I’ve never kept a diary. At least not since I was eight, when my father bought two blank journals and suggested that he and I spend time together every evening writing in our diaries. For several weeks we did just that, sitting side by side on the living room couch and recording the events of the day. One day I came home from school and found my diary in the wrong place on the bookshelf. When I inquired about this, my dad said, “I have to admit something to you. I was so curious about what you’ve been writing that I couldn’t help myself, so I went in your room and read it.”
This was November 1986. Over the last few weeks the tall hickory and oaks in our yard had dumped a blanket of brown leaves. I went outside and raked them down the hill into a tall heap for my father to burn. I don’t think he noticed me tossing my diary into the raging fire. Since then I’ve never felt the slightest impulse to keep another diary. What I do keep is a list of the books I read, divided up by year. Reading back through the year’s list, it’s uncanny how the events of the year play out again at rapid speed, as if the books are a cataloguing system for the library of memory.
Below I’m sharing the 2018 list to date. Reading between the lines you can see how I’ve moved from fad to fad as clearly as you might discern from my nonexistent diary. There’s the Whole30 month of food obsession; the streak of books on ultrarunning; the stretch of cold weather in February when all I wanted to read were memoirs of near-death in the polar ice. For months I never read a novel; then for months I read almost nothing but novels. Why? I can’t tell you.
I’ve put asterisks by the books that gripped or moved me more than the others. My favorite of the year may be the novel I finished only last night: The Overstory by Richard Powers. This book will change your life.
*Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari
Landscape with Invisible Hand, MT Anderson
The City, Frans Masereel
Scenes from an Impending Marriage, Adrian Tomine
Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, JP Stassen
Robot Dreams, Sara Varon
Exit Wounds, Rutu Modan
Before the Fall, Noah Hawley
*The Evolution of Beauty, Richard O. Prum
*Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
*Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
*The Far Away Brothers, Lauren Markham
The Whole 30, Melissa Hartwig and Dallas Hartwig
The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road, Finn Murphy
Find Me Unafraid, Kennedy Odede and Jessica Posner
Meb for Mortals, Meb Keflezighi
Hal Korner’s Field Guide to Ultrarunning, Hal Koerner
It Starts with Food, Dallas Hartwig and Melissa Hartwig
Natural Born Heroes, Christopher McDougall
Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith
*American Wolf, Nate Blakeslee
*Endurance, Alfred Lansing
Alone on the Ice, David Roberts
*The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson
The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks
In the Land of the White Death, Valerian Albanov
Slow Jogging, Kiroaki Tanaka
*The Barracks Thief, Tobias Wolff
Celine, Peter Heller
Behind Her Eyes, Sarah Pinborough
Jefferson’s Daughters, Catherine Kerrison
Fire Sermon, Jamie Quatro
Fluent in Three Months, Benny Lewis
Women and Power, Mary Beard
*The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston
*The Sarah Book, Scott McClanahan
Eat the Apple, Matt Young
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Michael Pollan
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Michael Pollan
The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers
Winter, Karl Ove Knausgaard
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
*The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
*The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Extra Lives, Tom Bissell
Food Politics, Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim
The Playwright’s Guidebook, Stuart Spencer
North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, Scott Jurek
Stuffed and Starved, Raj Patel
Trick, Domenico Starnone
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind, Barbara Lipska
Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich
Fluent Forever, Gabriel Wyner
A Colony in a Nation, Chris Hayes
The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis
Tribe of Mentors, Timothy Ferriss
*How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan
10% Happier, Dan Harris
Air Traffic, Gregory Pardlo
Heretic, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
*On Grand Strategy, John Lewis Gaddis
Two Sisters, Asne Seierstad
Motherhood, Sheila Heti
The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley
*Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill
Mr. Burns, Anne Washburn
Notes for a War Story, Gipi
*Sick, Porochista Khakpour
*Kudos, Rachel Cusk
*The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai
The Power, Naomi Alderman
The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst
The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis
The Descendants, Kaui Hart Hemmings
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
*Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
*The North Water, Ian McGuire
*Saints for All Occasions, J. Courtney Sullivan
*The Unpunished Vice, Edmund White
Harvard Square, Andre Aciman
Maine, J. Courtney Sullivan
Commencement, J. Courtney Sullivan
A Moonless Starless Sky, Alexis Okeowo
Dopesick, Beth Macy
*My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
First Person, Richard Flanagan
Pigtown, Anthony Roberts
*The Overstory, Richard Powers