2019 Book Highlights.
By popular demand, here are my favorite reads of the publishing year. Some of the most important writing ever published hit shelves in 2019. May we all applaud these authors’ vulnerability, tenacity and heed for truth. (Don’t worry, I threw in some fun ones too.)
“I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.”
Best Of The Best.
Know My Name: A Memoir
by Chanel Miller
On January 18, 2015, Chanel Miller was violently raped by Brock Turner on Stanford’s campus. Her story of surviving sexual assault and national scrutiny is powerful on its own, but the way she writes about her experience and the fallout is truly affecting.
Everyone should read this book. It should be required in schools and talked about in families and amongst friends. We should know Chanel Miller’s name and remember all of her undue pain and suffering. We should know Peter Jonsson’s and Carl-Fredrik Arndt’s names and remember how they sprung into action upon witnessing the crime and saved Chanel’s life. We should know Brock Turner’s name too and remember all of the people—his parents included—who went out of their way to rewrite Chanel’s story and sabotage justice. Finally, we should know Judge Aaron Persky’s name and remember the upsettingly lenient sentence that ultimately led to him being recalled from his position of power in the state of California.
Chanel’s experience is sadly not a novel one, but having regular conversations about consensual sex and how to set and honor personal boundaries is a simple and actionable step towards helping younger generations thrive in healthy and balanced ways. Let’s lift each other up. Start reading and talking.
She Said
by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey &
Catch and Kill
by Ronan Farrow
Like Chanel Miller’s book above, the never-ending explicit content published by Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and Ronan Farrow is bleak but far outweighed by its importance for our growth as a society and as individual people.
Kantor and Twohey of The New York Times are credited with breaking the story of widespread abuse that brought down Hollywood heavyweight and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein.
Ronan and his producer took it even further, exposing all of the ways rich and powerful people use their wealth and status to live above the law and keep others quiet.
Maybe You Should Talk To Someone
by Lori Gottlieb
“Above all, I didn’t want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion… In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”
Very few writers have the ability to capture the complexity of the human condition in a universally compelling way like Lori Gottlieb. Her background helps—she took a nonlinear path on her way to becoming a psychotherapist and openly celebrates her own ongoing mental health journey; two things that still face stigmas today.
Gottlieb’s latest book, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, gives us a look into the lives of some of her patients navigating modern ups and downs while simultaneously chronicling her own time as a therapy patient struggling to cope with sudden change. Sound familiar? We can all relate.
The Most Fun We Ever Had
by Claire Lombardo
Outside looking in, the Sorenson family has it all: a childhood house with a tree to climb in the backyard, loving and madly-in-love parents who married in the 70s and four wildly different but beautiful daughters living nearby throughout the Chicago area.
Inside looking out, things are very messy as all of the daughters struggle to cope with their own independent lives in the shadow of their parents’ undying love for one another. Wendy drinks and sleeps with much younger men after her husband dies; Violet discontentedly stays at home with her kids after leaving a high-paying job as a litigator; Liza is pregnant with a baby that she’s not sure wants by a man she’s not sure she loves; and Grace, the youngest, is seemingly beyond any kind of help.
Get on this one soon, as it’s set to be an upcoming HBO series produced by the brilliant Laura Dern and Amy Adams.
Recursion
by Blake Crouch
If you need a fast-paced, twisty plot with lots of action and thought-provoking themes, this is your book.
Barry Sutton, a New York City cop, is investigating False Memory Syndrome—a mysterious ailment that afflicts its victims with endless memories of events they never actually lived. Helena Smith, a neuroscientist, is trying to build technology that will preserve memories so people can relive their most precious moments at the snap of a finger. Both are working in a warped reality that’s constantly changing and humanity depends on them coming together to defeat the terrifying disease.
Blake Crouch hits lots of home-runs—shout out to Dark Matter and The Wayward Pines trilogy—but this might be his best yet. I read it in a single sitting!
Humankind
by Rutger Bregman &
Talking to Strangers
by Malcolm Gladwell
I’m a sucker for books that are equally entertaining and educational. We got two standouts that checked both boxes this year and each helped me shake off the heavy 2019 funk we’ve all been carrying around.
Rutger Bregman went against the negative societal grain with “a hopeful history” of the last 200,000 years of humankind. His perspective on our cooperative nature and his supporting evidence are very compelling and would give even the most cynical person at the table a reason to reconsider their doom. Hopeful, indeed.
Malcolm Gladwell is up to his usual tricks in his latest release about our interactions with strangers and how they often go wrong—it turns out our instincts aren’t as spot on as we’d like to think. There is a lot of timely information included that we should all be looking at as we continue to examine policing and its roll in keeping us safe (or putting us in danger).
Insider tip: Listen to this one on Audible!
Honorable Mention.
The Lager Queen of Minnesota
by J. Ryan Stradal
I firmly stand behind this statement: Minnesota-set books and Minnesota-born writers are some of the best out there.
Evidence in support of this statement keeps getting stronger too. The Lager Queen of Minnesota is a gem of a story about two feuding sisters set against the backdrop of rural Minnesota and hoppy breweries. The characters are so real you’ll believe that they came out of your own childhood neighborhood; or, if you’re like me, you’ll google (more than once) whether it’s a true story.
This is a warm hug of a book. To all of my lovely Minnesotans: don’t miss this one.
This Is How You Lose the Time War
by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Red and Blue are high-ranking operatives on opposing sides in a bloody and turbulent time war. And yet, word by poetic word, they fall in love with each other through their letters.
El-Mohtar and Gladstone went full method to produce the searing saga. Each author embodying one of the characters, they literally wrote to each other blindly as Red and Blue until the book was finished.
I have never read anything like this before and I doubt I will ever come across anything similar to it ever again.
Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Similar to many of the books on my list this year, Jia Tolentino’s collection of nine original essays is not for the weak or weary. She tackles topics from toxic wedding culture to women in politics and her sharp observations are backed by meticulous research and a searing intention to get people outside of their society-induced bubbles and into the world of critical thinking.
Many writers try to enter the cultural criticism sphere and often end up coming off as pretentious and out of touch at best and completely insufferable at worst. Jia dodges both ends of the spectrum with ease—her next-level writing and biting humor definitely help—and I’m willing to bet she somehow gets even the most deluded readers to find a small fraction inner clarity. Progress!
If you read one of these books, let’s talk. Please also send me the titles on your to-read list for 2020; they might show up on next year’s highlights! You can follow my reading journey on Goodreads.
Want to sponsor my reading? You can donate below! I read everything digitally before I invest in hardbacks and unique bindings for our home library.
Metta,
Drewsome.
