2019 Reads

Here's the list of books I read in 2019! I had my goal set at 120, which is what I had the previous year and I felt comfortable with it, but then in the first few months, I was reading a ton and figured I could up it to 150. Then I got pregnant and was horribly sick for the last half of the year and didn't quite succeed in meeting my goal. My overall number of books read was 138, still my highest ever! Here's the breakdown:

January

• Today Will Be Different, Maria Semple
• Greenglass House, Kate Milford
• Cravings: Hungry for More, Chrissy Teigen
• *I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown
• The Joy of Less, Francine Jay
• The Thousandth Floor, Katharine McGee
• *A Little Something Different, Sandy Hall
• Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler
• *You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie
• *Never Have I Ever, Katie Heaney
• The Best of Adam Sharp, Graeme Simsion
• Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
• *Teach Like Finland, Timothy D. Walker
• The Bright Hour, Nina Riggs
• *Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert
• I've Got Your Number, Sophie Kinsella
• Nine Perfect Strangers, Liane Moriarty
• The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Stephen Greenblatt
• *This Is Where You Belong, Melody Warnick

February

• The Sky Is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson
• The Memoir Project, Marion Roach Smith
• The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin
• The Invisibles, Cecilia Galante
• All the Bright Places, Jennifer Niven
• Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld
• The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh

March

• *Back Talk, Danielle Lazarin
• My Glory Was I Had Such Friends, Amy Silverstein
• *Intuitive Eating, Evelyn Tribole
• No Exit, Taylor Adams
• On the Come Up, Angie Thomas
• *The Garden of Small Beginnings, Abbi Waxman
• Small Admissions, Amy Poeppel
• *The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker
• The Great Alone, Kristin Hannah
• Outer Order, Inner Calm, Gretch Rubin
• *The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, Mackenzi Lee
• Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
• *Atomic Marriage, Curtis Sittenfeld
• Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
• The Lonesome Bodybuilder, Yukiko Motoya
• Season, Nik Sharma
• The Identicals, Elin Hilderbrand

April

• The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes
• *The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer
• Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
• Limelight, Amy Poeppel
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
• *Becoming, Michelle Obama
• The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal
• Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda
• Food52 Vegan, Gena Hamshaw
• Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Rhoda Janzen
• Second April, Edna St. Vincent, Millay

May

• From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg
• *A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara
• Training School for Negro Girls, Camille Acker
• *Dreamland Burning, Jennifer Latham
• Doña Barbara, Romulo Gallegos
• *The Woman in the Window, A.J. Finn
• The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
• *Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• My Abuela's Table, Daniella Germain
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
• *The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
• The Last Romantics, Tara Conklin

June

• *Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• *The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
• *Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi
• Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston
• The River, Peter Heller
• At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien
• The Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer

July

• *Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
• Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh
• I Gave Her a Name, Rachel Hunt Steenblik
• Circe, Madeline Miller
• *Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
• Places I Stopped on the Way Home, Meg Fee
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Eating from the Ground Up, Alana Chernila
• 1984, George Orwell

August

• Poetry 180, Billy Collins
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
• *The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
• If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes
• *How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
• Evvie Drake Starts Over, Linda Holmes
• *The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
• Martha Stewart's Slow Cooker, Martha Stewart
• The Mac and Cheese Cookbook, Erin Wade
• Food52 Mighty Salads, Food52
• The Street, Ann Petry
• *Save Me the Plums, Ruth Reichl

September

• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
• *The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
• *The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
• The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
• *Stay with Me, Ayobami Adebayo
• Antoni in the Kitchen, Antoni Porowski
• The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker

October

• 12 Million Black Voices, Richard Wright
• To Night Owl from Dogfish, Holly Goldberg Sloan
• *The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, Rob Thomas
• Tell Me Three Things, Julie Buxbaum
• *An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green
• The Boyfriend List, E. Lockhart
• Normal People, Sally Rooney
• *Mr. Kiss and Tell, Rob Thomas
• *Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith
• The Ensemble, Aja Gabel
• Through the Woods, Emily Carroll
• This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki
• Dosa Kitchen, Nash Patel
• *Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
• The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang
• *A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
• *And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

November

• *The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley
• *Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi
• The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
• Great With Child, Beth Ann Fennelly
• *The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Expecting Better, Emily Oster
• *Bread and Wine, Shauna Niequist
• Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, Ina May Gaskin
• Excuse Me, Liana Finck

December

• *Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
• *The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
• The Testaments, Margaret Atwood
• *Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• Irreversible Things, Lisa Van Orman Hadley
• Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie
• What We Were Promised, Lucy Tan
• *The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow
• What to Expect When You're Expecting, Heidi Murkoff

* indicates an audiobook listen

Out of my 138 books, 47 were audiobooks, with the rest being paper books or ebooks. Some of my favorite reads of the year were Becoming, The Age of Innocence, and Little Women. A few other books that have been very impactful and stayed with me are A Little Life, The Street, and Ina May's Guide to Childbirth.

Here's to more great reading in 2020!