did make me cry)
• Children of Time

Trying to have a better life

• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
• Against Creativity
• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
• Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now
• Burnout, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

Trying to be a better person

• Literally Show Me A Healthy Person
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• The Unexpected Joy of being Sober
• How To Date Men When You Hate Men (LOL)
• How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals
• Feeling Great About My Butt (go buy this from Kawan :) )

Epilogue

For 2020, I have a few books planned/preordered that I am excited about:

• Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User
• Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism
• Jeff Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts
• Melissa Broder’s The Pisces

If you’ve read this far — send me recommendations, please! I am always on the hunt for more :)