I've been capturing my top books of each year since 2001! You can see all the lists here.
The first book I read in 2018 was You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie, a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene writer, and I adored it! I felt certain it would be the best book I would read all year, so I was devastated to learn several weeks later that Alexie had sexually harassed several women and abused his power. Yet another fallen hero who believes he has the right to claim women’s bodies as his own. #timesup Here are my top reads of 2018:
Fiction
1. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
2. The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
3. Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff
4. I, Eliza Hamilton, Susan Holloway Scott
5. My Name Is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout
6. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
7. Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, Susan Elia MacNeal
8. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
9. Silence, Shusaku Endo
10. Faithful, Alice Hoffman
11. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers*
12. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
Nonfiction
1. Becoming, Michelle Obama (still savoring)
2. The Guilty Feminist, Deborah Frances-White (still reading)
3. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond*4. How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston
5. Hunger: A Memoir of My Body, Roxane Gay
6. Dare to Lead, Brene Brown
7. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, Pamela Newkirk
8. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Jon Krakauer*
9. Lion, Saroo Brierly
10. Beyond the Messy Truth: How We Came Apart, How We Come Together, Van Jones
11. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson*
12. A Fine Romance, Candice Bergen
13. Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection, A.J. Jacobs*
*I continue to read books mostly by women and people of color. The asterisked books are by white men
