First published Dec 2019

I read 35 books in 2019, a fair bit short of 52 — too many new commitments that took up a lot of time!

Great fiction, I think, is even better than fine drama. There’s just something utterly magical about a good story — a natural ecstatic high. Like Netflix for many people, it takes my mind off work and is a form of relaxation. It’s no surprise then that 60% of my books in 2019 were fiction in its various forms. Other categories I enjoyed were memoir/essays, some history/politics (though not as much as 2018), and some management/finance.

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin is the best science fiction / epic fantasy series that I've read in years. (And I’ve read quite a few.) It is well-deserved indeed that she won the Hugo Award, one of the most prestigious awards for science fiction, three years in a row (2016-2018), one for each novel. The series is brilliant in every way. What if we damaged the earth so far beyond repair that ashfall blots out the sun, and humans are reduced to primal communities where self-preservation is the only game around? What if, instead of four seasons, we now have five — the fifth season a terrible apocalyptic night that lasts for centuries — the known world is reduced, and dead civilisations are far more advanced than what survived? What if we could wield the powers of the earth, move rock and eat stone? How would we live? Are we still human? Her world-building is phenomenal, characters realistic, plot captivating, and still she manages to hit all the parallel notes that strike a chord within us: environmental devastation, racism and prejudice, the will to survive, the love and sorrow that carves every human life. Highly, highly recommended. However, once you start, you may end up reading into the wee hours of the night, on the bus and train, and in every spare slice of time… There’s no other way to explain manically consuming 1,300 pages of this trilogy because you can’t put it down… and I know I’m not the only one.

It was heart-wrenching to follow this series with Blood River. There were too many echoes of Jemisin’s depiction of the apocalyptic world in a real country today, the Congo. A daring journalist on what seemed to everyone else a suicide mission, Tim Butcher re-created Henry Stanley’s original expedition to the Congo in the early 1870s. In 2004, Butcher visited once-thriving cities and roads that are entirely wiped out, consumed by the ever-hungry forest, by greed, violence, and evil, by rust and ruin — where fleeing into the bush is the only safe place for ordinary folk, and civilization had truly regressed. It seems utterly unimaginable that the children in a village had never seen a motorbike until Butcher came through the bush on one, yet their grandparents had, in the 1950s. Is there any other country in this world that is “undeveloping”, as he called it, in such a grievous way?

Other non-fiction books that merit a shoutout, but may be less widely-known include:

• The Return by Hisham Matar: This is Matar’s memoir on searching for his father in the land of his birth, Libya, decades after his father, a prominent political dissident, was kidnapped and imprisoned by Qaddafi’s government. It is a meditation on longing and home-coming, and the unmediated tensions between fathers and sons. This book won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. It definitely shows in his gorgeous prose.

• The Wave in the Mind by Ursula Le Guin: Le Guin is very famous for her novels (she has won many, many awards in her long and storied career), but this book of essays is a peerless look into her creative and humorous mind. It is laugh-out-loud funny at points. It jolted me back into reading and writing, but more importantly, back into an appreciation for wit and life.

• The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham: Warren Buffett considered Benjamin Graham his mentor. This alone should be recommendation enough. This is the grand-daddy manual, or at least the starting point, for all defensive / passive investors. Graham's advice is eminently sensible and surprisingly applicable, even 50 years on. I recommend getting the updated version with chapter commentary, as the commentator updates Graham’s advice for a modern context (the 2000s, which is still dated, but better than Graham’s original of 1970). I am definitely putting what I’ve read into practice, and only wish I had come across this book earlier. I hope that you will enjoy these as much as I have! Happy reading in 2020 😃

\\

Highly recommended reads indicated with **

Fantasy / Sci Fi / Myth

• "The Stone Sky”, N.K. Jemisin (Broken Earth #1)**

• “The Obelisk Gate”, N.K. Jemisin (Broken Earth #2)**

• “The Fifth Season”, N.K. Jemisin (Broken Earth #3)**

• “Circe”, Madeline Miller**

• “Speaker for the Dead”, Orson Scott Card**

• “The House with Chicken Legs”, Sophie Anderson

• “The Final Empire”, Brandon Sanderson

• “Oathbringer”, Brandon Sanderson

• "Words of Radiance", Brandon Sanderson

• “The Way of Kings”, Brandon Sanderson

• “Suicide Club”, Rachel Heng

Literary Fiction

• “Siddartha”, Hermann Hesse**

• “Milkman", Anna Burns

• “Normal People”, Sally Rooney

• “Little Fires Everywhere”, Celeste Ng

• “On Love”, Alain de Botton

• “Where the Crawdads Sing”, Delia Owens

Crime / Mystery

• “Sharp Objects”, Gillian Flynn

• “The Thirteen Problems”, Agatha Christie

• “Murder at the Vicarage”, Agatha Christie

• “The Good Daughter”, Karin Slaughter

History / Politics

• "The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development", Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho", James Ferguson

• “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao”, Ian Johnson

• “Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart”, Tim Butcher

• "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914", Christopher Clark (halfway through)

Memoir / Essays

• "Educated”, Tara Westover**

• “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, Ursula K. Le Guin**

• "The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between”, Hisham Matar**

• "By Searching", Isobel Kuhn**

• “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber”, Mike Issac

• “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start Up”, John Carreyou

• “Small Fry”, Lisa Brennan-Jobs

• “I’ll be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer”, Michelle McNamara

• "The God who Is There", Francis Schaeffer (re-read)

Management / Finance

• The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham**

• “HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself”, by Clayton Christensen, etc.