I read or listened to 104 books this year. Here are some that I really liked.
Over the last few years, I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of fiction by writers from African countries. This was a great year in that regard:
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What It Means When A Man Falls from the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. This short story collection by Arimah — from Nigeria — has gorgeous prose and deep feeling. I’d read a novel based on any of these stories. My favorite work of fiction of the year.
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My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Korede, the nurse, is always cleaning up after her sister… That is, her sister’s murder scenes! It’s a fast-paced, wild ride. Really enjoyed it.
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Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue. Cameroonian immigrants struggle in NY. Fascinating, heart-reading interpersonal dynamics set against the backdrop of the 2007 recession.
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Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi. A girl is inhabited by various gods, which translates into multiple personalities including a fluid sexual identity. A fresh, original voice.
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She Would Be King, by Wayetu Moore. A magical realist tale of the founding of Liberia with three superheroes. It takes a while to get moving, but then it’s unstoppable.
There was even some good fiction by writers outside of Africa:
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Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. This captivating epic follows a Korean family over decades during the Japanese occupation of Korea, migrating to Japan early in the novel. My favorite novel of the year.
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Nutshell, by Ian McEwan. Amazing prose and a tight thriller to boot, all narrated from inside the womb. Think Hamlet… Oh, never mind, just read it.
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Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. Brief, beautiful, and tragic. The elusive quest for the American dream, or any dream of a better life.
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The Power, by Naomi Alderman. What if women suddenly became physically dominant? Power corrupts, no matter the gender. Delightful exploration of shifting power dynamics.
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Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Gorgeously written story of a refugee couple.
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MacBeth, by Jo Nesbø (translated by Don Bartlett). Nesbø updates Shakespeare’s play as a 1970s crime thriller. Equal part thrilling in plot and fascinating to see how he adapts the old play. Maybe a little long, but it didn’t really lag. I’m just impatient.
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Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart. A satirical look at the future, where social media is even more dominant than it is today. Think Dave Eggers’ The Circle but farcical.
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Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff. Groff captures fabulously the loneliness of the person obsessed with the praise of others. Oh, and his wife has secrets. (Think a much more literary Gone Girl.)
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Archaeopteryx, by Dan Darling. A magical realist thriller novel about society’s misfits, corporations tampering with nature, and immigration — all set in beautiful New Mexico.
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An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones. When an African-American man is unjustly imprisoned, what’s the impact on a marriage? Heartbreaking. Good writing. Maybe a tiny bit long.
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Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward. Beautiful, difficult novel about a low-income African American family. with ghosts.
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Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn. Solid thriller. Very dark. Surprised me even when I thought I was done being surprised. (Not as good as her Gone Girl but better than her Dark Places.)
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Push, by Sapphire. A harrowing account of a deeply abused young woman and how learning to read and write offer a path to healing.
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Son, by Lois Lowry. This finale in Lowry’s “The Giver” quartet is a great finale, a good meditation on wants and needs, and it makes the third book – Messenger – more satisfying.
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Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman. Excellent, entertaining retelling of Norse myths. Gaiman narrates the audiobook. A pleasure to listen to.
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Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor. Binti leaves earth to attend a university with 5 percent humans. Suddenly she’s in the middle of a war. Oh, and she LOVES math. I particularly loved the mathematical meditation.
I read great books on economics, psychology, and political science:
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Who Gets What ― and Why, by Alvin Roth. Roth, winner of the economics Nobel prize, shows how important rules are for making markets work. Especially matching markets, like organs and school placement. He shares his extensive experience in designing difficult markets. Enlightening and inspiring, it shows — if you had any doubt — the good that economics can do in the world.
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Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy, by Dani Rodrik. An accomplished economist who isn’t afraid to talk straight on international trade, the pluses and minuses, and how to move forward. AND he quotes Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story in his conclusion.
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Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality, by James Kwak. Great discussion of how simplistic economic models are used for political ends.
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Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling. Great treatise on “data as therapy,” how many aspects of the wider world are better than widely reported, and how to interpret stats more responsibly. Mixed with a lot of charming and exciting (and sometimes devastating) anecdotes from Hans Rosling’s life.
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The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, by Michael Lewis. A fascinating story of breakthroughs in psychology, together with the account of a research partnership that soured but never died. Great example of popular writing about social science, in many ways. A couple of the “aside” chapters weren’t perfectly integrated, but a good example of turning social science into a compelling saga.
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The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, by Angus Deaton. Nobel Prize winning economist explains global inequality in health and wealth + the dangers of aid. Lots of intelligent thinking here, even if you don’t agree with everything.
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What Would the Great Economists Do? How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems, by Linda Yueh. Fun bios of great economists with lots of delightful detail, combined with less interesting of current economic issues. The former outweighed the latter.
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Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa, by Kim Yi Dionne. Through a healthy mix of ethnographic fieldwork, original survey collection, and large-scale survey analysis, Dionne shows that international donors care a lot more about HIV/AIDS than African do.
Here are great memoirs:
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I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb. This is what standing up for what you believe in looks like.
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The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. I adored this mix of recovery memoir and exploration of addiction and creativity, and the racial and class divide of addiction public policy. A little sprawling but worth it.
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Educated, by Tara Westover. Tough memoir of a childhood in a survivalist Mormon household and the author’s ultimate escape. Spends some time on her own imperfect memory and questions of historiography.
and memoirs or biographies (and one how-to guide) written as comics:
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The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, by Thi Bui. A Vietnamese-American explores her family history and what it means for her identity. Beautiful and powerful. Some Vietnamese history mixed in.
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You & a Bike & a Road, by Eleanor Davis. Travel memoir of biking across the country. Lots of honest emotion. Quick and interesting.
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The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea: A Graphic Memoir of Modern Slavery, by Vannak Anan Prum. A Cambodian man is enslaved on a fishing boat. After his escape, his documents his story through the images in this book. Powerful and heartbreaking.
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Hostage, by Guy Delisle (translated by Helge Dascher). Delisle uses a graphic novel to tell the true story of a humanitarian worker who was kidnapped in the Caucases. It is excruciating in the best way, as we follow the hostage’s thoughts and efforts to escape. (I also liked Delisle’s book Pyongyang, about his year working in North Korea.)
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Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York, by Roz Chast. “This book is a sort-of guide and also a thank-you letter and a love letter to my hometown and New Yorkers everywhere.” Fun book. I laughed aloud many times.
and graphic novels or short stories:
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My Favorite Things Is Monsters – Volume 1, by Emil Ferris. My favorite graphic novel of the year (lots of other people agree with me). Compelling, gorgeous, very dark mystery and bildungsroman set in 1960s Chicago.
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Three Shadows, by Cyril Pedrosa (tr. from French by Edward Gauvin). How far will a parent go to save their child from death? This is an urgent little fable. “In this our springtime there is no better, there is no worse. Blossoming branches burgeon as they must. Some are long, some are short.”
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Boundless, by Jillian Tamaki. Wonderfully weird collection of short stories in comic format. Ends mid-word.
a couple of essay collections:
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Men Explain Things to Me — Updated edition with two new essays, by Rebecca Solnit. Thoughtful, engaging, fair collection of essays on women in society.
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Browse: The World in Bookshops, edited by Henry Hitchings. Lovely collection of essays about bookshops by writers from around the world — India, China, Turkey, Colombia, Kenya, the U.K., Denmark, Italy, Germany, the Ukraine, and the U.S.
one wonderful poetry collection:
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Don’t Call Us Dead, by Danez Smith. Tragic, beautiful poems about black men killed by police, being black and gay, being HIV+. (A lot of other people recommend this collection, too!)
and a fun book of literary criticism:
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Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, by Bruce Handy. Delightful analysis of many childhood classics. Don’t miss the footnotes nor the appendix.
and even some kids’ books:
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The Moomins and the Great Flood, by Tove Jansson (translated by David McDuff). Delightful, sweet, with beautiful illustration. My favorite Moomin book so far. If you don’t know the Moomins, this is a great place to start. Think Winnie the Pooh but wonderfully weirder.
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Le Petit Prince, by Antoine Saint-Exupery. Poignant, and troubling as I grow older and increasingly identify with the businessman and the lamplighter. I listened in French, so I didn’t catch everything.
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Brave, by Svetlana Chmakova. This is the second in Chmakova’s deeply affecting middle school graphic novel trilogy. This one explores bullying and left me in tears.
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Hilo Book 4: Waking the Monsters, by Judd Winick. A girl’s mom wants her to be a cheerleader; she wants to be a ninja wizard instead. Robots! Aliens! So much awesomeness!
I enjoyed many others that I read, and you can read about more of them here.
David Evans' personal blog 
Impressive and fun to see. I just started to catalogue my post GPE reading list but with 4 months of sabbatical clocked only 32 books. We overlap on African literature and Sci fi (I love Binti). My suggestions to you for 2019: Washington Black; Homegoing. On education – Reader Come Home; and for general fiction: The american war; the underground railroad; and Tell the machine (sci fi).
Thanks, Karen! I loved Homegoing, but I haven’t read any of the others. I’m looking forward to checking them out!
[…] I gave up on before the first 100 pages). Saying that, I don’t know what a good number is. David Evans at the world bank reads 100 books a year! He also keeps a spreadsheet of all the books. And writes a useful description. And is a prolific […]