Brittany's Top 5 in 2018

I have never waited this long to write my end of the year post, and I really wish I hadn’t. I have already read 8 books this year and now 2019 and 2018 are swirling in my head. The way I feel right now in this moment about reading is clearly not how I felt for almost all of 2018. I read 22 books, which is just two more than my lowest year and a whopping 45 fewer than my highest year. I wrote 1 book review (joining the chorus of bloggers saying Sorry Chris!). In spite of my mostly lackluster year, I spent the last week of December at home with a large stack of books and fell back in love with reading.

By the Numbers

• 22 complete books read (8 audiobooks, 9 non-fiction or memoirs, 10 young adult, 1 book of poems, 1 book of short stories, 1 re-read
• 22 authors (the only repeat was Neal Shusterman)
• 16 women authors, 6 men authors
• 21 living, 1 dead (RIP Michelle McNamara)
• 14 authors with nationalities/ethnicities besides white American: Nigerian American (Nnedi Okorafor), Senegalese African American (Issa Rae), African American (Roxane Gay, Rebecca Hankins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Colson Whitehead), Latinx (Miguel Juárez, Celia C. Pérez is Mexican Cuban American, Elizabeth Acevedo is Dominican American, Benjamin Alire Sáenz and Erika L Sánchez are Mexican American), Creole and white (Nina LaCour), and British (Kate Atkinson)
• Note: every author in Where Are All the Librarians of Color? The Experiences of People of Color in Academia is written by a person of color, but for the ease of numbers I only included the editors in my calculations for this book

Things that stand out compared to previous years: I am no longer reading for grad school which definitely changes what my reading looks like. As it has every years since I finished my MA in English literature, the percentages of women authors continues to increase (57% in 2015, 62% in 2016, 66% in 2017). In 2018 72% of the authors I read were women. This year, like last year, about two-thirds of my authors were non-white or non-American.

Top Books

1 . Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I have nothing new to say about this short non-fiction book except that it is as excellent as everyone continuously says it is. It is absolutely essential reading for anyone who is not Black in America. It was especially important for me because I do read many books by Black women, but not very many by Black men. In 2017 I didn’t read a single book by a Black man, so I definitely need to hear what Coates is saying.

2 . Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

And yet, this year I picked up my first Roxane Gay book, and I can’t believe it took me so long. I read a lot of books written by or about women, but it is still a total luxury to pick up a book of short stories and know that every single one will center a woman’s story. I liked some stories more than others, but all of them made me feel something powerful.

3. The First Rule of Punk by Celia C. Pérez

This middle reader (recommended grades 3-6) is a top book for me because it does something almost no book has done: it reminds me of me. Like Malú, I have a white parent and a Mexican parent and I spent my youth listening to punk music, making zines, and getting dresscoded.

In the past few years I keep having these moments where I see a woman on the screen doing something that women never get to do (Ghostbusters, A Wrinkle In Time, Wonder Women) and think, “This is what men feel all the time.” Or I would see a person of color on the screen doing something POC never get to do (A Wrinkle In Time, Black Panther, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and think, “This is what white people feel all the time.” Reading this book brought me to tears because it was seeing me and my identity and my experiences on every single page. It was wonderful to read this in my 30s, but it would have been absolutely magical to read it when I was in school. Representation is so important, and I really hope the publishing pipeline starts valuing #ownvoices and #weneeddiversebooks.

4. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I am almost always a fan of a novel that has interconnected stories and shifting narrators, so I was interested in this book both for both its structure and subject. Randy and I read this book together in between watching Roots (the 1977 version). The novel and the miniseries helped contextualize each other, especially because I received a standard white American education when it came to slavery (which is to say I knew almost nothing until I went to college and started taking literature classes). I appreciated that I read it with Randy - it is a hard heavy book, and I am glad I didn’t have to process it alone.

5. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

I originally read this in 2010 or 2011. I have a vivid memory of finishing the book because friends were picking me up to go see a movie, and I sat in the backseat and ignored them while I finished the last few pages and cried. I have no idea what movie we saw. When I was teaching English, if I ever had the need for a perfect opening page or a perfect paragraph or a perfect sentence, I would reach for this book:

On the counter, she’d set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges.

I cannot look at a block of butter without thinking of this book, and I love lemon cake. Randy took this book on our annual two-week camping/road trip, and he finished it in Congaree National Park. I immediately picked it up and didn’t put it down until I was finished, sighing in the tent and turning off my headlamp. It’s scary to reread a book you love so much, especially if your life is very different than it was when you first held it to your chest, but this book is one that always feels like home.

Honorable Mentions

• The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo: a young adult novel told in verse by our protagonist, Xiomara Batista, a Dominican American living in Harlem. I listened to this as an audiobook, so I missed out on the pleasure of seeing the poems laid out on the page, but it is narrated by Acevedo herself which is a treat.
• Where Are All the Librarians of Color edited by Rebecca Hankins and Miguel Juárez: this edited volume has 13 chapters written exclusively by academic librarians of color. Librarianship is 86% white, but academic librarianship (librarians who work in colleges and universities in various capacities) is even whiter. I make up part of the 3% of academic librarians who are Latinx, so this book meant a lot to me.
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. The book follows eight people and families in Milwaukee, WI, one of the most segregated cities for renters in America. Six people are being evicted and two are landlords doing the evicting. I have been privileged enough to never face an eviction notice, so this book was particularly eye opening for me.