The following is a complete list of books I read in 2017, separated by category and then ranked. Books I consider must-reads and would recommend to just about anyone are in bold.
Nonfiction books/books that taught me a lot:
- Art & Fear, David Bayles and Tedd Orland
- Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
- Upstream: Selected Essays, Mary Oliver
- Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy
- Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman
- Postville: A Clash of Cultures in the American Heartland, Stephen G. Bloom
- Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, William Deresiewicz
- David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell
- Everybody Writes, Ann Handley
- The Creating Brain, Nancy Andreason
- The Four Tendencies, Gretchen Rubin
- The Gig Economy, Diane Mulcahy
Books on living your best life/productivity:
- Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed
- The Art of Non-Conformity, Chris Guillebeau
- Deep Work, Cal Newport
- Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
- Born for This, Chris Guillebeau
Memoir:
- Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed
- The Glass Castle: A Memoir, Jeanette Walls
- The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir, Ariel Levy
- The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, Nina Riggs
- Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, Paul Kingsnorth
- Tell Me If You’re Lying, Sarah Sweeney
- South and West, Joan Didion
Fiction:
- The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe
- The Underground Railroad: A Novel, Colson Whitehead
- The Gangster of Love, Jessica Hagedorn
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- The Gathering, Anne Enright
Cool post – I love these kind of ‘meta reviews’ of the year. I’ve never kept track, I just discard and go onto the next one… I usually have 4 or 5 on the go at once! Chris Guillebeau’s podcast is good too, have you listened to it?
I’ve listened to his podcast a couple times! It sounds like he is going to keep creating a new one every day in 2018, so I’ll have to start listening to them more consistently.
You should definitely start keeping a list of everything you read! Before 2017, I had never kept one either, but it’s been really rewarding, even if I only recorded the title and author in the back of my planner.