Notable 2018 Books

Sorry if you don't care about 2018 anymore, but I still do! Here are the books I read this year that I feel deserve reviews, books I truly loved and/or books that deeply moved me.

Fiction

• Dumplin, Julie Murphy
• This is a book about a fat teenage girl who isn't trying to lose weight and whose life doesn't change because she does. Besides being funny, an engaging story, and recently made into a movie on Netflix, this book was touching to me because stories of fat women are still super rare but super necessary. Lived it, loved it, and laughed about it.
• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
• This book tracks an African family as it splits, telling stories of the branch of the family that stayed in Africa and a branch of the family that was taken to America as slaves. Each chapter is a story about someone from the next generation, and it captures so many different facets of the experience of being African/African American/black. Most of the stories don't exactly have happy endings, and there were some graphic parts (I almost fainted while reading this on a plane). Overall, it was incredibly powerful, and though the emotional toll it took was severe, the flow of the writing and the vocabulary made for a fairly easy reading experience. This book stands as a reminder to me that books don't have to be intimidating to be valuable or literary.
• Love Walked In, Belong to Me, and I'll Be Your Blue Sky, Marisa de los Santos
• I read these first two books years ago and absolutely loved them as I love really good romance movies. The third one came out this year, so I reread them all and *fell in love* again. The stories are more complicated than an average romance, and what stands out to me is that I am so convinced at the emotions and reality of the characters. These books were a great summer read.
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
• I absolutely love books about friendship and find it very relatable and powerful when characters in books prioritize and work to enrich their friendships as I feel I do in my life. I have had this novel about two couples who become instant friends recommended to me several times and when I finally got around to reading it, I wished I had done it years earlier. It's beautiful, it's touching, it's timeless, and it has made me think a lot about the kind of friend and wife I want to be.
• An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
• This is a story of a wrongfully imprisoned black man and his wife. It was captivating, deep, moving, and made me think a lot about prison, marriage, and privilege.

Nonfiction/Memoir

• Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson
• This is also a book about imprisonment, but it's nonfiction and even more heartbreaking because of that. I heard about it from many people before I finally read it for a book club, and it is really worth all the hype. I believe it's important to have my eyes opened to worlds that I don't know about, and the world of prison and the death penalty is something that I knew so little about before reading this book. 
• Educated, Tara Westover
• This is another book that opened my eyes to a world that I knew about nothing about, despite sharing a religion with the family that the author grew up in. This book has also been getting a lot of deserved hype.  I recommend reading it not only to gawk at the differences that at times seem ridiculous but also to consider the ways that the abuse the author experienced may be more common than we think.
• Guide to Getting It On, Paul Joannides
• This is a book about how to have sex. I know that's something a lot of people figure out as teenagers or in their 20s, but I did not, and it was very helpful when I got married to have a literal guide. I really recommend this book if you are sexually active or preparing to be sexually active but don't feel confident that you know what to do.
• One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly, Ashley Mae Hoiland
• This is a spiritual memoir from a woman who shares my religion and I loved reading her perspective mostly because it inspired me to consider my own spirituality and remember that there is not one "right" way but rather a path for each person.
• So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo
• A hard truth about me is that I have a lot of what is sometimes called "white guilt." I want to be an ally to people of color and I want to fight against institutional racism. I also want constant validation that I am doing the right things and course-correction from people of color because I feel vulnerable and out of my comfort zone. On these fronts, this book was fairly damning to me, but it also helped me identify some places where I was going wrong and gave me some ideas about how to have difficult conversations.
• Good and Mad, Rebecca Traister
• This is a book about the "revolutionary power of women's anger" and wow, I am angry and it feels good. I learned about so many stories I didn't previously know, found some new role models, and got tons of good information to teach the students in my activism-themed Humanities class.
• Home Comforts, Cheryl Mendelson
• This is a reference book about the art and science of keeping house. I checked it out from the library and skimmed through the whole thing, reading deeply the parts that felt applicable, but I eventually decided to purchase my own copy because I just couldn't write down everything I needed to before I had to return it. The author is pretty critical of the way that I have always "kept house," which is dealing with things (from grocery shopping and laundry to lost or missing items and emergencies) as the need arises. Out of several compelling arguments in this book, the one I am attempting to implement now is creating a schedule for house chores so that there is a way to be "done" with housekeeping each day and everything will more or less run smoothly in the meantime.
• The Quotidian Mysteries, Kathleen Norris
• After Home Comforts convinced me of a better way to keep house, this book convinced me that doing so is not the drudgery I (and a lot of people) have always felt it is. The author compares daily chores to worshipping deity and talks about the transformative power of both. Essentially, we think that the things we have to do every day are unimportant things to rush through and finish as soon as possible, but really, these are the things that make up our lives. "It is the paradox of human life that in worship, as in human love, it is in the routine and the everyday that we find the possibilities for the greatest transformation... What we think we are only "getting through" has the power to change us... What we dread as mindless activity can free us, mind and heart." This book is short but packed with insights that I want to revisit again and again.
• Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
• A beautiful book about writing, especially fiction. As an English major and then an English teacher, I have definitely thought about writing a novel, but I've never even come close to actually doing it. If I ever do, I will return to this book again and again to revisit Anne Lamott's wisdom.
• Reading People, Anne Bogel
• I love personality tests so much that I taught a whole unit about getting to know yourself through personality tests to every student in my school at the beginning of this year (as part of the introduction to our new Humanities courses). This is a book about using several different personality tests to better understand who we are. If you're into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator but have never heard of the cognitive functions that actually determine our type, you should look into it and also read this book. So interesting!

Poetry

• Mother's Milk, Rachel Hunt Steenblik
• A beautiful book of poems about Heavenly Mother. I've shared this with a lot of people and all of them have been touched. 
• When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen
• I first read a poem by this gay Chinese-American poet through my poem-a-day subscription and loved it, so I requested a book of his poetry from the library. I believe taste in poetry is very personal and what works for some people doesn't work for everyone. Chen Chen definitely works for me.
• Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, Wendy Cope
• I first heard about Wendy Cope from the brilliant poem Differences of Opinion and everyone I found about her delighted me, so I found the only book I could get my hands on in the US (she's British). This book is bizarre at times, but some of the poems were delightful and I'm really impressed with her ability to say so much with so few words. Plus, her overall message seems to be "smash the patriarchy" and I just can't argue with that.

Cookbooks

• What's Gaby Cooking, Gaby Dalkin
• This a cookbook of "California food" which sounds so annoying and pretentious to someone from the East coast, but actually the book is beautiful and features a full-page picture for each recipe, which is a game-changer, and on my first look-through I marked more than half of the recipes to make. Since then, I've made a lot of them and they've all been delicious. If you love Chrissy Teigen's Cravings and have been looking for something similar, this is the book.
• The Food Lab, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
• This book takes a scientific approach to cooking the best version of several different foods and everything I've tried has been spot-on. It doesn't include desserts, which is a downside for me, and it's absolutely huge, which means I may never get to even considering every recipe, but it's a great book to have on hand.
• The Dinner Plan, Kathy Brennan
• This book that focuses on cooking dinner for a family is full of simple but delicious recipes. Every recipe falls into at least one of the following categories: make ahead, staggered, one-pot, extra fast, or pantry-based. Great book for getting ideas to cook for your family.
• All About Cake, Christina Tosi
• This is a book about cake from the owner/founder/chef of Milk Bar and if I was not totally sold on cake before reading this, I absolutely am now. This book talks a lot about the "flavor story" of cakes, which sounds so cheesy, but in reality has a huge effect on making a delicious cake. In the few weeks since I've had this book, I've made 3 of the recipes and tried one more. This book is compelling and informative and also includes weights for the full list of ingredients, meaning I don't have to take out any measuring cups or spoons. I didn't think I'd ever be so excited about cake!