2019 Book Reading in Review

In 2019, I finished and reviewed 40 books, the same as in 2018. Technically, I read two more books than 2018, since I've finished two books (one just before midnight) that I've not yet reviewed, but I'll stick with counting only those books for which I've published a review. I did a little bit better this year in spreading my reading out over the year instead of only reading on vacation. Finding time to write reviews was another matter; apologies for the flood of catch-up reviews in the last week of December.

I met both of my reading goals for last year — maintaining my current reading pace and catching up on award winners and nominees — but only barely in both cases. 2020 will bring schedule and life changes for me, and one of my goals is to carve out more room for daily reading.

I have 10 out of 10 ratings to two books this year, one fiction and one non-fiction. The novel was Arkady Martine's exceptional debut A Memory Called Empire, which is one of the best science fiction novels I've read. It's populated with a fully imagined society, wonderful characters, political maneuvering, and a thoughtful portrayal of the cultural impact of empire and colonialism. I can hardly wait for the sequel.

The non-fiction book was On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger, a brilliant piece of investigative journalism that looks at the working conditions of the modern American working class through the lens of an Amazon warehouse job, a call center, and a McDonald's. If you want to understand how work and life feels to the people taking the brunt of the day-to-day work in the United States, I cannot recommend it highly enough. These jobs are not what they were ten or twenty years ago, and the differences may not be what you expect.

The novels that received 9 out of 10 ratins from me in 2019 were The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, and The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. Kowal's novel is the best fictional portrayal of anxiety that I've ever read (with bonus alternate history space programs!) and fully deserves its Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Pilcher's novel is outside of my normal genres, a generational saga with family drama and some romance. It was a very satisfying vacation book, a long, sprawling drama that one can settle into and be assured that the characters will find a way to do the right thing.

On the non-fiction side, I gave a 9 out of 10 rating to Bad Blood, John Carreyou's almost-unbelievable story of the rise and fall of Theranos, the blood testing company that reached a $10 billion valuation without ever having a working product. And, to close out the year, I gave a 9 out of 10 rating to Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer's English, a collection of advice on the English language from a copy editor. If you love reading books about punctuation trivia or grammatical geeking, seek this one out.

The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.