I don’t have much to say about what I read in 2019, having written already about the books I loved the most.
Goodreads did a neat little wrap up:
Here they all are.
Jane Casey’s mystery series was excellent. I have put in an interlibrary loan request for the latest one.
The Almost Nearly Perfect People was a perfect book.
I want to be best friends or at least neighbors with Novella Carpenter.
Super Sushi Ramen Express is as perfect as the almost perfect people book. I wonder if he has published anything new?
Two books about books with the same title…
…My beloved Virginia Ironside, who wrote the quintessential book about grieving for, companion animals and is very funny about aging.
Natural Causes shares wisdom about when it is time to enjoy what is left of life without medical tests and interventions.
Christine Walkden, I want to be your best friend and neighbor. You, me, and Novella, living on the same block and visiting each other’s gardens.
Meg Wolitzer is a favourite novelist.
I decided to read mostly gardening books during gardening season. Although sometimes a new book by a favourite author or on a fascinating subject snuck in.
Plot 29 and Hidden Nature and The Ivington Diaries are wonderful and worth the cost of buying them from the UK.
I wanted to write better. Vivian Gornick’s book did not help as much as I hoped.
I cleaned houses for 18 years so found the cleaning book pretty gripping, even though I made a decent living out of it in Seattle.
How to Forget made me want to reread Mulgrew’s earlier memoir. I haven’t yet.
All the Monty Don books made me ever so happy. I liked The Plant Hunter better than garden lust.
I had fallen behind on Anne Lamott.
With gardening season winding down, I read books about the social internet and new books by some favourite authors.
I remembered how much I like Augusten Burroughs and realized that while I like David Sedaris’ memoirs, some of his earlier essays are downright mean.
Allan and I enjoyed The Leftovers telly series ever so much. So I had to read the novel, also good.
Daemon Voices –loved it but it still didn’t help me write better. 57 Bus–a tragic but uplifting true story. What Goes Up reminded me in painful ways of life with a bipolar partner.
Astoria is one of the best history books of my reading history.
….More gardening and social media, memoirs, and at least some mysteries, a staple of my winter reading. Mysteries are frustrating in summer when I cannot read a book in one day.
I went on to read the rest of the Edward trilogy into 2020; they went well with John Robison’s memoirs. Still disgruntled with mean David Sedaris.
The Last Gift of Time was my favourite memoir and in some ways my favourite book of 2019. Looking back, though, I probably loved The Ivington Diaries more. Maybe.
In looking at the next batch, I realized I had not recorded reading the excellent
…which explains why I then read The Liar’s Club and will soon read two more Mary Karr memoirs. Now that throws off Goodreads total of 125 books and however many pages..
The book without a title is the apparently obscure Monty Don gardening memoir, My Roots. The Rosie series continued with the Aspergers theme. I enjoyed the Yorkshire Dales detective series for the setting and for good writing.
I love Ruth Reichl.
Jennifer Weiner and Amy Schuman both had good things to say about feminism and beauty bullying of women. Both are stereotyped as “light” writers.
The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, which was an offshoot of reading The Last Gift of Time, was one of the best books of the year and had me start 2020 by reading some poetry. That’s something old…as I last read poetry in my 20s..and therefore something new.
Wow. I know a lot of voracious readers but you take the prize. And you read an impressive variety.
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Thanks; it’s because my life has two things, gardening and reading.
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A lovely cross section of good reading, and more than a few I will be looking for here. My garden book reading, including bios is poor because my library stocks almost nothing, including via their interlibrary loan system. Not a single Monty Don!
Sedaris. There is a fine line between the cutting edge of wit, and just cutting.
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I wish your library was better. I was so surprised when I moved here at how good ours is.
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That puts my five books to shame….but I do read a lot of newspapers.
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🙂
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I, too, was thinking, “Wow, she’s a voracious reader.” I looked up quite a few of these books such as “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter” and “Farm City” (I’ve read “Farm City” and I enjoyed it very much.). Only problem for me (which you can’t do much about) is that my library is SO limited and ordering books on inter- library loan can get costly.–$3-$6/book for postage. If you order a bunch, it adds up.
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I am so sad for friends who don’t have the great ILL system that we have.
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