I think it's pretty obvious that I am drawn in by a beautiful or striking cover. Would I have read Heidi if it didn't have that stunning floral cover art on a chartreuse background, done by Anna Bond of Rifle Paper Company? Maybe not. Coincidentally Little Women, with another gorgeous Anna Bond cover from the same series of reissues, is sitting on top of my to-read pile right now.
Two books horrified me with the treatment of the protagonist(s): Educated and The Radium Girls.
Lincoln in the Bardo was beautiful and very weird, in both style and substance, and I loved it.
I read two rock and roll memoirs, one true (Jeff Tweedy) and one fiction (Daisy Jones). Both were excellent.
As usual I suppose, there was a lot of family dysfunction, both fact and fiction, and to varying degrees: Hillbilly Elegy, Where the Crawdads Sing, Educated, There There, Rabbit Cake, and Eleanor Oliphant.
I learned a lot and enlarged my perspective by reading the memoirs of Jeff Tweedy, JD Vance, Tara Westover, Kareem Adbul-Jabbar, and Marjane Satrapi.
One delightful surprise was how much I liked both The Wild Robot and its sequel, The Wild Robot Escapes. I recommend it even if you don't have an enthusiastic six year old to read it to. It's charming as can be.
Young Jane Young is a fictionalized version of the Monica Lewinsky story, told from the points of view of various women whose lives were affected. It raises a lot of good questions, and I'm planning to recommend it to my book club.
I read a wide variety of genres last year: murder mystery, memoir, juvenile fiction, adult fiction, essay collection, how-to, narrative nonfiction, regular nonfiction, romance, graphic novel, and an academic lecture printed in book form.
One goal I have for my 2020 reading is more non-fiction. Only three on my list this year--Swedish Death Cleaning, The Radium Girls, and The Next Mormons--took a subject and explored it in depth. Time to level up my brain workouts.
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