Here is a look at what I’ve been reading. Sharing with the hope someone will hire me to design their book cover someday. I don’t rate books but do highlight the 5 that resonated the most with me each year.

Last updated SEPTEMBER 18, 2024

Small Game - Blair Braverman
Real Estate - Deborah Levy
Last Summer on State Street - Toya Wolfe
Now is Not the Time to Panic - Kevin Wilson
Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood - Satya Doyle Byock
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
The Paper Palace - Miranda Cowley Heller
Great Circle - Maggie Shipstead
The Rachel Incident - Caroline O’Donoghue
The Glow - Jessie Gaynor
A Heart That Works - Rob Delaney
Thirst for Salt - Madelaine Lucas
The Girls of Summer - Katie Bishop
Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto
Cult Classic - Sloane Crosley
Seven Days in June - Tia Williams
Shark Heart - Emily Habeck
The Golden Couple - Greer Hendricks
Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession - Jess Damuck & Martha Stweart
I Have Some Questions for You - Rebecca Makkai
The Villa - Rachel Hawkins
The Good Ones - Polly Stewart
Search History - Amy Taylor
Go as a River - Shelley Read
The Guest - Emma Cline
The Lifeguards - Amanda Eyre Ward
Girlfriend on Mars - Deborah Willis
The Sunset Crown - Karin Tanabe
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone - Benjamin Stevenson
The Children’s Bible - Lydia Millet
A Slow Fire Burning - Paula Hawkins
How I Won a Nobel Prize - Julius Taranto
The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery
Rouge - Mona Awad
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid - Jimmy Carter
More Is More: Get Loose in the Kitchen - Molly Baz

Happy Hour - Marlowe Granados
Several People Are Typing - Calvin Kasulke
The Things We’ve Seen - Agustin Fernandez Mallo
Snowflake - Louise Nealon
Jillian - Halle Butler
Modern Lovers - Emma Straub
Bright Dead Things - Ada Limón
Vegetable Literacy - Deborah Madison
Dishoom - Shamil Thakrar, Kavi Thakrar, Naved Nasir
I Used to Be Charming - Eve Babitz
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Valleyesque: Stories - Fernando A. Flores
Chef’s Kiss - T.J. Alexander
Friends and Strangers - J Courtney Sullivan
Bad Vibes Only - Nora McInerny Purmort
Hurricane Girl - Marcy Dermansky
Must Read Well - Ellen Pall
In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado
Nobody Will Tell You This But Me - Bess Kalb
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance - Alison Espach
American Fever - Dur e Aziz Amna
The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith

Pure Colour - Sheila Heti
Cook This Book - Molly Baz
Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney
At a Distance: 100 Visionaries at Home in a Pandemic - Andrew Zuckerman, Spencer Bailey
I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood - Jessi Klein
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. - Eve Babitz
Companion Piece - Ali Smith
Nora Goes Off Script - Annabel Monaghan
Girls They Write Songs About - Calene Bauer
Wish You Were Here - Jodi Picoult
French Braid - Anne Tyler
M Train - Patti Smith
Florence Adler Swims Forever - Rachel Beanland
Book Lovers - Emily Henry
City of Likes - Jenny Mollen
A Tidy Ending - Joanna Cannon
The Lonely Stories - Natalie Eve Garrett
The Hotel Nantucket - Elin Hilderbrand
Four Treasures of the Sky - Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe - Dawn Tripp
Recitatif - Toni Morrison

All Books Read in 2021

Know My Name - Chanel Miller
Luster - Raven Leilani
Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby
The Devil’s Highway: A True Story - Luis Alberto Urrea
Gods with a Little G - Tupelo Hassman
Everything Under - Daisy Johnson
The Music Shop - Rachel Joyce
Euphoria - Lily King
Another Brooklyn - Jacqueline Woodson
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark - Michelle McNamara
Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson
Summerwater - Sarah Moss
Hana Khan Carries On - Uzma Jalaluddin
Second Place - Rachel Cusk
The Divorce - César Aira
Whereabouts - Jhumpa Lahiri
A Thousand Mornings: Poems - Mary Oliver
A Table: Recipes for Cooking and Eating the French Way - Rebekah Peppler
Two Lives: A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs - Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz
Sontag: Her Life and Work - Benjamin Moser
Animal - Lisa Taddeo
Last Summer in the City - Gianfranco Calligarich
It’s Been A Pleasure, Noni Blake - Claire Christian
Zaiton: Recipes from my Palestinian Kitchen - Yasmin Khan
One Pot, Pan, Planet: A greener way to cook for you, your family, and the planet - Anna Jones
Milk Fed - Melissa Broder
Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner
Detransition Baby - Tory Peters
The Lonely City: Adventures on the Art of Being Alone - Olivia Lang
Amaro: The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas - Brad Thomas Parsons
Milk Fed - Melissa Broder

Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft - Samantha Silva
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency - Olivia Laing
Run Studio Run - Eli Altman
Summer Brother - Jaap Robben
Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami
With Teeth - Kristen Arnett
The Summer Job - Lizzy Dent
Super Natural Simple: Whole-Food, Vegetarian Recipes for Real Life - Heidi Swanson
Blush - Jamie Brenner
Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus - Yasmin Khan
Florida - Lauren Groff
Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating - Wyatt Williams
Three Rooms - Jo Hamya
One Two Three - Laurie Frankel
Black Food: Stories, Art & Essays - Bryant Terry
What You Can See From Here - Mariana Leky
Higher Ground - Anke Stelling
Nightbitch - Rachel Yoder
Bonnie Jack - Ian Hamilton
Malibu Rising - Taylor Jenkins Reid
Public Library and Other Stories - Ali Smith
Interior Chinatown - Charles Yu
Runaway - Alice Munro
We Run the Tides: A Novel - Vendela Vida
Sorrow and Bliss - Meg Mason
Laserwriter II - Tamara Shopsin
The Office of Historical Corrections - Danielle Evans
No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
When Breathe Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life - Jeremy Lewison (Editor)
The Weak Spot - Lucie Elven

All Books Read in 2020

Fake Like Me - Barbara Bourland
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir - Anna Weiner
The Topeka School - Ben Lerner
The Power Broker - Robert Caro
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell (4th X reading)
Truth and Beauty - Anne Patchett
Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous
Times of Britain’s Great Modern Painter - Geordie Greig
My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh
The Most Fun We Ever Had - Claire Lombardo
The Great Animal Orchestra - Bernie Klause
The Plague - Albert Camus
My Life in France - Julia Child
Ghosts - Dolly Alderton
Beach Read - Emily Henry
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir - Natasha Trethewey
Girl in a Band - Kim Gordon
Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain - Roger Deakin
Migrations - Charlotte McConaghy
What Are You Going Through - Sigrid Nunez
Everything I Know About Love - Dolly Alderton
Transcendent Kingdom - Yaa Gyasi
Darius the Great Is Not Okay - Adib Khorram
Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors From My Israeli Kitchen - Adeena Sussman
Flights - Olga Tokarczuk

The Book of Harlan - Bernice L. McFadden
The Bay of Noon - Shirley Hazzard
Boy Swallows Universe - Trent Dalton
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Woman is No Man - Etaf Rum
Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo
The Stationery Shop - Marjan Kamali
Writers & Lovers - Lily King
The Fifth Season - N. K. Jemisin
Intimations - Zadie Smith
Blindness - José Saramago
Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero - Charles Sprawson
The Lying Life of Adults - Elena Ferrante
The Overstory - Richard Powers
Hollywood Park - Mikel Jollett
Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair - Witold Rybczynski
The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett
Sea Wife - Amity Gaige
Essential Ottolenghi [Special Edition, Two-Book Boxed Set]: Plenty More and Ottolenghi Simple - Yotam Ottolenghi
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and Memoir - Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich *disturbing content warning
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations - Mira Jacob

All Books Read in 2019

The Crying Book - Heather Christie
Little Weirds - Jenny Slate
Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger - Edited by Lilly Dancyger
A New Program for Graphic Design - David Reinfurt
The World of Normal Boys - K.M. Soehnlein
Fleishman is in Trouble - Taffy-Brodesser-Akner
All the Water in the World - Karen Raney
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion - Jia Tolentino
Raw: My Journey into the Wu - Lamont U-God Hawkins
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Glitch - Elizabeth Cohen
My Life on the Road - Gloria Steinham
Arbitrary Stupid Goal - Tamara Shopsin
The Vacationers - Emma Straub
Vampires in the Lemon Grove - Karen Russell
The Flight Portfolio - Julie Orringer
Evening in Paradise: More Stories - Lucia Berlin
Troubling Love - Elena Ferrante
Shadow Tag - Louise Erdrich
People Who Knew Me - Kim Hooper
Summer of ‘69’ - Elin Hilderbrand
There’s a Word for That - Sloane Tanen
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Near & Far - Heidi Swanson
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy - Jenny Odell
The Gifted School - Bruce Holsinger

The Golden State - Lydia Kiesling
The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin
If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin
There There - Tommy Orange
This Will Only Hurt a Little - Busy Phillips
The Gulf - Belle Boggs
Fame Adjacent - Sarah Skilton
Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney
Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick
The Late Bloomer’s Club - Louise Miller
The Children - Ann Leary
Normal People - Sally Rooney
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. - Adelle Waldmen
Self-Portrait with Boy - T Kira Madden
So Much Blue - Percival Everett
How to Date Men When You Hate Men - Blythe Robertson
When Katie Met Cassidy - Camille Perri
Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying
Meaning of Everyday Words - David Whyte
Heart Berries - Terese Marie Mailhot
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell (3rd X reading)
Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith
Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in the Time of Rage and Revolution - Amber Tamblyn

Too Much and Not in the Mood - Durga Chew-Bose
Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood
Dark Matter - Blake Crouch
The Nowhere Girls - Amy Reed
Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell
The Love Song of Johnny Valentine - Teddy Wayne
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
This Is How It Always Is - Laurie Frankel
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward
Everything Here is Beautiful - Mira Lee
Elmet - Fiona Mozley
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
Emergency Contact - Mary H. K. Choi
We Are Okay - Nina LaCour
Reservoir 13 - Jon McGregor
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready - Meaghan O’Connell
Feel Free - Zadie Smith
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence - Christopher Potter
We Need to Talk - Celeste Headlee
Nutshell - Ian McEwan
The High Season - June Blundell
I Will Be Complete: A Memoir - Glen David Gold
Jaws - Peter Benchley
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories - Lucia Berlin
Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
Unclaimed Baggage - Jen Doll
The Upside of Unrequited - Becky Albertalli
Crudo - Olivia Laing
The Real Lolita - Sally Weinman
Leaving Atlanta - Tayari Jones
The Starboard Sea - Amber Dermont
I Await the Devil's Coming - Mary MacLane
The Wildlands - Abby Geni
Skippy Dies - Paul Murray
The Interestings - Meg Wolitzer
The Incendiaries - R. O. Kwon
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell (2nd X reading)
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
The Story of a New Name - Elena Ferrante
Catcher Caught - Sarah Honenberger
Severance - Ling Ma

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street - Matt Taibbi
Before and Again - Barbara Delinsky
Tell the Machine Goodnight - Katie Williams
Choose Your Own Disaster - Dana Schwartz
Social Creature - Tara Isabella Burton
Alligator Candy - David Kushner
An American Marriage - Tayari Jones
Indecent - Corrine Sullivan
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
The Night in Question - Tobias Wolff
The Mandela Plot - Kenneth Bonert
Innocents & Others - Dana Spiotta
The Perfect Nanny - Leila Slimani
The Mars Room - Rachel Kushner
The French Girl - Lexie Elliott
Motherhood - Sheila Heti
The Witch Elm - Tana French
The Reckonings - Lacy M. Johnson
Far From the Tree - Robin Benway
The Library Book - Susan Orlean
The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas
Men We Reaped - Jesmyn Ward
Where the Dead Sit Talking - Brandon Hobson
Swimming Lessons - Claire Fuller
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
The Only Story - Julien Barnes
Greyhound - Steffan Piper
The Power - Naomi Aiderman
The Round House - Louise Erdrich
Future Home of the Living God - Louise Erdrich
The Mothers - Brit Bennett
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death - Maggie O’Farrell
A Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich
Tangerine - Christine Mangan
The Trauma Cleaners - Sarah Krasnostein
Rules of Civility - Amor Towles
Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman
On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
Robin - Dave Itzkoff*
My Sunshine Away - M.O. Walsh
Fruit of the Drunken Tree - Ingrid Rojas Contreras
The Days of Abandonment - Elena Ferrante
All About Love - Bell Hooks
New York 2140 - Kim Stanley Robinson
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Elena Ferrante
The Story of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante

All Books Read in 2017

Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
In a Lonely Place - Dorothy B. Hughes
Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
Infinite Ground - Martin Macinnes
Made for Love - Alisa Nutting
What is Not Yours is Not Yours - Helen Oyeyemi
Turtles All the Way Down - John Green
Landmarks - Robert McFarlane
Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz
Pond - Clair-Louise Bennett
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
A Man Called Ove - Fredrik Backman
The Rules Do Not Apply - Ariel Levy
The Mother of All Questions - Rebecca Solnit
Before the Fall - Noah Hawley
Giving up America - Pearl Abraham
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Innocents and Others - Dana Spiotta
The Braindead Megaphone - George Saunders

My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward - Mark Lukach
The Keeper of Lost Things - Ruth Hogan
Transit - Rachel Cusk
Drinking: A Love Story - Caroline Knapp
City of Dark Magic (City of Lost Dreams, #1) - Magnus Flyte
City of Lost Dreams (City of Dark Magic, #2) - Magnus Flyte
Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
Goodbye Vitamin - Rachel Khong
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Sourdough - Robin Sloan
Outline - Rachel Cusk
Woman No. 17 - Edan Lepucki
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking - Susan Cain
Rubyfruit Jungle - Rita Mae Brown
Sweetbitter - Stephanie Danler
We Are All Stardust - Stefan Klein
White Tears - Hari Kunzru
We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Long Goodbye - Meghan O’Rourke

Ways to Disappear - Idra Novey
Intimations: Stories - Alexandra Kleeman
The Braindead Megaphone - George Saunders
Innocents and Others - Dana Spiotta
The Collected Stories - Grace Paley
The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
The Opposite of Everyone - Joshilyn Jackson
So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell
Yes Please - Amy Poehler
Little Bee - Chris Cleave
Heartburn - Nora Ephron
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons From the Crematorium - Caitlin Doughty
This is Water - Yannick Murphy
The Interestings - Meg Wolitzer

Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
Other Voices, Other Rooms - Truman Capote
The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
The Devil Finds Work - James Baldwin
Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps - Dave Isay
The Martian - Andy Weir
The Rocks - Peter Nichols
On Such a Full Sea - Chang-rae Lee
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion - Meghan Daum
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Desperate Characters - Paula Fox
Seconds - Bryan Lee O’Malley

Victory - Joseph Conrad
Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanial West
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration - Isabel Wilkerson
White Girls - Hilton Als
The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner
Elegies for the Brokenhearted - Rhonda Riley
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science Behind Life in the Void - Mary Roach
Science in Culture: Conversations at the New Intersection of Science and Society - Adam Bly