Reading Challenge

Two years ago, in honor of my sixty-first birthday, I challenged myself to read sixty-one books. And I succeeded: here's the list of books I read (a good chunk of which were picture books, but hey—they were great). It was a satisfying project.

I am now considering something similar in honor of my sixty-third birthday—but no, it won't be sixty-three books. Maybe fifty? I don't know. What seems reasonable?

I'll keep mulling that over, but for today, in preparation (I have until tomorrow to iron out the details), I thought I'd skim through New York Times Best 10 Books lists and note down a few that I might like to check out. Starting with this year's:

Autumn, by Ali Smith: "a moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be."

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid: "A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. Magic doors separate the known calamities of the old world from the unknown perils of the new, as the migrants learn how to adjust to an improvisatory existence."

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee: In this novel about four generations of an ethnic Korean family living in Japan, "Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen."

The Power, by Naomi Alderman: "Alderman imagines our present moment—our history, our wars, our politics—complicated by the sudden manifestation of a lethal “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the globe. It’s a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss."

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward: "Ward gives us Jojo, a 13-year-old, and a road trip that he and his little sister take with his drug-addicted black mother to pick up their white father from prison. And there is nothing small about their existences. Their story feels mythic, both encompassing the ghosts of the past and touching on all the racial and social dynamics of the South [the story is set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi] as they course through this one fractured family. Ward’s greatest feat here is achieving a level of empathy that is all too often impossible to muster in real life, but that is genuine and inevitable in the hands of a writer of such lyric imagination."

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, by Richard O. Prum: "If a science book can be subversive and feminist and change the way we look at our own bodies—but also be mostly about birds—this is it. . . . Prum wants subjectivity and the desire for beauty to be part of our understanding of how evolution works."

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood: "In this affectionate and very funny memoir, Lockwood weaves the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with her own coming-of-age, and the crisis that later led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof. She also brings to bear her gifts as a poet, mixing the sacred and profane in a voice that’s wonderfully grounded and authentic."

And here are the books from earlier lists that I have not read that I might seek out (ones marked with asterisks I already possess, so I might as well start there):

2016

The Association of Small Bombs, by Karan Mahajan*
War and Turpentine, by Stefan Hertmans
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer*
The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between, by Hisham Matar

2015
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, by Lucia Berlin*
The Sellout, by Paul Beatty*
Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert
H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald*
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World, by Andrea Wulf*

2014

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr*
Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill*
Euphoria, by Lily King
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
On Immunity: An Inoculation, by Eula Biss

2013
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt*
Life after Life, by Kate Atkinson
Five Days at Memorial: Five Days in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark
Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala

2012

Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
Building Stories, by Chris Ware*
The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers
Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, by Jim Holt

2011
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach*
11/22/63, by Stephen King
Arguably: Essays, by Christopher Hitchens
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman*

2010

Selected Stories, by William Trevor
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddartha Mukherjee*
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson*

Yep, if I simply start with the ones I already own, my list is fourteen books long. But first, I've got to finish three or four that I'm partway through. In short: I need to dedicate some time every day to reading. That's a resolution I can live with. Let the book reports resume!

P.S. Another list I clipped recently that I'll just add here for good measure: Ten Illuminating Books for Confusing Times, published by Zócalo: An ASU Knowledge Enterprise Magazine of Ideas. If I run across any other good ones I'll either add them here or post a new list. So many books, so little time!

P.P.S. 1/18/2020 In the intervening years, I have read exactly two of the books listed above—and acquired a shitload of new ones. Is there a lesson to be learned here? Will I ever?