It is always a weird feeling to look back at all the books I read in any given year. Some books I loved, some books I remember strongly and evoke a specific emotion, and honestly there are some in here that I have to look up to remember the slightest thing about them.

Fire Weather was both an important read and a total page turner, and it was one of the best books I read this year. Say Nothing was also outstanding, as was this year’s excellent Hulu limited series based on this book.

There was some very fun diversions, like Our Band Could Be Your Life about the American punk scene, and Goth about, well, the Goth scene written by one of it’s pioneers.

Some others that really jump at my as I reflect on this list are Knife, 1Q84, How the World Ran Out of Everything, and the fantastically well-written Zeitoun.

Here are all the books I read in 2024 in the order I read them…

1. Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker 
2. The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen 
3. The Zone of Interest — Martin Amis 
4. Firewater — Harold R. Johnson
5. World Within a Song — Jeff Tweedy
6. Eve — Cat Bohannon 
7. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry — Gabrielle Zevin 
8. Our Band Could Be Your Life — Michael Azerrad 
9. Trust — Hernan Diaz 
10. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine — Rashid Khalidi 
11. Burn Book — Kara Swisher 
12. How to Know a Person — David Brooks 
13. Goth — Lol Tolhurst 
14. All the Light We Cannot See — Anthony Doerr 
15. Erasure — Perceval Everett 
16. Great Expectations — Vinson Cunningham
17. Fire Weather — John Vaillant 
18. Say Nothing — Patrick Radden Keefe 
19. I Shall Not Hate — Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish 
20. Rogues — Patrick Radden Keefe
21. Kitchen Confidential — Anthony Bourdain 
22. The Deluge — Stephen Markley
23. Knife — Salman Rushdie
24. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo — Taylor Jenkins Reid 
25. In My Time of Dying — Sebastian Junger 
26. Limitarianism — Ingrid Robeyns
27. A Children’s Bible — Lydia Millet
28. The Talented Mr. Ripley — Patricia Highsmith 
29. Justin Trudeau on the Ropes — Paul Wells
30. Becoming Earth — Ferris Jabr
31. Comedy Book — Jesse David Fox
32. Darth Plagueis — James Luceno 
33. Aurora — Kim Stanley Robinson 
34. Crooked Teeth — Danny Ramadan
35. The Marrow Thieves — Cherie Dimaline
36. 1Q84 — Haruki Murakami 
37. The Will To Change — bell hooks
38. The Undoing Project — Michael Lewis 
39. Rest is Resistance — Tricia Hersey
40. Misfit — Gary Gulman 
41. Ripley Under Ground — Patricia Highsmith 
42. Our Crumbling Foundation — Gregor Craigie 
43. Age of Revolutions — Fareed Zakaria
44. The Message — Ta-Nehisi Coates
45. Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari 
46. Revenge of the Tipping Point — Malcolm Gladwell
47. Reconciling History — Jody Wilson-Raybould 
48. Hunting by Stars — Cherie Dimaline 
49. Red Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
50. How the World Ran Out of Everything — Peter S. Goodman
51. The Spamalot Diaries — Eric Idle 
52. Zeitoun — Dave Eggers
53. At a Loss for Words — Carol Off
54. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord — Daniel J. Levitin 

I also saw lots of great films and many amazing shows in 2024.

In 2023, I read so many great books. Here’s a list of all the books I read in 2023 in the order I read them (not the order I enjoyed them).

When I look back at this list, four books really stand out. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (so good I read it twice—thanks Alison for the reco!), Black Cake (excellent, much better than the new Hulu series), Adrift by a great local author Lisa Brideau, and the spectacularly ambitious and immensely readable Babel by R. F. Kuang.

I also really enjoyed the Children of Time trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky and the two “Moon” books by Waubgeshig Rice. I’d also like to mention We Do This ’Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba because it is the source of an amazing quote my friend Parker taught me earlier this year: Hope is a Discipline. I think of that quote frequently when the problems of the world seem so much bigger than our efforts of repair.

I appreciate my book club for introducing me to books I otherwise wouldn’t have read. Every year when I publish this list I always get into great conversations about our favourite books, so what books stood out to you in 2023?

1. Girl, Woman, Other — Bernardino Evaristo
2. Directed by James Burrows — James Burrows
3. The Persuaders — Anand Giridharadas
4. We Are All Made of Scars — Christopher Morris
5. New York 2140 — Kim Stanley Robinson
6. A Psalm for the Wild-Built — Becky Chambers
7. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin
8. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy — Becky Chambers
9. Chokepoint Capitalism — Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow
10. The Long Road Home — Debra Thompson
11. The Creative Act — Rick Rubin
12. The Myth of Normal — Gabor Maté
13. The Theory of Crows — David A. Robertson
14. The Power of Story — Harold Johnson
15. Banking on a Human Scale — George Hofheimer
16. Greenwood — Michael Christie
17. Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates
18. Urban Magnets — Bruce Haden, Mark Holland & Bruce Irvine
19. Care Of — Ivan Coyote
20. Children of Time — Adrian Tchaikovsky
21. Unbroken — Angela Sterritt
22. God Human Animal Machine — Meghan O’Gieblyn
23. Power, for All — Julie Battilana & Tiziana Casciaro
24. Poverty, by America — Matthew Desmond
25. all about love — bell hooks
26. Black Cake — Charmaine Wilkerson
27. The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece — Tom Hanks
28. A Visit from the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan
29. Truth Telling — Michelle Good
30. How to Break Up With Your Phone — Catherine Price
31. An American Marriage — Tayari Jones
32. Junie — Chelene Knight
33. Children of Ruin — Adrian Tchaikovsky
34. We Do This ’Til We Free Us — Mariame Kaba
35. The Book of Boundaries — Melissa Urban
36. Children of Memory — Adrian Tchaikovsky
37. Stamped From The Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America — Ibram X. Kendi & Joel Christian Gill
38. The Country of the Blind — Andrew Leland
39. Happy-Go-Lucky — David Sedaris
40. All That She Carried — Tiya Miles
41. Yellowface — R. F. Kuang
42. Post Capitalist Philanthropy — Alnoor Ladha & Lynn Murphy
43. Not Here — Rob Goodman
44. Ducks — Kate Beaton
45. American Prometheus — Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin
46. Doppelganger — Naomi Klein
47. Monsters — Claire Dederer
48. The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt
49. Moon of the Crusted Snow — Waubgeshig Rice
50. Adrift — Lisa Brideau
51. Moon of the Turning Leaves — Waubgeshig Rice
52. MCU: The Rise of Marvel Studios — Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, & Gavin Edwards
53. The Candy House: A Novel — Jennifer Egan
54. Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult — Maria Bamford
55. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin
56. Babel — R. F. Kuang
57. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin
58. Young Jane Young  — Gabrielle Zevin

Happy 2024, all!

I’m not sure what compelled me to start publishing the list of all the books I read in the year, but I’ve been doing it a couple of years in a row. Since three makes a trend, here’s my third annual list.

I gotta start with Homegoing. This is literally one of the best books I’ve read in a few years. It is super compelling, very touching, enthrallingly written and weaves a complex story in a very satisfying way.

Looking back at this list, some of the standouts were the truly excellent Half a Yellow Sun; Sea of Tranquility, which I finished and re-read almost immediately to better understand all the nuances (which I’d never done before); Finding the Mother Tree was something I’d been meaning to read for a while and it was beautifully written and an important subject; Namwayut was a book by Chief Robert Joseph, whom I’ve known a little for many years and found his telling of his story to be powerfully written and deeply moving.

VanBikes was written by my friend Colin, and I’m so proud of him for telling this story which he’s been working on for so many years—it came together beautifully. Run Towards the Danger has stayed with me and still feels very present. Invisible Boy was an amazing insight into a situation I know nothing about and is extremely compelling. Finally, I’ve been an Elvis Costello fan since I was a teenager, so I don’t know why it took me so long to read his memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. As I write this I’m about half-way through and am enjoying it a lot.

Here’s my list of books I read in 2022 in the order I read them:

1. Indigenous Relations — Bob Joseph & Cynthia F. Joseph
2. Under a White Sky — Elizabeth Kolbert
3. Life in the City of Dirty Water — Clayton Thomas-Müller
4. Half of a Yellow Sun — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. Factfulness — Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund & Oka Rosling 
6. Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi
7. The 1619 Project — Nikole Hannah-Jones
8. How the Word is Passed — Clint Smith
9. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — Mark Haddon
10. The Sixth Extinction — Elizabeth Kolbert
11. Caste — Isabel Wilkerson
12. State of Terror — Hillary Clinton & Louise Penny
13. Stolen Focus — Johann Hari
14. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
15. How to be Perfect — Michael Schur
16. Finding the Mother Tree — Suzanne Simard
17. Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
18. The Comedians — Kliph Nesteroff 
19. Sing Backwards and Weep — Mark Lanegan
20. Underground Airlines — Ben H. Winters
21. Transcendent Kingdom — Yaa Gyasi 
22. Origin — Jennifer Raff
23. Entangled Life — Merlin Sheldrake 
24. Big Lonely Doug — Harley Rustad 
25. Fundamentals — Frank Wilczek
26. The Islander — Chris Blackwell
27. Ragged Company — Richard Wagamese
28. Paris 1919 — Margaret MacMillan
29. Sea of Tranquility — Emily St. John Mandel 
30. Lonely Boy — Steve Jones
31. Sea of Tranquility — Emily St. John Mandel (I had to read it again immediately to fully appreciate it)
32. Vanishing Half — Brit Bennett 
33. The Glass Hotel — Emily St. John Mandel 
34. Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel
35. Quiet — Susan Cain
36. Subdivided — Jay Pitter & John Lorinc
37. The Netanyahus —Joshua Cohen
38. The Midnight Library — Matt Haig
39. How to Be Animal — Melanie Challenger
40. Nasty, Brutish, and Short — Scott Hershovitz
41. Namwayut — Chief Robert Joseph
42. The Last White Man — Mohsin Hamid
43. Humble Pi — Matt Parker 
44. Monkey Beach — Eden Robinson
45. Too Dumb for Democracy? — David Moscrop
46. Vanbikes — Colin Stein
47. Profiles in Ignorance — Andy Borowitz
48. Run Towards the Danger — Sarah Polley
49. True Reconciliation — Jody Wilson-Raybould
50. Surrender — Bono
51. Invisible Boy — Harrison Mooney
52. Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink — Elvis Costello

I’m looking forward to all the books to read in 2023!