What I’m Reading

What I’m Reading Now | Next on My List | All-Time Favorite Books

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

William Faulkner

What I’m Reading (or listening to) Now

  1. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil de Grasse Tyson
  2. News of the World, Paulette Jiles

Next on My List

  1. The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni
  2. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

Books I’ve Enjoyed Since I Started Keeping Track (October 2015)
Note: if I didn’t enjoy a book, I didn’t add it to this list, which may explain why a title went from “What I’m Reading” to not on any list.

  1. Miss Jane, Brad Watson
  2. A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
  3. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
  4. A Really Big Lunch, Jim Harrison
  5. The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery
  6. Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple
  7. South and West, Joan Didion
  8. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
  9. Hillbilly Elegy,  J. D. Vance
  10. Ordeal, Jorn Lier Horst
  11. Caveman, Jorn Lier Horst
  12. Mastering Leadership, Robert Anderson & William Adams
  13. The Nest, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
  14. Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
  15. A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman
  16. Crusader’s Cross, James Lee Burke
  17. In the Kingdom of Ice, Hampton Sides
  18. Lab Girl, Hope Jahren
  19. The Danish Girl, David Ebershoff
  20. Delicate, Edible Birds, Lauren Groff
  21. Pack of Two, Caroline Knapp
  22. The Earth is Enough, Harry Middleton
  23. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
  24. Can’t Not Do, Paul Shoemaker
  25. The Lake House, Kate Morton
  26. Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
  27. The Nightingale, Kristen Hannah
  28. StandOut 2.0, Marcus Buckingham
  29. Etta and Otto and Russell and James, Emma Hooper
  30. Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion
  31. Fates & Furies, Lauren Groff
  32. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North
  33. Thunderstruck, Erik Larson
  34. Hold Still, Sally Mann
  35. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
  36. The Opposite of Loneliness, Marina Keegan
  37. The Swimmer, Joakim Zander
  38. Strengths-based Parenting, Mary Rechmeyer and Jennifer Robison

All-Time Top Favorites 

  1. The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
  2. Man’s Fate, Andre Malraux
  3. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
  4. A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean
  5. She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb
  6. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
  7. Rivers of Memory, Harry Middleton
  8. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
  9. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  10. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  11. The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein
  12. Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
  13. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
  14. Sense & Sensibility, Jane Austen
  15. Grendel, John Gardner
  16. The Meadow, James Galvin

Favorite Books I Read with My Kids

  1. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankewiler, E. L. Konigsburg
  2. Magic Marks the Spot (and the entire Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates series), Caroline Carlson
  3. Gregor the Overlander (and other books in the same series), Suzanne Collins
  4. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
  5. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle
  6. The Borrowers, Mary Norton
  7. The Fairy Tale Detectives (and the entire Sisters Grimm series), Michael Buckley
  8. Looking for Alaska, John Green
  9. The Hunger Games (and series), Suzanne Collins
  10. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban (and the entire series, but book 3 is my favorite), J. K. Rowling