2019 Reading Review — Anthony Randazzo
In 2019, I read 61 books, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, essay collections, and fairly thick tomes. My top 12 are listed below (though I’m cheating an listing all four of The Years of Lyndon Johnson series as one 3,000+ page book). This year included some of my usual interests in economics and tech, but a higher than usual amount of science-fiction-fantasy from Neal Stephenson (The Fall, Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash) and Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys, Neverwhere). Plus, upon review it turns out I totally unintentionally started the year with Handmaid’s Tale and ended it with The Testaments.
Long-time friends will recognize this format as my annual reading list post. I’ve started posting reviews of each book I read on Instagram with Caroline under the hashtag #caroninoreads — and I continue to use Goodreads to keep track too.
Let me know what from your list I should add this year. Here are the 12 best books I read last year:
- The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
- Notes on a Foreign Country (Suzy Hansen)
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Robert A. Caro) —four parts, the best being Master of the Senate
- The Way We Eat Now (Bee Wilson)
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari)
- The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (Rick Atkinson)
- Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Francis Fukuyama)
- Calypso (David Sedaris)
- The Topeka School (Ben Lerner)
- Girl, Woman, Other (Bernardine Evaristo)
- Lost Children Archive (Valeria Luiselli)
- An Improvised Life (Alan Arkin)
Honorable mentions — “Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture,” “Cryptonomicon,” “Power Ball: Anatomy of Modern Baseball;” “After War: Political Economy of Exporting Democracy;” “The Upstarts; God: A Human History,” “Snow Crash”
Originally published at https://www.anthonyrandazzo.com on January 1, 2020.