2019: A Year of Books

What I learned from my 2019 resolution to read a book per week

Similar to many people, I started off 2019 with a list of resolutions. The goal as always was self-improvement and self-investment. Some goals, like beating my best 5K running time, didn’t happen (or come particularly close). One ambitious goal — to read one book per week for the entire year — was accomplished.

Social media is filled with year-end reading lists, and I don’t expect this write-up to stand out in a crowded field. I’m also aware that there is a sort of perceived hubris in publishing lists like these — “Hey, everybody, check out my accomplishment!” I’ll certainly admit a degree of pride in this endeavour. Reading this much takes time, dedication, and rebalancing leisure moments away from the seduction of TV watching and “vegging out.” However, I hope this reflection can serve as a guide or source of inspiration for those looking to add reading as a personal goal for themselves.

Reading a book per week during 2019 was an unexpected joy, rather than a burden. While I expected to find myself scrambling to finish a book each week, I instead had the opposite experience — I started outpacing my original goal. Instead of scrapping my way to 52 books as expected, I ended the year at 60. No one was more surprised than me. Reading was not a tedium to be tolerated, it was something I looked forward to, particularly as I found myself in more airports for work than usual in 2019. Whenever I happened to open a book, I felt my worldview expand and my spark of wanting to learn for the sake of learning reinvigorated. Each turn of the page revealed something new — an idea, a feeling, a challenge. It was wonderful.

To all those considering a similar goal — be it a book a month or just to read more — I hope you experience something similar. To help those looking ahead to 2020, I hope these reflections and learnings can be helpful for you.

1. Aim for variety

Some people consider themselves exclusively tied to a certain type of book: “I’m a fantasy person”, “I only read non-fiction.” While I probably have more eclectic tastes than most people, my reading goal was an opportunity for expanding my horizons. Instead of focusing exclusively on one type of book or genre, I found it fun to mix things up.

I sought out new review sites and blogs discussing books that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to. Additionally, I also used a spreadsheet to track some basic information about the books I was reading like fiction vs. non-fiction, genre, author nationality, author gender, year published, and book length (In case it wasn’t clear from my 2019 goal, I am somewhat of a nerd). Whenever I saw myself going getting too pigeonholed, I’d force myself back out.

By forcing variety, I happened upon amazing experiences I would have otherwise missed. For example, my fianceé and I noticed that my reading-list was heavy on male authors. This set me seeking more books by women, starting with Helen Macdonald’s excellent H is for Hawk. I would not normally have gravitated towards this first-person narrative about a University of Cambridge professor raising a goshawk to work through the grief after her father’s death, but I’m glad I did.

At a normal reading cadence, I’d probably index naturally towards biographies and novels. However, if you’re challenging yourself to read more, also think about reading more broadly too.

2. Do what works for you

It’s not entirely fair to say that I “read” all 60 books this year. In fact, many of them were consumed via Audible, particular during runs as I trained for my yearly marathon. Some people are quick to say “Well, isn’t that cheating?” I think it misses the point of the challenge. Your goal shouldn’t be to prove that you’re a fast reader. It should be to invest in your mind.

Since reading is personal activity, no single process works for everyone. To that end, I recommend doing what comes naturally or comfortably. For me, this included audiobooks in addition to physical ones. In fact, my favorite book this year was consumed on Audible: Robert A. Caro’s monumental Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. While I’d love to have read this 1336-page tome, I found the 66-hour audiobook more enjoyable — particularly as I ran around San Francisco and was in a good mindframe to think about urban planning and development. While I have many friends who prefer reading on Kindles or other e-readers, I almost always prefer physical books (the one exception this year being John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism which was free online).

Additionally, I also didn’t feel like I had to finish a book before starting the next. More often than not, I had multiple books going at once and picked up the one I was most excited about at that moment. At one point, I had 5 books going at once. Some books I finished in a single sitting, others like Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays stretched over multiple months until I was in the right mindset.

Do what works for you. Be comfortable and don’t set silly rules that detract from what should be a fun experience.

3. Make reading a group activity

One of my first feelings upon finishing a really great book is almost always: “Wow, I wish I had someone to share this with.” I naturally find that making reading a social activity made it that much more enjoyable. In 2019, I was part of two book clubs and formed a number of one-off reading partnerships to augment reading with discussions.

Rather than finish a book and add it silently to the shelf, I enjoyed setting up drinks and dinner with people. It was particularly fun when the author’s homeland and cuisine lined up (e.g. Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at a Russian bakery). Even when that didn’t happen (Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s Hunger at Li Po Cocktail Lounge!?), I almost always enjoyed the reading experience more with friends.

In addition to the enjoyment aspect, social gatherings also forced me to explore books from new viewpoints. Clemantine Wamariya’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood were more profound as others shared their own racial discrimination experiences. Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents took on more depth through the eyes of friends who had immigrated to America or whose parents had. And it’s hard to separate John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup from the startup storytelling that followed from friends in the Bay Area.

In my copy of E.B. White’s Here is New York a previous owner left the following note on the title page:

“Wishing you delight and happiness as you discover your New York — and pleasure as you read here of someone else’s.”

Even this small touch of person-to-person connection made the experience of reading that much more wonderful.

4. Knock out your reading list, then explore

If most readers are like me, it’s fair to guess they have a backlog of books that they’ve “always been meaning to get to.” For example, I’ve been meaning to read Neil Stephensen’s Cryptonomicon, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden for years. After increasing my reading velocity, it was surprising how quickly I got through this mental backlog and was left with greenfield opportunities for exploration. Once you get through the “this is what I should read” queue, that’s when the fun really begins.

Once I was clear of my backlog, I was clear to follow my curiosity into new areas. These new areas often left me wanting to learn more, which I’d do with another book that was tangentially related or had been referenced. Paired with my desire for variety, I felt like I increased my knowledge and deepened it in multiple areas as diverse as Latin American history, moral philosophy, football (or, er… soccer), freedom of speech legal precedents, Native American experiences, and artificial intelligence.

Reading goals can be used as an opportunity to expand your reading horizons. Unburden yourself of your bedside stack of books and start creating new ones.

5. Consume, then create

One of the goals of the 2019 reading challenge was to reduce my personal “consumption” habits of watching Netflix and HBO shows or spending time reading low-value Internet articles. I think this exercise was successful in doing that, as I found myself reading more compared to getting hooked to another television series. However, I’m also left with the feeling that while I replaced mindless content consumption with intellectual content consumption, I’m still doing a lot of consuming.

I’m regularly left in awe of great writing. The creativity that goes into a science fiction classic like Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is amazing. The research and dedication required to produce David McCullough’s 1776 or Robert Caro’s Power Broker is hard to comprehend. The brilliant introspection apparent in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, or Ernestine Hayes’ The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir is moving. I got goosebumps and had to go for a walk after reading Camus’ immortal line “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” from The Myth of Sisyphus. Great writing is a beautiful art.

As I look ahead to next year, I’m planning on acting on these feelings. While 2019 was focused on consuming books, I want 2020 to be about creation. Instead of completing a book a week, I’d like to write something a week — a blog, a long letter or email, etc. It’s also — as you may have guessed — one of the reasons for writing this year end reflection.

A retrospective

Reading a book away sounds like a crazy New Years resolution, particularly when you factor in all the time needed for normal life activities like sleep, friends and family time, and work. It requires patience and dedication (and a supportive significant other in my case). But, as with many large challenges, there’s much joy to be found in the pursuit of something noble and audacious. I hope this blog helps whoever may be setting out on a similar challenge, and that you find the same delight that I did.

The Top 5 (in no particular order after #1)

While 2019 introduced me to a number of great books, a few stand out from the rest. Below is my personal list of top 5:

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro (1974)
• The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1956)
• 1776 by David McCullough (2005)
• The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet by Jeff Kosseff (2019)
• Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel (2009)

My 2019 Reading List: Data Review

As mentioned earlier, I tracked my reading list in Google sheets to ensure diversity of reading. Here’s a glimpse at that data:

• Of the 60 books, 26 (43.3%) were fiction, while 34 were non-fiction (56.7%). I’ve definitely noticed that I’ve been leaning more towards non-fiction in recent years, whereas I used to be a heavy novel reader.
• Of the 26 fiction books, the most popular genres were novels with 14 (53.8%) and science fiction with 4 (15.4%).
• Of the 34 non-fiction books, the most popular genres were biography with 7 (20.6%), history with 6 (17.6%), and political science with 5 (14.7%). Biographies included those of Michelle Obama, Clemantine Wamariya, Karl Marx, Robert Moses, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Simón Bolívar, and Alex Ferguson.
• US authors dominated my reading list at 35 (58.3%). Other countries represented were Brazil, Chile, China, Dominica, Domincan Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.
• The reading list was disproportionately male-dominated. Men accounted for 44 books (73.3%) compared to women at 16 books (26.7%). This isn’t great, and I’ll be expanding my books by women authors going forward.
• My 2019 books had on average 356 pages with a median of 325 pages. Overall, a nice distribution emerges (see chart below). Ah, nerd charts.
• By decade, there’s a clear skew towards more recent books. The last decade of 2010 to 2019 accounted for 32 books (52.3%). A full 12 books (20%) came from 2019 alone.

My 2019 Reading List (In Order)

1. Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephensen (1999, Fiction, Sci-Fi, US 🇺🇸, 918 pages)
2. Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu (2004, Fiction, Sci-Fi, China 🇨🇳, 352 pages)
3. The Captain’s Verses by Pablo Neruda (1952, Fiction, Poetry, Chile 🇨🇱, 160 pages)
4. Becoming by Michelle Obama (2018, Non-Fiction, Biography, US 🇺🇸, 400 pages)
5. The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil (2018, Non-Fiction, Biography, US 🇺🇸, 288 pages)
6. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark (2017, Non-Fiction, Technology, Sweden 🇸🇪- US 🇺🇸, 384 pages)
7. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853, Fiction, Novel, UK 🇬🇧, 912 pages)
8. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000, Non-Fiction, Comedy, US 🇺🇸, 288 pages)
9. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Gen. Stanley McChrystal (2015, Non-Fiction, Business / Management, US 🇺🇸, 304 pages)
10. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber (2013, Non-Fiction, Biography, US 🇺🇸, 672 pages)
11. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro (1974, Non-Fiction, Biography, US 🇺🇸, 1336 pages)
12. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr (2019, Non-Fiction, History, US 🇺🇸, 528 pages)
13. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (2018, Non-Fiction, Business / Management, US 🇺🇸, 352 pages)
14. The Vanishing Man (Charles Lenox Mysteries, Book 12) by Charles Finch (2019, Fiction, Mystery, US 🇺🇸, 304 pages)
15. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (1902, Fiction, Novel, US 🇺🇸- UK 🇬🇧, 544 pages)
16. The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War by Arkady Ostrovsky (2015, Non-Fiction, History, Russia 🇷🇺, 374 pages)
17. Origin by Dan Brown (2017, Fiction, Novel, US 🇺🇸, 656 pages)
18. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki (2004, Non-Fiction, Political Science, US 🇺🇸, 336 pages)
19. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966, Fiction, Novel, Dominica 🇩🇲, 171 pages)
20. The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1956, Fiction, Play, Switzerland 🇨🇭, 109 pages)
21. Happy Days by Samuel Beckett (1960, Fiction, Play, Ireland 🇮🇪, 96 pages)
22. Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse (1932, Fiction, Novel, Germany 🇩🇪, 122 pages)
23. Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond (2019, Non-Fiction, Political Science, US 🇺🇸, 512 pages)
24. Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas by Stephen Budiansky (2019, Non-Fiction, Biography, US 🇺🇸, 592 pages)
25. Mr. Peters’ Connections by Arthur Miller (1999, Fiction, Play, US 🇺🇸, 56 pages)
26. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961, Fiction, Sci-Fi, US 🇺🇸, 438 pages)
27. Here Is New York by E.B. White (1949, Non-Fiction, Memoir, US 🇺🇸, 56 pages)
28. 1776 by David McCullough (2005, Non-Fiction, History, US 🇺🇸, 386 pages)
29. Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein (2017, Fiction, Novel, US 🇺🇸, 368 pages)
30. Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890, Fiction, Novel, Norway 🇳🇴, 232 pages)
31. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (1942, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, France 🇫🇷, 212 pages)
32. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (1904, Fiction, Play, Russia 🇷🇺, 97 pages)
33. A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book by John Barton (2019, Non-Fiction, History, UK 🇬🇧, 640 pages)
34. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (2018, Non-Fiction, Science, US 🇺🇸, 474 pages)
35. Who Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin Roth (2016, Non-Fiction, Economics, US 🇺🇸, 272 pages)
36. Fly Already: Stories by Etgar Keret (2019, Fiction, Short Stories, Israel 🇮🇱, 224 pages)
37. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984, Fiction, Sci-Fi, US 🇺🇸, 271 pages)
38. Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah (2016, Non-Fiction, Memoir, South Africa 🇿🇦, 304 pages)
39. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014, Non-Fiction, Memoir, UK 🇬🇧, 283 pages)
40. The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway (1986, Fiction, Novel, US 🇺🇸, 247 pages)
41. The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet by Jeff Kosseff (2019, Non-Fiction, Technology, US 🇺🇸, 328 pages)
42. The Round House by Louise Erdrich (2012, Fiction, Novel, US 🇺🇸, 321 pages)
43. The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman (2016, Non-Fiction, Science, US 🇺🇸, 352 pages)
44. The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir by Ernestine Hayes (2017, Non-Fiction, Memoir, US 🇺🇸, 192 pages)
45. Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth by Rachel Maddow (2019, Non-Fiction, Political Science, US 🇺🇸, 432 pages)
46. Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (2019, Fiction, Novel, UK 🇬🇧, 352 pages)
47. Do You Mind If I Cancel?: (Things That Still Annoy Me) by Gary Janetti (2019, Non-Fiction, Comedy, US 🇺🇸, 176 pages)
48. Bolívar: American Liberator by Marie Arana (2013, Non-Fiction, Biography, US 🇺🇸, 624 pages)
49. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (1991, Fiction, Novel, Domincan Republic 🇩🇴 — US 🇺🇸 , 336 pages)
50. The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector (1964, Fiction, Novel, Brazil 🇧🇷, 220 pages)
51. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963, Fiction, Novel, US 🇺🇸, 244 pages)
52. Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy (2009, Non-Fiction, History, US 🇺🇸, 448 pages)
53. The Vortex by Noël Coward (1924, Fiction, Play, UK 🇬🇧, 96 pages)
54. Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill (1863, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, UK 🇬🇧, 77 pages)
55. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (2019, Fiction, Novel, US 🇺🇸, 272 pages)
56. Alex Ferguson: My Biography by Alex Ferguson (2014, Non-Fiction, Biography, UK 🇬🇧, 416 pages)
57. The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg (2018, Non-Fiction, History, UK 🇬🇧, 368 pages)
58. On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis (2018, Non-Fiction, Political Science, US 🇺🇸, 384 pages)
59. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel (2009, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, US 🇺🇸, 320 pages)
60. The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (2019, Fiction, Novel, Japan 🇯🇵, 116 pages)