Reading retrospective
I had three goals for my reading this year and I met two of them:
✅ Read 20 books (I read 30 books)
✅ 40% of books read are by authors of color (the total was 42% which is up from 30% in 2021)
❌ Read more in Icelandic than in 2021 (I read only one book in Icelandic compared to a whopping two books in 2021)
Favorite book of the year
This was such a tough year to select a favorite for! I read quite a few really excellent books this year and several of them have stayed with me long after reading them. So instead of forcing myself to pick one book, this year I will present you with my top 3, in no particular order:
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- Know My Name by Chanel Miller
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
These three books honestly could not be more different from each other, so I won’t even try picking a single favorite out of the three. Project Hail Mary is an excellently written and super entertaining science-fiction with a surprisingly tender message at its heart. Know My Name is a memoir of a survivor of sexual assault, which you will not get rhrough reading without experiencing literally every emotion available to humankind. Finally, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a beautiful, poetic, heart-wrenching story of trauma, of growing into and accepting yourself, of family and the intergenerational impact of war. I highly recommend every one of these books, each for wildly different reasons.
Note from future me: this was really an unfair year to try to pick a favorite book. I am now reviewing this in June 2024, and I can’t believe that this is the same year that I read Pride and Prejudice, Crying in H Mart, Hunger: A Memoir of My Body and The Left Hand of Darkness which is a book I still think about at least once a week to this day.