2019 — a year in books

6 min readFeb 9, 2020

This year I read 32 books. Here are some more stats:

19 fiction, 13 non-fiction
27 read on Kindle!!
20 by female authors
7 by WOC
6 memoirs (Michelle Obama, Azar Nafisi, Anchee Min, J.D. Vance, Alyssa Mastromonaco, Cheryl Strayed)
4 with my book club

Full list at the very bottom.

Book Club:

This year, I finally started a book club with friends and co-workers in the city. It’s been going for over 8 months now, and one member of the club has christened it “the most successful book club” she has ever been part of. I’m also surprised that a group of people has made time in their busy schedules to agree upon and discuss a single book. What worked?

Set meeting time on a bi-weekly basis (i.e., Tuesday evenings). Meet halfway and upon completion of the book.
Rotate the meeting place. Provide wine.
Do not mandate attendance. Participation is on an opt-in basis, not an opt-out basis, so people only join for books they are interested in and want to read.
Only 50% of people show up to a given meeting, so make sure to invite more people than you think!
Stick to non-fiction given the varied tastes of different individuals in a diverse group.

This year, our group read Supercapitalism, Trick Mirror, Evicted, and Midnight in Chernobyl.

Best…

Best Overall Fiction:

A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

This novel has a simple premise: a former aristocrat is sentenced to house arrest in Bolshevik Russia, confined to the grand Metropol hotel for the rest of his life. His new world is minuscule in comparison to the glamour of his previous life, but Count Rostov’s charm, humor, and wit shine shine through in the stripped down setting. Whether Towle’s main gentleman is scheming with the chefs in the Metropol dining room, chatting with the housekeeping staff, or rendezvousing with the guests that come through the hotel lobby during some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history, he allows us to escape our hurried, humdrum existences and observe the tiny gilded moments that define a life.

I was floored by the simple writing and the beautifully illustrated vignettes — the plot doesn’t become evident till the later half of the novel, but the story itself is in the details. The Moscow Kremlin can be seen from the Metropol hotel, and Towles does not shelter the beautiful bubble of hotel life from the outside events that are reshaping Russia. The level of detail is high, the tone is both nostalgic and hopeful, you will cry more than once, and you will definitely wish you could forget everything and have the chance to reread it again for the first time.

The best part is that if you liked this read, you’ll love Amor Towle’s other book Rules of Civility.

Honorable Mention: Commonwealth, Ann Patchett

Best Overall Non-Fiction:

Evicted, Matthew Desmond

Evicted packs a punch. Desmond follows 8 families of tenants and landlords in the lower-income areas of Milwaukee following the Great Recession. His commentary is light for most of the book, he lets the statistics and the anecdotes speak for themselves. My two biggest learnings were the following:

1. Domestic abuse complaints, which are more prevalent in lower-income neighborhoods, are actually a leading cause of evictions. Landlords don’t want to keep getting visits and fines from law enforcement, as they may make their properties and dealings more subject to scrutiny. As a result, domestic abuse victims often have to choose between putting up with the abuse or being evicted yet again.

2. When residents are evicted once, it becomes harder and harder for them to be approved for better housing, and the strain follows them emotionally and financially. The former residents themselves are disillusioned and don’t care much about making their new “temporary” home feel like a community, and their former neighborhood loses a member that cared and helped make it a better place.

This is a good read for those who complain about homelessness yet refuse to acknowledge the gentrification that they have contributed to in SF (and in many other urban centers worldwide). It’s clear that the condition of being homeless is not a choice, it’s the equivalent of a death by a thousand paper cuts in a system that has historically been structured to “defend” class and racial lines in America.

Best Memoir:

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

I picked up this book at a used book sale outside a bookstore and went a couple years without reading it. I picked it up again when I went to visit my parents over a long weekend and had nothing else on hand to read. Azar Nafisi is a professor of Western Literature at the University of Tehran during the early years of the Iranian revolution, when students are occupying the university and protests and riots are commonplace. The framing device of the memoir is the book club that Nafisi starts with her former female students once she leaves the university as a result of the continued perpetuation of repressive practices.

As they read books that have been newly banned in Iran such as The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita, the women start questioning and sharing their own stories, their dreams and disappointments. This book touched me most deeply because it took the same novels I read with my classmates through high school and put them under an entirely new light, gave them a new interpretation. Nafisi deftly weaves between her own past and present, between real life and the book plots.

Honorable Mention: Wild, Cheryl Strayed

Best Collected Essays:

Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino

This book was a recommendation by a book club member who was ahead of the curve — upon finishing Trick Mirror, I began seeing it in every bookstore window ever. Tolentino is a writer for the New Yorker and I’ve read and enjoyed her articles before. She writes about the rise of athleisure, her time on a teenage reality show, book heroines, and her early life in the shadow of a Texas megachurch. She is incisive yet compassionate, even as she calls readers out for their daily Sweetgreen “fix” or their insistence that the institution of marriage is not a scam. I didn’t agree with all of her points and I can see how some readers have objected to her simplification / generalization of complex issues, but a book of essays is a mixed bag — Trick Mirror has many more hits than misses.

I’ve gifted this book to numerous friends this year. And for those that think this book is inaccessible to readers that are not heterosexual women, my entire book club found this an enjoyable read and a catalyst for multiple great discussions.

Best Recommendation by an UberPOOL co-passenger:

Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? Alyssa Mastromonaco

Best Unexpected Surprise:

The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion

Full List:

Non-fiction

Becoming, Michelle Obama
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
The Cooked Seed, Anchee Min
Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance
Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, Alyssa Mastromonaco
Factfulness, Hans Rosling
Supercapitalism, Robert Reich
Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino
Evicted, Matthew Desmond
Wild, Cheryl Strayed
Bad Blood, John Carreyrou
The Future of Capitalism, Paul Collier
Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham

Fiction

A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
The Unhoneymooners, Christina Lauren
The Last Romantics, Tara Conklin
Beloved Enemy, Ellen Jones
Gilded Cages, Ellen Jones
The Hopefuls, Jennifer Close
The Dressmaker’s Dowry, Meredith Jaeger
Swingtime, Zadie Smith
The Immortalists, Chloe Benjamin
Hey Ladies!!!, Michelle Markowitz & Caroline Moss
The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion
The Rosie Effect, Graeme Simsion
The Rosie Result, Graeme Simsion
The Storyteller’s Secret, Sejal Badani
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Emma Orczy
Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
This One Is Mine, Maria Semple