30 before 30 :: the books

I’ve always loved reading but, like many others, college reading and assignments forced me to stop reading for fun. I rediscovered reading in the latter part of my 20s, ironically, when I was working full-time and in grad school full-time. My job required too much of me, and grad school on top of that was depleting my humanness. I ached for time to myself, not having to worry about how 18-year-olds’ choices affected my sleep or how APA citations impacted my grades. 

I started reading again, sometimes waking up at 5:30am to get an hour in before I had to start on that paper or respond to that duty call. It was time just for me, before the rest of the world woke up and required something of me. I have vivid memories of sitting on my couch in my apartment on the 9th floor of Ondine Residence Hall, reading a book and watching the sun rise out my window.

Reading doesn’t feel like fun anymore, like just a hobby or a pastime. Reading has saved me from nights of loneliness, especially in this last year of the pandemic. It’s helped me witness lives outside of my own, pushing me to acknowledge my privilege and power and the shitty systems in our world. And every book, in some way, has stretched me to learn new things about myself. Books are crucial to my life, a requirement that allows me to show up better in the world. It sounds dramatic, but dang — it’s true. Just like I need a cup of coffee in the morning, I’m a better human when I make time to read.

The circumstances of my 20s were the perfect conditions for reading as much as I did: I was single for most of this decade and lived alone for most of it, too. I leaned into my introverted side and preferred Friday nights curled up on my couch with a book. I became a morning person and learned to wake up a few hours before work, with nothing to do except what I chose.

My reading habits will change in this next decade, I’m sure of it. I hope that one day, I have a partner whom I live with, who goads me to put down my book to watch his favorite movie for the fifth time or who whisks me off the couch on a Friday night. I hope that one day, I will have children running around my house who will steal away my morning peace, but give me the opportunity to reread the Junie B. Jones series.

Maybe this next decade will allow room for all of it. The quiet and the chaos, the solitude and the family, the time to read squeezed alongside the rest of life’s big, messy moments. I’ll hold onto both possibilities: grateful for the books I’ve read so far, hopeful that there will be many, many more. 

And so: here are the best books I’ve read in the last decade. Like choosing songs, narrowing these down was hard. If I’ve counted correctly, I’ve read over 330 books since 2011. I only know that fact because I’ve kept track of every book I’ve ever read in a Google Spreadsheet, which made it easy to remember and also reminded me that I’m a little bonkers.

Memoir:

1. Tiny Beautiful Things x Cheryl Strayed

2. Untamed x Glennon Doyle

3. Between the World and Me x Ta-Nehisi Coates

4. Gift from the Sea x Anne Morrow Lindbergh

5. When Breath Becomes Air x Paul Kalinithi

6. The Bright Hour x Nina Riggs

7. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone x Lori Gottlieb

8. How We Fight for Our Lives x Saeed Jones

9. On Writing x Stephen King

Nonfiction:

1. Love Wins x Rob Bell

2. Bird by Bird x Anne Lamott

3. The Crossroads of Should and Must x Elle Luna

4. Attached x Amir Levine & Rachel Miller

5. Daring Greatly x Brené Brown

6. The Road Back to You x Ian Cron & Suzanne Stabile

7. Missoula x Jon Krakauer

8. Eaarth x Bill McKibben

9. Bad Feminist x Roxane Gay

Fiction:

1. The Poisonwood Bible x Barbara Kingsolver

2. Americanah x Chimamanda Adichie

3. The Round House x Louise Erdrich

4. All the Light We Cannot See x Anthony Doerr

5. Gilead x Marilynne Robinson

6. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine x Gail Honeyman

7. Where the Crawdads Sing x Delia Owens

8. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue x V.E. Schwab

Poetry:

1. Devotions x Mary Oliver

2. Milk and Honey x Rupi Kaur

3. Citizen x Claudia Rankine

4. Good Bones x Maggie Smith

one book book club.

Why did people ask, "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

I signed up for English 160 on a whim.

It looked interesting (it was), it was a night class (which meant more time to hang out in the Atrium, my college's social hotspot, during the day), and it counted for a required humanities credit (thanks, liberal arts).

On the first day, after passing out the syllabus and talking through the assignments and giving us a short break halfway through the three hours, Dr. Joan Kopperud showed us author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's now-famous TEDTalk, "The Danger of a Single Story." I had never met Dr. Kopperud before, and I still didn't know what to expect from this course, but after hearing Chimamanda speak the words, "When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise," I realized two things: one, that Monday nights from 6:00-9:00 pm were going to be a literature heaven-on-Earth, and two, that I needed to get to know this professor.

The class came and went each week. I would dash across town from my internship, dash across campus to Academy Hall, dash up to the third floor, books and dinner and highlighters in hand. I would sit in my desk (the same, awkward, left-handed one every week), listening to freshmen and seniors and Dr. Kopperud share thoughts on each book we read. We read fiction and nonfiction and poems and plays that were single stories from India, or Saudi Arabia, or England, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I questioned why I had decided not to become an English teacher; I wondered how I could live a life that wasn't surrounded by reading and sharing literature with others every day. I panicked that I hadn't chosen the right major; I poured through the course catalog and my senior year schedule, trying to squeeze any other English courses into my last two semesters (I didn't). And, I (eventually and timidly) asked Dr. Kopperud if she would have coffee with me outside of class. She, with all her energy and kindness and openness, agreed.

A class that started as a core curriculum requirement quickly became a space to confront the unknown in each chapter, ask questions about each story, and write not-totally-researchy papers about them. A professor that started as a name next to the most ideal class time quickly became a mentor, cheerleader, and permanent book-recommender. She also became the person who gifted me a hardly-used food processor before I moved across the country, who makes time in her schedule to grab coffee when I'm back home from across the country, and who ventured to my new home across the country with another of my college-year-and-still-now mentors. The whims -- the things you hardly think about, the things that require minimal brainpower at the time, like entering the Course Registration Number for English 160 as you register for the spring semester of your junior year -- can burrow deep into your heart and stick around to shape your own story.

During our coffee date this January, over Starbucks and swapping book titles, I mentioned how I wanted to join a book club in Portland, but felt a little overwhelmed by the idea. (Once a month? Sometimes it takes me two months to get through two short stories. Saturday mornings? I don't leave my room until at least 11:00 am. Through a Meetup group? Maybe I'm more of an introvert than I think I am...) Dr. Kopperud, with that same energy and kindness and openness as when I first asked her to coffee three years before, leaned in and smiled. She went on to tell me what she's been doing with her girlfriends for years: a One Book Book Club.

So tonight, I made a sign for my apartment door and threw some frozen pizzas in my oven as a group of women gathered around a pile of Americanahs in the middle of my living room floor. Some had read the book in its entirety in two days; some had yet to crack open the cover. We were from Arizona and Zimbabwe, rural and "urban" North Dakota. We were full-time employees and students and volunteers, part-time writers and dancers and yogis. We shared our own stories and learned more about each other's as we talked about this single story and all that it brought up -- race and gender and love and privilege. One book, one evening, and one club that (I hope) will shift and grow and share more books and more evenings and more stories; a One Book Book Club.

I still have each book I read during English 160. They sit ear-marked and underlined on my bookshelf, next to an ear-marked and underlined Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, reminding me of the danger of a single story (and how whims and 20-minuted TEDTalks and energetic, kind, and open professors can make your own story much more interesting and full circle-y). Now, every book that is a part of the Portland edition of One Book Book Club will, in some small way, be part of that semester -- and will be a part of my story too.