Category: Books & Poetry

2023 Reading List

Keeping track of the books I read in 2023. What is on your reading list?
Other lists: 2022 reads, 2020-2021 reads, books written by amazing humans in my life.

FICTION

  1. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois – Honorée Fanonne Jeffers [January]
  2. Black Cake – Charmaine Wilkerson [January]
  3. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley [January]
  4. Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin [January]
  5. Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus [March]
  6. The Color Purple – Alice Walker [March]
  7. Beloved – Toni Morrison [April]
  8. Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami [April]

NON-FICTION

  1. The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles  – Bruce Lipton [January]
  2. I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman – Nora Ephron [February]
  3. No One Tells You This: A Memoir – Glynnis MacNicol [March]
  4. Scattered Minds – Gabor Maté [April]

2022 Reading List

Here are the books I read in 2022. What were you excited to read this year?

FICTION

  1. The Sellout – Paul Beatty – READ April 2022
  2. Must Love Otters – Eliza Gordon – READ April 2022
  3. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger – READ September 2022
  4. Fleishman is in Trouble – Taffy Brodesser-Akner – READ August 2022
  5. Deacon King Kong – James McBride – READ June 2022
  6. Kafka by the Shore – Haruki Murakami –READ December 2022
  7. The Sentence – Louise Erdrich – READ December 2022

NON-FICTION

  1. The 4-Hour Work Week – Tim Ferriss – READ January 2022
  2. Tiny Beautiful Things– Cheryl Strand – READ May 2022
  3. Awakening: Conversations with the Masters – Anthony de Mello – READ May 2022
  4. Untamed – Glennon Doyle – READ May 2022
  5. Nice White Ladies – Jessie Daniels – READ October 2022
  6. Broken Open – Elizabeth Lesser – READ November 2022
  7. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches – Audre Lorde – READ December 2022

Some of my Favourite Reads of 2018-2021

Reading is my preferred way of consuming stories and media.
Here’s a list of some favourite reads (in no particular order) of the past 2 years

FICTION

  1. 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami *my favourite read of 2020
  2. Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens
  3. My Sister, the Serial Killer: A Novel – Oyinkan Braithwaite
  4. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
  5. Conversations with Friends: A Novel – Sally Rooney
  6. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern
  7. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
  8. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  9. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
  10. The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe series Book 1) – Raymond Chandler
  11. Less (Pulitzer Prize) – Andrew Sean Greer
  12. The Sympathizer (Pulitzer Prize)- Viet Thanh Nguyen
  13. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
  14. Crazy Rich Asians – Kevin Kwan
  15. Where’d You Go, Bernadette – Maria Semple
  16. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sáenz
  17. Beautiful You – Chuck Palaniuk
  18. Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler
  19. The Rosie Project – Graeme Simsion
  20. The Martian – Andy Weir
  21. The Girl on the Train – Paul Hawkins
  22. The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd
  23. Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend & Rich People Problems – Kevin Kwan
  24. Indian Killer – Sherman Alexie
  25. Men without Women – Haruki Murakami
  26. Dune – Frank Herbert
  27. Daisy Jones & the Six: A Novel – Taylor Jenkins Reid
  28. Snow Crash – Neil Stephenson
  29. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
  30. The Bell Jar– Sylvia Plath
  31. Evvie Drake Starts Over – Linda Holmes
  32. Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

Non-Fiction

  1. Bad Feminist: Essays – Roxane Gay
  2. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide – Carol Anderson
  3. Dear Girls – Ali Wong
  4. Born to Run – Christopher McDougall
  5. Open: An Autobiography – Andre Agassi
  6. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup – John Carreyrou
  7. The Last Girl – Nadia Murad
  8. The Girl Who Smiled Beads – Clemantine Wamariya
  9. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law – Haben Girma
  10. My Horizontal Life – Chelsea Handler
  11. Awareness – Anthony de Mello
  12. The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders – John E. Sarno
  13. The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk 
  14. Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison – Piper Kerman
  15. Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself – Melody Beattie
  16. Everybody lies – Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  17. The Art of Asking – Amanda Palmer
  18. The War of Art – Steven Pressfield
  19. Being Mortal – Atul Gawande
  20. Modern Romance – Aziz Ansari
  21. Bossy Pants – Tina Fey
  22. Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  23. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
  24. Hillbilly Elegy – J.D. Vance
  25. The Everything Store – Brad Stone
  26. Gang Leader for the Day – Sudhir Venkatesh
  27. Night – Elie Wiesel
  28. White Rage – Carol Anderson
  29. Funny in Farsi – Firoozeh Dumas

Fantastic books created by some of the amazing humans in my life.

Looking for some new reads? I can recommend the following by some of the incredible humans I’ve been fortunate to connect with.

  1. The Girl Who Smiled Beads; A Story of War and What Comes After – Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil, 2018
  2. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law – Haben Girma, 2019
  3. Talking to Robots – David Ewing Duncan, 2019
  4. The Little Girl, The Ocean, and The Moon: A Children’s Book – Ivy Kwong, 2019
  5. What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers – Jessica Pearce Rotondi
  6. The Laws of Brand Storytelling: Win—and Keep—Your Customers’ Hearts and Minds – Ekaterina Walter & Jessica Gioglio
  7. Neo Life: 25 Visions for the Future of Our Species – Edited by Jane Metcalfe & Brian Bergstein
  8. The Elevation Approach: Harness the Power of Work-Life Harmony to Unlock Your Creativity, Cultivate Joy, and Reach Your Biggest Goals – Tina Wells with Stephanie Smith, 2023