What I Read – 2019

Over the month of December I shared some of favourite reads of 2019 in my Karissa Reads Books Literary Awards, so feel free to glance back over those posts if you’re curious about what I enjoyed reading this year. This post will focus on my overall reading statistics and at the end I’ll share a list of everything I read in 2019. This is mostly for my own amusement/recording.

• I read 104 books in 2019. This was 4 more than my goal of 100.
• 73 were fiction; 31 were non-fiction.
• 38 were by men; 68 were by women. Which does not add up to 104. Maybe I counted some DNF titles? I’m not going to go back and recount. The point is that women dominated.
• I Did Not Finish (DNFed) 9 titles. This number was actually lower than I expected because I felt like 2019 was the year I gave up on books more easily.
• I read 10 short story collections.
• Where did my books come from? 22 ARCs, 49 library books, 12 thrift store finds, 3 borrowed, and 13 were bought brand new. (This doesn’t include books that I’ve had so long I forgot where they came from.)
• Who wrote my books? The Americans narrowly took the lead with 40 titles. Despite my best efforts, Canada came second at 39. The English were strongly represented with 17 books. Ireland at 3 and then France and Iran with 2 each. Italian, Russian, Syrian, Polish, and Nigerian authors each had 1 title. Again, I’d like to work on diversity in my reading in 2020 but still keep a focus on Canadian writers.
• June was my best reading month (15 books); December was my very worst (1 book)

The Whole List:

January:

1. Article 353 – Tanguy Viel (Other Press, 2019)

2. Great Stories – Arthur Conan Doyle (John Murray, 1959)

3. Mr. Palomar – Italo Calvino (A Harvest Book, 1985)

4. Educated – Tara Westover (Harper Collins, 2018)

5. In Our Mad and Furious City – Guy Gunaratne (McD x FSG Originals, 2018)

6. Radiant Shimmering Light – Sarah Selecky (Harper Avenue, 2018)

7. Bridge to Terebithia – Katherine Paterson (Scholastic, 1996)

8. A Month in the Country – J.L. Carr (New York Review Book, 2000)

9. A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway (Touchstone, 1996)

10. Tomorrow There Will Be Sun – Dana Reinhardt (Viking, 2019)

11. All the Broken Things – Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer (Random House Canada, 2014)

12. The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway – Maxwell Perkins Correspondence ed. Matthew J. Broccoli (University of South Carolina Press, 1996)

February:

13. When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi (Gale Engage Learning, 2016)

14. Divided Loyalties – Nilofar Shidmehr (Astoria, 2019)

15. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev (Penguin Books, 1975)

16. Minster Without Portfolio – Michael Winter (Hamish Hamilton, 2013)

17. The Bellman’s Secret – Heidi Barnes (Rare Bird Books, 2019)

18. Quiet – Susan Cain (Crown Publishers, 2012)

17. Miss Burma – Charmaine Cragg (Grove Press, 2017)

18. The Education of Augie Merasty – Joseph Auguste Merasty, with David Carpenter (University of Regina Press, 2015)

19. The Parade – Dave Eggers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)

20. Cat & Nat’s Mom Truths – Catherine Belknap & Natalie Telfer (Harmony Books, 2019)

21. Transcription – Kate Atkinson (Little Brown & Company, (2018)

22. Southern Lady Code – Helen Ellis (Doubleday, 2019)

March:

23. The Immortalists – Chloe Benjamin (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018)

24. Tin Man – Sarah Winman (Viking, 2017)

25. The Waiting Hours – Shandi Mitchell (Viking, 2019)

26. Lanny – Max Porter (Strange Light, 2019)

27. A Room with a View – E.M. Forster (Penguin Books, 1978)

28. American War – Omar El Akkad (McClelland & Stewart, 2017)

29. You Will Be Safe Here – Damian Barr (Anansi International, 2019)

30. How to Give Up Plastic – Will McCallum (Penguin Books, 2019)

31. Juliet the Maniac – Juliet Excoria (Melville House, 2019)

April:

32. The Lesser Bohemians – Eimear McBride (McClelland & Stewart, 2016)

33. The Night Tiger – Yangsze Choo (Flatiron Books, 2019)

34. Ordinary People – Diana Evans (Bond Street Books, 2018)

35. The Incendiaries – R.O. Kwon (Riverhead Books, 2018)

36. Leaving the Witness – Amber Scorah (Viking, 2019)

37. The Woo Woo – Lindsay Wong (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018)

May:

39. Carry Me – Peter Behrens (Anansi, 2016)

40. Boys: What It Means to Become a Man – Rachel Giese (Patrick Crean Editions, 2018)

41. Crow – Amy Spurway (Goose Lane, 2019)

42. Celebration of Discipline – Richard J. Foster (Harper One, 2018)

43. Chop Suey Nation – Ann Hui (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019)

44. A Prayer Journal – Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013)

45. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground – Alicia Elliott (Doubleday Canada, 2019)

46. Dear Current Occupant – Chelen Knight (Bookthug, 2018)

47. Death is Hard Work – Khaled Khalif (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019)

48. Voice: On Writing with Deafness – Adam Pottle (University of Regina Press, 2019)

49. Moccasin Square Gardens – Richard Van Camp (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019)

50. Dual Citizens – Alix Ohlin (House of Anansi, 2019)

51. One Night at the Lake – Bethany Chase (Ballantine Books, 2019)

52. The Winter of our Discontent – John Steinbeck (The Viking Press, 1961)

53. All Things Consoled – Elizabeth Hay (McClelland & Stewart, 2018)

June:

54. Shut Up You’re Pretty – Tea Mutonji (VS. Books, 2019)

55. How She Read – Chantal Gibson (Caitlin Press, 2019)

56. Original Prin – Randy Boyagoda (Biblioasis, 2018)

57. Dissident Doctor – Michael C. Klein (Douglas & McIntyre, 2018)

58. Positive Discipline – Jane Nelsen (Ballantine Books, 2006)

59. Jesus the King – Timothy Keller (Penguin Books, 2016)

60. Rue des Rosiers – Rhea Tregebov (Coteau Books, 2019)

61. Supper Club – Lara Williams (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019)

July:

62. Say Say Say – Lila Savage (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)

63. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead Books, 2019)

64. Reproduction – Ian Williams (Random House CAnada, 2019)

65. The Porpoise – Mark Haddon (Bond Street Books, 2019)

66. Watermark – Christy Ann Conlin (House of Anansi, 2019)

67. Mother Night – Kurt Vonnegut (Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2009)

68. Aria – Nazanine Hozar (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2019)

69. Women & God – Kathleen Nielson (the good book company, 2018)

August:

70. We Went to the Woods – Caite Dolan-Leach (Random House, 2019)

71. Black Light – Kimberly King Parsons (Vintage Books, 2019)

72. All the Bad Apples – Moira Fowley-Doyle (Kathy Dawson Books, 2019)

73. As Many Nows as I Can Get – Shana Youngdahl (Dial Books, 2019)

74. My Conversations with Canadians – Lee Maracle (BookThug, 2017)

75. Mistakes to Run With – Yasuko Thanh (Hamish Hamilton, 2019)

76. Furious Hours – Casey Cep (Alfred A. KNopf, 2019)

September:

77. The Fall – Albert Camus (Alfred A. Knopf, 1957)

78. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (Warner Books, 1982)

79. Go Set a Watchman  – Harper Lee (HarperCollins, 2015)

80. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? – F.F. Bruce (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981)

81. Everything Under – Daisy Johnson (Jonathan Cape, 2018)

82. Milkman – Anna Burns (Graywolf Press, 2018)

83. Grand Union – Zadie Smith (Penguin Press,2019)

84. Late Breaking – K.D. Miller (Biblioasis, 2018)

85. Immigrant City – David Bezmozgis (Harper Collins Publisher, 2019)

86. Half Magic – Edward Eager (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)

87. My Sister, the Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite (Anchor Books, 2019)

88. Lampedusa – Steven Price (McClelland & Stewart, 2019)

October:

89. Risen Motherhood – Emily Jensen & Laura Wifler (Harvest House Publishers, 2019)

90. The Innocents – Michael Crummy (Doubleday Canada, 2019)

91. Here I Am! – Pauline Holdstock (Biblioasis, 2019)

92. Every Little Scrap & Wonder – Carla Funk (Greystone Books, 2019)

93. The Blythes Are Quoted  – L. M. Montgomery (Viking Canada, 2009)

94. Frankly in Love – David Yoon (Putnam, 2019)

95. All the Forgivenesses – Elizabeth Hardinger (John Scognamiglio Books, 2019)

November:

96. Reviving Ophelia – Mary Pipher & Sara Pipher Gilliam (Riverhead Books, 2019)

97. Under the Lilacs – Louisa May Alcott (Nelson Doubleday Inc., 1955)

98. The Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker (Penguin Books, 2018)

99. Frying Plantain – Zalika Reid-Benta (Astoria, 2019)

100. Know My Name – Chanel Miller (Viking, 2019)

101. Emerald City – Brian Birnbaum (Dead Rabbits, 2019)

102. Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng (Penguin Books, 2014)

103. The Dutch House – Ann Patchett (Harper, 2019)

104. The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2016)