At the end of 2016, as part of my general annual soul-searching I decided that I needed to spend more time reading. Really since grad school I had allowed my reading to trail off as I spent more time on the internet, etc. to the point where I read only 16 books in 2016, most of those during a two week vacation in the fall.
So, in 2017 I wanted to re-establish a daily habit of reading more books and set a fairly ambitious goal of reading a book a week. Additionally, I wanted to read more fiction (I tend to read mostly nonfiction) and books by non-white dudes.
Good news first: I’m happy to say I easily beat my overall goal and read 60 books last year! That’s 17,974 pages, according to Goodreads.
Unfortunately, I did less well on the sub-goals. A quick analysis of the books I read last year showed that only 12 of 60 (20%) were fiction and, slightly better but still not great, 26 of the 60 (43%) were by non-white dudes.
Loosely assigning topics to the books I read didn’t revel anything terribly surprising, mostly topics I tend to read a lot about anyway:
- Biography/Memoir/History – 14 of 60 (23%)
- Food/Farming – 12 of 60 (20%)
- Tech/Media/Journalism/Writing – 10 of 60 (17%)
- Planning/Urbanism – 8 of 60 (13%)
- Racism/Feminism – 7 of 60 (12%)
- Power/Autocracy/Resistance – 7 of 60 (12%)
- Appalachian History/Culture – 4 of 60 (7%)
Of the 60, here are a baker’s dozen that stood out (for various reasons):
- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
- Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity, and Community by Amy D. Clark
- The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South by John T. Edge
- The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
- Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945 by Ronald D. Eller
- Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by Eric Foner
- The Market Gardener: A Handbook for Successful Small-Scale Organic Farming by Jean-Martin Fortier
- Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes by Ronni Lundy
- Meyer’s Bakery: Bread and Baking in the Nordic Kitchen by Claus Meyer
- Webfont Handbook by Bram Stein
- Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams
- Black Boy by Richard Wright
And the rest…
- Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams
- On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
- BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts by Stella Parks
- How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegia
- The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
- Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- The Southern Foodways Alliance Guide to Cocktails by Sara Camp Milam
- A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski
- Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
- This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
- Cities for People by Jan Gehl
- Umami by Laia Jufresa
- Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line by Michael Gibney
- The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning by Le Corbusier
- Garden Cities of To-Morrow by Ebenezer Howard
- Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck
- The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener by Eliot Coleman
- Animation at Work by Rachel Nabors
- Color Accessibility Workflows by Geri Coady
- Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area by Harry M. Caudill
- The Grifters by Jim Thompson
- Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer by Margot Morrell
- The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton
- We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The Cave by Jose Saramago
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
- Compact Farms: 15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or Less by Josh Volk
- Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroh
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch
- Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security by Masanobu Fukuoka
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
- China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
- Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit by Andrew Moore
- The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte
- The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship by Anjan Sundaram
- The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
- Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky
I’m going to try to keep this up for 2018, roughly the same goals. Hopefully I’ll do better on the diversity front, but if you have any great fiction you’d like to recommend, let me know. I’d love to hear what some of your favorites have been recently.