I've Read Exactly 40 Books Over the Past Two Years and These Are My Top 10 Titles
The 5 Best Books I Read In Each of the Past Two Years
I read on my kindle every single day. I rent ebooks to my kindle from a library back in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I grew up. If you don’t know this hack, I explain how it works and how much it’s saved over the past ten years of traveling and living abroad in this piece. (Books are between $10-15 bucks on average, so you can do the math.)
Earlier this week I used the email notifications from my library to search back to the beginning of the year and record each title that I rented electronically and then finished. I did this same process at the beginning of 2022. What I found most surprising (and charming) this time around—on the second go at this new yearly ritual—is that I read the exact same amount of books in each of the past two years.
I read every morning and every evening, on average for about 45 minutes a day. It allows me to set the pace and tone for my day in the morning. In the evening, it allows my active mind to find a pillow, get lost in a story, and then drift into a dream state. I’ve read like this for the past two years.
Nevertheless, it’s still very surprising that my routine resulted in the same number of books finished two years in a row. Books are all different lengths and depths and such, you know?
However this Christmas reading miracle came to pass, it feels nice—like grabbing the right amount of hangers from the closet or running out of gas at the gas station. It’s as satisfying as pushing in the last puzzle piece. It has also allowed me to reflect on which titles consumed in each of the past two years made the biggest impact on me.
All 40 of the books listed below I read to completion. I only finish books if they really hook me and I’ll always give a new read at least 20–30% before I call it quits. If it’s not whispering “pick me up” from my nightstand, I’ll move on. So these books are all already Fosbury-flopping over a pretty high bar. I’d say about one out of five books that I start I quit on.
All of these books below were worth my time, but my top ten out of the past two years are those types of books that you really should read before you die.
2021 Reading List
Wave
Old Man and the Sea
Hillbilly Elegy
1Q84
Barbarian Days
Greenlights
Many Live Many Masters
Everything is Fucked
Roald Dahl’s Going Solo
Like Streams to the Ocean
Be Here Now
Everything is Fucked
Dune
I Contain Multitudes
Breath
Hells Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
American Dirt (I enjoyed reading this book but I have some pretty negative feelings about it as well.)
The Year of Magical Thinking
The Four Agreements
Less
Here are my 2021 Top 5 books in no particular order:
Wave
I love memoirs, being a memoir writer myself, and this memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala is both heartbreaking and incredibly well-written. Her honest and powerful storytelling allows the reader to imagine what going through a storm of this magnitude—and the related trauma—might feel like.
The dance she does between her two homes is also very powerful for anyone who has two distinct “homes.” This book left a haunting and powerful impression on me. It’s a story I still find myself thinking about from time to time.
Breath
This book by James Nestor changed some of my behaviors around my breathing and health, which is very rare for a “help” book to accomplish in my history of reading.
It’s well researched and well delivered, and entirely worth your time. I think about something that I learned from this book at least once a week. Like did you know that elevating rates of sleep apnea might be correlated to processed foods because we’re not using our jaws the way we used to and the bones in our faces are getting softer?
Barbarian Days
There's a reason it won the Pulitzer Prize. This book had me in a trance and I’d put it on my top 10 books of all time list. The way that William Finnegan describes the art of surfing will make anyone want to get on a board and paddle out into the endless blue.
Beyond the sections describing barreling waves and harrowing rock breaks, the aspect of the book I loved most is that it’s essentially a travel memoir. You get to follow Bill and his board to far-off corners of the map that you’ve never considered visiting, to see if he can find the perfect untouched breakpoint. I like this book so much that I’ve gifted it to several people, none of whom even surf.
1Q84
A very long and strange book, but it got under my skin and there’s a reason I didn’t ever consider giving up on it although it’s a nearly 1000-page tome, and the author goes to great lengths to describe food and clothing and seemingly mundane things. It’s like Melville endlessly describing whales in Moby Dick, but way better.
It took me almost two months to read, but the world that Haruki Murakami created swam around in my brain. Even still, over a year after finishing, when I look up at the moon I imagine there being two.
Note: I liked Dune, but I enjoyed Murakami’s verion of “fantasy” far more.
Greenlights
Matt McConaughey’s memoir is full of heart. From cover to cover the book is teaming with intimate moments that he didn’t need to reveal. He’s already very famous. But that is what makes his memoir a real work of art.
Candid dreams and thoughts about sex, marriage, and growing into a man. Untold stories from movie sets about various famous scenes and Hollywood characters. Playing bongos butt naked and high as a kite until the police arrived. What a genuine legend.
2022 Reading List
The Four Winds
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Midnight library
Anxious People
Red Notice
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Nonviolent Communication
Will
Just like You
American Kingpin
Underland
The Storyteller (I finished this book because I love Nirvana and was curious enough to keep going, but I actually think Dave Grohl entirely fails the assignment of writing a vulnerable memoir.)
The Nightingale
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Atomic Habits
Eat The Buddha
The Lincoln Highway
Pachinko
The Stranger
Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing
Here are my 2022 Top 5 books in no particular order:
Pachinko
If I had to just pick one, I think this was my favorite book of the year. Pachinko is another very long book, one that I was hooked on almost immediately. Something about Lee’s storytelling and the characters that she created had me reading well past my bedtime every single night.
The relationship between the countries of Japan and South Korea is central to the story. So along with a gripping narrative, as a reader, you can’t help but feel like you’re absorbing truth and history—about geopolitical relationships, different cultures, and even the game of pachinko itself—with every single page.
Note: Much like Shantaram, one of my all time favorite books, Apple TV produced a television series based on Min Jin Lee’s book.
The Nightingale
So, the one downside of reading free library books from a kindle is that from time to time, if your book is “due” (normally after 21 days), and you’re connected to Wifi (I normally keep mine on airplane mode to avoid this fate), the book will just return itself. Sometimes this happens when you’re almost finished.
When reading the Nightingale (a rather long book), my rented copy returned itself when I was around 85% finished. Heartbreak city. I liked the story so much that I put it back on my library list, waited two months for it to be available, and picked up the story right where it left off. It’s a deeply touching story set back during WWII, and the end led to big fat tears landing on my chest as I lay in bed finishing the last fifteen percent of the book. If you read this book and don’t cry, I’d be shocked.
Will
Seven percent into Will Smith’s memoir, I had a whole new context for understanding “the slap.” It dates back to his youth. To when he watched his father beat his mother and failed to react. His little brother tried and was knocked aside. His sister fled, and he just watched and then later resorted to trying to make everyone laugh. To be the peacemaker and family jester.
He can trace his sibling’s strongest personality traits and their respective paths into adulthood back to that one moment. As a reader, it’s incredibly easy to trace “the slap” back to this moment in Will’s life, which led him to always fear that he couldn’t protect the people he loves. Dave Grohl could learn something from Will Smith about writing an honest, vulnerable, deeply personal memoir. They’re both incredibly famous, but the movie star wrote a way more no-holds-barred “rock and roll” memoir.
The Anthropocene Review
If the only work by John Greene that you know of is “A Fault in Our Stars” you might find it strange that I rate him as one of my ten favorite living authors. He’s a brilliant thinker, writer, and storyteller. A Fault In Our Stars was far and away his greatest commercial success, but I’ve read every book he’s written and they’re all wonderful. Most of his books are non-fiction coming-of-age stories based on people and details from his real life, but the Anthropocene Reviewed is entirely different.
It’s a series of essays where he is attempting to review “everything in our human-centered history on a 5-star scale.” The essays are personal, educational, and incredibly entertaining. They range on subjects from Mario Kart, to Diet Dr. Pepper, to the QWERTY keyboard, to Airconditioning, to Sycamore trees, and they each end in John Green rating the thing he just wrote about from 1–5 stars. I give the Anthropocene Reviewed, 5 stars.
Note: The essays that make up this book were first released in podcast form. I also highly recommend the podcast if you prefer taking information in through your ears rather than your eyes.
Red Notice
I love memoirs. I love true stories. As Red Notice puts right in the title, Bill Browder's book is A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice. He was one of the first investors to make his way to Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Following his instincts, he made a fortune, but also garnered the attention of the Kremlin.
It’s the type of true story that has you interrupting your reading to google characters and watch old YouTubes mentioned as the story unfolds. An unbelievable tale that gives deep insight into both the interworkings of the finance industry and the country of Russia itself. In every chapter, you learn something new while quickly flipping the pages of a true story that reads like a fictional Hollywood blockbuster.
Pachinko was the first book I ever recommended to Maria, and, well, now we’re getting married! Great lists, awesome reviews. Thanks for telling me about John Greene’s podcast way back when. Utterly amazing.