1. Cane River - this was for a book club, which is the only reason I finished it. Five hundred pages of depressing slavery historical fiction, ranging from super depressing slave rape and torture to slightly-less-depressing institutional racism by the end of the saga. Would not recommend.
2. The Road Less Traveled - this is a psychology cult classic from the 70s that's fun to read. In one chapter he mentions in a footnote that "the only healthy marriage is an open marriage." Lol, the seventies were awesome.
3. Down Among the Sticks and Bones - a well-written and darkly funny YA fantasy novella. Think CS Lewis with vampires.
4. The Hating Game - this was just a bubble gum contemporary romcom about a love-hate-love relationship. Super fast and sexy read, recommended as a nice beach read if you like romance.
5. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue - How did I end up reading so much YA at the beginning of this year? I don't even particularly like YA, these were all recommended to me. This was a fun romp of pirates and highwaymen and gay interracial relationships in the 1800s, but it was very very YA. I can't even put my finger on what "Very YA" means, but whatever it was, this book was that. My next read is YA, too, then I think I'm done for a while. I think it's the quirkiness that gets me. Everyone is so goddamn quirky in YA books.
6. Jane Unlimited - ugh, another YA, this one with a quirky main character who makes artsy umbrellas. Four mentions of Doctor Who in the first half of the book, how weird and nerdy lolol!!! I'm so done with YA.
7. Dead Wake - okay, this one is historical fiction about the Lusitania. I don't know history so this is always good for me. Plus Erik Larsen is the tits, this was a guaranteed Good Book after my latest string of failures. This book is not quite as good as his epicly awesome Devil in the White City that I love love loved, but it's still good and suspenseful.
8.The Duke and I - Regency romance, definitely more erotic than Jane Austen. Fun and light but not particularly great. Recommended all over the place as one of the best contemporary-written regency romances, which probably means I just don't really like this genre. I love Jane Austen, though, oh well.
9.Paris To the Moon - Another French travelogue about an American moving his family to Paris. Funny, well-written, but not epically hilarious like my favorite of this genre, Toujours Provence.
10. Drop the Ball - nonfiction, about how women need to stop trying to do it all. Kind of a companion book to Lean In, which I also didn't like. This book just feels repetitive. It did get my husband and I to make a spreadsheet for our grocery lists, though.
11. A Man Called Ove - another book club read, I guess it was a movie? Anyway, it made me ugly cry at the end although the opening chapters were hard for me to get into. Old grumpy man inspirational lit, I would classify it.
12. The Artist's Way - I am not in the right spot to get into this kind of book, in that I have a toddler and would love to do "morning pages" but it's clear from the way this author writes that she cannot imagine not having alone time every day. Well, bully for her. I'll pick this back up in a few years.
13. Designs for Living and Learning - really great book about childhood learning environments. Gave me a bunch to think about as I create living spaces for my young toddler.
14. Voyage -a play by Tom Stoppard that's a witty sendup of every Russian play from the greats. Lots of philosophizing and wordplay, but not nearly as entertaining as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which everyone should read (and watch the movie version!) if they have ever read Hamlet. For you Game of Thrones fans out there, Jorah is Hamlet, and that should seal the deal. He also wrote Shakespeare in Love which was a fun screenplay.
15. Chrysalis - nonfiction, an account of female naturalist Maria Meriam. The book I'm writing is going to have a main character named after her, so I thought I'd do some research. Really interesting so far, she was a gifted artist and scientist back when science was stuck more in naming and classifying rather than experimenting. Makes me excited to write my book!
16. The Kingmaker's Daughter - historical fiction by the same woman who wrote The Other Boleyn Girl which I loved. This was a great book, made even greater by the fact that I don't know any history at all. What will happen to Anne and Richard? I don't know, it's a mystery! Makes reading historical fiction all the better, imo.
16b. The Shadow of the Wind - I... really didn't like this. I didn't even finish it, so that's why it's going on the list as 16b. Just awful, pretentious writing. Maybe it's the translation? I had high hopes and a lot of people recommended it, but I found it utterly lacking.
17. The Refrigerator Monologues - On recommendation by this thread. I didn't really care for this one, maybe because I don't know an awful lot about comics. Most of the characters had the same voice, there weren't any great new perspectives. I dunno, I might have been in the wrong frame of mind for this.
18. The Whole-Brain Child - Some really good suggestions for how to handle parenting decisions, based on brain science of developing children. Some of it was for older kids so not quite as useful, but a lot of excellent practical advice for toddler meltdowns, etc. We have been lucky so far with our kid (not quite 2!) but I'm sure she'll be testing our patience soon enough so I want to be prepared.
19. Transatlantic - Another historical fiction about Ireland, transatlantic flight, Frederick Douglass, and some other things that are not really interesting to me. Also the author uses way too many. Sentence fragments. For dramatic effect. And I'm sick of it.
20. Brain on Fire - Nonfiction account of a NY Post journalist who went crazy due to a rare form of encephalitis. Super interesting, like reading a House episode. Ending kind of dragged on weakly but otherwise very engaging.
21. The Philosophical Baby - An overview of studies on the cognitive and emotional capabilities of developing babies. I liked it, but not a lot of good parenting takeaways other than "don't neglect your baby".
22. The Importance of Being Earnest -Reread this one for funsies. It was fun, like all Wilde is fun.
23. Lady Windemere's Fan - Oh, so fun!
24. The Thirteenth Tale - Solid meh. Gothic mystery type book, very debut-novel in that there's lots of meta-commentary on books and reading and literature. I did the same thing in my debut novel, and I cringe whenever I read it somewhere else. Too long for not enough payoff and I guessed the ending.
25. The Wizard of Earthsea -Thanks to whoever recommended this one in this thread. Leguin is amazing but I've only read The Left Hand Side of Darkness by her and I need to read more. I didn't realize it was YA but I just ran through it super fast.
26. All Our Wrong Todays - GREAT time travel romance book, really really fun. If Chuck Palahniuk wrote The Time Traveller's Wife, this is what it would have turned out as.
27.The Girl Who Drew Butterflies - another biography of Maria Merian as research, YA stuff so very light. My toddler liked looking at all the pictures of butterflies, haha.
28.Superintelligence - Holy moly, this is a fascinating book. Regardless of when you think the singularity will come, there are risks associated with AI and this book does a great job of giving an overview of possible pitfalls where our world will be turned into a ball of paperclips... or something. Really interesting if you're at all into artificial intelligence.
29.Parenting in the Digital Age - pretty much a memoir of an advertising/TV guy with some little parenting stuff thrown in with plenty of unsourced speculative assertions. Fun to read, but just about useless when it comes to making evidence based decisions.
30.How to Raise a Child with a High EQ - that's an "emotional quotient", and it's pretty straightforward stuff, lots of repetition I'd already read in books about positive parenting and emotional discipline. Also not super useful until my kid gets a bit older.
31.Evening Star - Oh, my freaking god, this book is amazing. Larry McMurty is the guy who wrote Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment, and this book was actually a sequel to the latter but it didn't read like a sequel at all. It was amazing, poignant, and made me ugly cry at the end, and then again at midnight when I woke up and thought about the book, and probably a couple more times in the future if I'm being honest here. Great writing, characters, interesting take on how relationships work. BEST BOOK SO FAR ON MY LIST.
32. How to Create a Mind - by Ray Kurzweil, of singularity fame. Really interesting look at how artificial intelligence has come so far and the path it has to go. Highly recommend to anyone interested in AI.
33. The Parent's Tao Te Ching - Eh, I liked The Tao of Pooh better. This just seems like a weird adaptation of the TTC so that someone could dole out parenting advice. And as a depressed person, advice like "Be happy and your children will be happy" just makes me feel more depressed that I'm fucking up this whole parenting thing.
34. The Master Algorithm - Not as interesting as the Kurzweil AI book, kind of a summary of different styles of machine learning which is interesting in parts but gets somewhat dry. I guess I'm not as into ML as I thought I was.
35. Swamplandia! - What a weird book. I liked it, kind of reminded me of Geek Love (which, if you need a great book that's like magical realism about a wacky circus family, that is the book for you). Had a lot of weird characters and good writing, but it turned into a weird rape thing at the end which I dunno, felt off from the rest of the book and just didn't work well in the plot imo.
36. The Hotel Du Lac - really strange literary book. Kind of felt like a short story in that every sentence seemed to mean more than surface level. The protagonist felt weirdly relatable, being a trashy romance author who doesn't like trashy romance and hates being around people and is emotionally numb, haha kill me now.
37. The Behavior Gap - I forget where this was recommended, but it's really a whole bunch of commonsense financial psychology that is so boring to anyone who is posting here. Read it in a half hour and will forget it tomorrow.
38. The Importance of Being Little - FANTASTIC book on parenting preschoolers and how early childhood education can help or harm children. Really, a great book on the importance of human connection, natural connection, and unsupervised, unstructured play. Gave some really good practical advice on things like literacy and how to best structure playtime and play environments to let kids go about their business of learning. Highly recommend if you're a parent of a toddler!