In high school I always thought I’d have more time to read… later. When I was older. When I didn’t have to do homework.
Then in early adulthood I realized I wasn’t reading nearly as much as I thought I would. I missed it, I used to be able to lose myself in a book for hours. Yet once I got home from work, I was always mentally tired, with only enough time to cook up dinner, watch a quick show, and go to bed. I hoped that maybe in early retirement I’d have time to read, a wistful goal. So now that I don’t work, the question remains: have I been able to read as much as I used to dream?
The answer is YES. Probably one of my favorite things about early retirement is finally having time to read. I read on the beach, in restaurants, in my hostel bed. My kindle is a constant feature in my backpack, and pretty much every meal as I travel solo. I’ve started to keep track of all the books I read in posts like Every Book I Read Last Year (2021) and All The Books I’ve Read So Far in 2022. That last post was back in June, so it’s time to wrap up all my reads of the year.
Fiction & Storyweaving
Lessons in Chemistry
Rated 5 out of 5
Dune
Rated 5 out of 5
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Rated 4.7 out of 5
You imagine a world where the two of you can go out to dinner together on a Saturday night and no one thinks twice about it. It makes you want to cry, the simplicity of it, the smallness of it. You have worked so hard for a life so grand. And now all you want are the smallest freedoms. The daily peace of loving plainly. — Taylor Jenkins Reid
Ghosts
Rated 4.7 out of 5
Maybe instead of saying I love you we should say I imagine you. — Dolly Alderton
Arsenic and Adobo
Rated 4.7 out of 5
Circe
Rated 5 out of 5
But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me. — Madeline Miller
H is for Hawk
Rated 3.7 out of 5
Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone.— Helen Macdonald
After I Do
Rated 4.5 out of 5
It Ends With Us
Rated 4.5 out of 5
I wish cutting my feelings off for the person who hurt me was as easy as I used to think it would be. Preventing your heart from forgiving someone you love is actually a hell of a lot harder than simply forgiving them. I’m a statistic now. The things I’ve thought about women like me are now what others would think of me if they knew my current situation.— Colleen Hoover
Queenie
Rated 3.2 out of 5
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding
Rated 3 out of 5
Solutions and Other Problems
Rated 3 out of 5
I really like Allie’s author bio, which encapsulates the chaoticness of her childhood stories: “Allie Brosh has enjoyed writing ever since her mom tricked her into writing a story to distract her from her immediate goal of wrapping the cat in duct-tape.”
Academic & Social
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
Rated 4.7 out of 5
I’m always wary of bombarding an audience with never-ending mortality and morbidity statistics, lest they themselves lose the will to live in front of me. It is hard not to do so with such compelling masses of studies in the field of sleep deprivation. — Matthew Walker
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Rated 5 out of 5
Cultish language isn’t a magic bullet or lethal poison; it’s more like a placebo pill. And there are a host of reasons why it might be likelier to “work” on certain people and not others. We’ll investigate some of these factors throughout this book, but one of them has to do with a type of conditioning most of us have experienced: the conditioning to automatically trust the voices of middle-aged white men. — Amanda Montell
How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love
Rated 5 out of 5
We can’t achieve complete certainty before any big relationship decision—and luckily, we don’t have to in order to be happy. Great relationships are built, not discovered. — Logan Ury
Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much
Rated 3 out of 5
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Rated 3 out of 5
Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations. — Morgan Housel
Memoirs
Crying in H Mart
Rated 5 out of 5
What do you mean put my hand on top of the rice and add water until it covers it?” “Put water in until water covers your hand!” “Covers my hand? Covers my hand until where?” “Until it covers the top of your hand!” I held the phone against my shoulder, my left hand submerged under water, laid flat on the surface of the white rice. “How many cups is that?” “Honey, I don’t know, Mommy doesn’t use cup!”— Michelle Zauner
I'm Glad My Mom Died
Rated 4.8 out of 5
I tried to broach the subject gently one night when we were driving home from work, but Mom started screaming and saying she was losing control of the steering wheel and that I was causing her tremendous stress that was putting both of us in danger, so I quickly learned to never bring up the subject again. — Jennette McCurdy
Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life
Rated 5 out of 5
“What do you want?” he asked. The word want echoed in my head. Want, want, want. I groped for a way to speak my longing in the affirmative, not just blurt out how I didn’t want to die alone.
— Christie Tate
If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing
Rated 3.8 out of 5
Feminism & Sex
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
Rated 5 out of 5
So why is it that young women get the harshest dose of criticism for vocal fry, uptalk, like, and other hedges? According to linguists, the way that these speech qualities are perceived has way less to do with the thing being said and way more to do with who’s saying it. — Amanda Montell
Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy
Rated 4.3 out of 5
Is it honestly possible to feel safe and secure in a capitalist society that defines our human value based on what we do and how much we make, rather than who we are?
[…]
In polyamory, we need the internal security of being anchored in our inner strength and inner nurturer to navigate a relationship structure that is considerably less secure.
Shameless: A Sexual Reformation
Rated 4 out of 5
In my pastoral work I’ve started to suspect that the more someone was exposed to religious messages about controlling their desires, avoiding sexual thoughts, and not lusting in their hearts, the less likely they are to be integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. […]
Sexual flourishing is for every type of body, every type of gender, every type of sex drive, every type of human. — Nadia Bolz-Weber
Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays
Rated 4 out of 5
What I’m saying is, you can walk down the street in any major city and hear a straight woman at brunch, spilling her strawberry mimosa, shouting, “I wish I was a lesbian—it’d make everything so much EASIER” at anyone who’ll hear her. Which like, okay, lots to unpack there—you know anyone can be gay, right? Like, if you want to date women, you just… can? Also, being gay isn’t “easier”—have you heard of homophobia? But what the brunching straight woman is trying to signal, above all, is that she knows—like Listerine knows—that being queer, or even liking queer people, is cool now. — Jill Gutowitz
We Should All Be Feminists
Rated 3.4 out of 5
Romance & Luuuurve
Book Lovers
Rated 4.7 out of 5
The last time my boss, Amy, went home with an un-vetted woman, she turned out to have a room that was entirely dolls. Floor-to-ceiling ceramic dolls. How inconvenient would it be to fall in love with a person only to find out they had a doll room? The answer is “very.” — Emily Henry
Nora Goes Off Script
Rated 4.7 out of 5
The Shaadi Set-Up
Rated 4 out of 5
Delilah Green Doesn't Care
Rated 4 out of 5
When In Rome
Rated 3.7 out of 5
Husband Material
Rated 4.5 out of 5
Bridge was sitting beside me, wearing a penis hat and, like all of the guests, a T-shirt that, owing to a miscommunication on the phone with the printers, read Bridge’s Bitches No Oliver I Think It’s Fine We’re Using It in the Reclaimed Sense and Anyway It’s Too Late to Change. — Alexis Hall
It's Been A Pleasure Noni Blake
Rated 3 out of 5
Just Haven't Met You Yet
Rated 3 out of 5
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Rated 3 out of 5
The Summer I Turned Pretty & It's Not Summer Without You
Rated 3 out of 5
The Unhoneymooners
Rated 3.2 out of 5
Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble
Rated 3.2 out of 5
Some Data About What I Read
Last year, I read 44 books. This year, I read 60 (or 71 if you include the quick & dirty Bridgerton novels).
I also made a list of 13 books I wanted to read, and managed to finish 7 of those I intended to pick up.
- The Midnight Library – Matt Haig
- The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy
- House on the Cerulean Sea – TJ Klune
- The Psychology of Money – Morgan House
- Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World – Tomás Prower
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World – David Epstein
- The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Somebody’s Daughter – Ashley C. Ford
- Sunreach – Brandon Sanderson
- Wallet Activism – Tanja Hester
- We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngoni Adichie
- Why We Sleep: Unlocking The Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker
- Women Don’t Owe You Pretty – Florence Given
How Many Books Were Written By Female Vs. Male Authors?
About a one fifth (11) I read were written by men. Interestingly, I also read 11 books by men last year! The rest (49) were written by women.
Since being more intentional about reading books by women when nearly all the book lists I read online tend to be male-dominated, I’ve definitely noticed a shift in tone over time. I picked up The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel, after a long stretch of reading women authors. It struck me that nearly all of his examples, quotes, and studies were by men.
I didn’t do a breakdown of race this year, mostly because it’s a time-intensive task on top of an already extensive post. I should get better at collecting this data as I go so it’s not so tricky. Some authors have bios or photos that provide this information, but it feels problematic to judge based off of photos. At least with gender, authors typically include their pronouns in their bios, but don’t volunteer their race.
Also, several authors in my list this year identify as queer, trans, or otherwise outside of the cis-het ‘default’. I’d love to see this number increase, and to add more categories than just male and female authors. If anyone knows of an app that can gather information about the books we read, I would be so grateful!
Top Recommendations
It’s tricky to pick just a few but I’d say the books I think everyone should read are two that taught me the most and introduced new studies and ideas I’d never thought about before:
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell
Both books made me reconsider my assumptions, words, and culture in ways I hadn’t thought critically about before. I also just finished Wordslut so I potentially have a bit of recency bias, but I loved learning more about the history of language, swearing, and what our language reveals about our beliefs.
For a fun book, I’d tell a friend to read either Dune, Lessons From Chemistry, or Book Lovers, depending on what genre strikes their fancy.
Currently reading....
Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle
by Emily Nagowksi
Lessons in Chemistry is next on my list. I love Taylor Jenkins Reid, so will have to pick up the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo next. Great list – thanks for sharing – and that pizza looks amazing!
Do you have a different favorite of Taylor Jenkins Reid? I was thinking of picking up Malibu.
A friend got me Burnout. Let’s discuss when we’ve both finished reading! And I LOVE Amanda Montell. Do you listen to her podcast, “Sounds Like a Cult”?
No, I didn’t realize she was the one behind that pod! I’ll have to check it out, I enjoyed both of her books immensely. For sure let’s chat about Burnout!