Last year was a big year for my reading life. After reading a few phenomenal short story collections, and because I dared to try writing fiction, I wanted to study short stories. I subscribed to The New Yorker for a weekly dose of curated short fiction. I started with a 12-issue trial, and when in the 10th issue of my trial there was a new Olive Kitteridge story from Elizabeth Strout, I bought a 6-month subscription. Each week when a new issue arrives, and my husband deposits the mail on the kitchen table, I say “ooh!”, pick up the magazine, and flip to the page 2 table of contents to see who the fiction author will be. Sometimes I even read other parts of the magazine, and I have been delighted to come across surprises like personal essays from David Sedaris or Anthony Lane’s “The Intoxicating History of Gin,” which honest-to-god used the word “recharché.”

I also subscribed to a quarterly magazine called Offscreen. It’s beautifully designed, independent, and takes an unvarnished, thoughtful view of technology with the hopes of helping us steer it in humane directions. I enjoy quiet time away from a screen reading and thinking about the tech world we live and work in.

Those subscriptions are novelties in my reading life, and I enjoy their fresh differentness compared to my usual long-form reading. But by far the most significant reading I did in 2019 was to complete my Andrea Reads America project (with a few detours). Oh! And I read two Tolstoy novels! After six years of American literature, I now get to move into the wide open world of reading without rules. If my tracking in Goodreads is to be trusted, I read 60 books in 2019:

• The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson
• The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
• Wildwood by Colin Meloy
• Mink River by Brian Doyle
• Oreo by Fran Ross
• The Mysteries of Pittsburg by Michael Chabon ♥
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• The Prince of Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Short Stories edited by Radmila J. Gorup and Nadežda Obradović
• The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• Buck: A Memoir by M.K. Asante
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky ♥
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy ♥
• The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
• Animal Farm by George Orwell ♥
• Clover by Dori Sanders
• The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
• Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman ♥
• The Feminine Revolution by Amy Stanton and Catherine Connors
• Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris
• The Soul of the Indian by Charles Alexander Eastman
• Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• This Side of Eternity by Rosalyn McMillan
• Kaya, Belgrade, and The Good American by Mirjana Đurđević, Alice Copple-Tošić (Translator)
• Bloodroot by Amy Greene
• A Death in the Family by James Agee
• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
• The Old Order: Stories of the South by Katherine Anne Porter ♥
• Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert ♥
• When the Emperoror Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
• The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
• My Garden by Jamaica Kincaid
• Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
• Secrets of Six-Figure Women by Barbara Stanny
• The Last Cowgirl by Jana Richman
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King ♥
• Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
• Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones
• Bread Alone by Judi Hendricks ♥
• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie ♥
• Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple ♥
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
• Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
• Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters by Ryan Singer (Basecamp)
• Wingshooters by Nina Revoyr
• The Jesus Cow by Michael Perry
• The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach ♥
• Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigley
• The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister
• Open Season by C.J. Box
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva ♥
• I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson ♥
• The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg whose 29 Books in 2019 post inspired me to reflect on my reading life in 2019. I was particularly struck by his comment about how little books cost for how much they give. Looking through my list above, I think I purchased fewer than 5 of them; the rest I was able to borrow from the library.