2018 Top Rereads

Following up on my list of best first-time reads of 2018, here are the best books I've returned to this year. These are books that not only survive multiple readings but become richer on repeated reads.

1. Austin Kleon, Show Your Work. This is why I started bgfay.com and the newsletter

2. Rick Bass, Winter. There’s nothing I’ve read quite like this book. I read it in summer and kept thinking, like Bass, I’ve got to stockpile more firewood.

3. Linda Cline, The Ghost Of Cramer's Island. I read this for the first time in 3rd grade. It has been years since I reread it and it still feels great. Better than Where The Red Fern Grows.

4. Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country. Thank goodness Vonnegut only had George W. Bush as the worst president in his life. He might have killed himself if he saw who we have now.

5. Christopher McDougall, Born To Run. People think it’s just a barefoot running book. It’s hardly that. McDougall has written a nonfiction thriller as good as anything I’ve ever read.

6. Stephen King, On Writing. Anyone who thinks Stephen King isn’t a brilliant writer hasn’t read this. Great memoir and good advice for writers. This keeps me writing. I read it once a year.

7. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. I forgot what a poet Dillard is. I wanted to copy huge sections out of this. The word lyrical may have been coined to describe this book.

8. J.K. Rowling, The Harry Potter Series. Every summer my daughter and I each reread these books. I never tire of them and they shine as bright as they ever have. Rowling is supremely gifted.

2018 Top New (To Me) Books

My 2018 top-ten list of new (to me) books ended up being eleven. Oh well. These are listed in the order that I read them. All eleven are nonfiction. That sounds about right for me.

1. Damon Krukowski, The New Analog. This confirmed what I’ve felt about turntables and taught me the value of signal and noise.

2. Alan Jacobs, How To Think. This really got me thinking about how to think. That’s not something most books do for me.

3. Alan Lightman, Searching For Stars On An Island In Maine. Lightman deftly showed how faith and logic can live together, how religion and science intersect. It's quite a high-wire act.

4. Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments For Deleting All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Technology companies are using me. This book convinced me to delete my long-held Facebook and Twitter accounts. I'm quitting Amazon but won't ever quit Google.

5. Richard Russo, The Destiny Thief. Russo's prose is as good as anyone writing today or yesterday. I wish he wrote more essays. I’ll reread this book someday soon.

6. Hans Rosling, Factuflness. My friend Laurie begged me to read this. Now I beg everyone else to read it. It turned me around. One of the most important books of this new century.

7. Chris Offutt, My Father The Pornographer. The best memoir I’ve read in a couple years. It's difficult to get through because of who and how his father was. The prose is lyrical. This is a writer’s writer but the book is for everyone.

8. David Sedaris, Calypso. Sedaris is the humorist of our times, which is a weightier mantle than that of comedian. He's also one of the best writers I've read.

9. Stephen Kuusisto, Have Dog, Will Travel. How is this not on every Best of 2018 list? Kuusisto is an honest to God poet and his prose is infused with both poetry and his vision of being a blind man in a sighted world.

10. Deborah Levy, The Cost Of Living. No book stuck with me more. Levy’s style is brilliant, forceful, spare, and so far beyond my abilities I almost want to cry but that would get in the way of reading more of her stuff.

11. Kristi Coulter, Nothing Good Can Come From This. I love this. Her mix of humor and honesty raise the book beyond the typical alcoholic's memoir. I can’t wait to read what she does for a second book.

Next up: 2018 Top Re-Reads

Reading In The Schools

“Thus my efforts throughout this book to dissociate reading from academic life, not just because teachers and professors make reading so much more dutiful and good-for-you than it ought to be but also because the whole environment of school is simply alien to what longer form reading has been for almost all of its history.”

— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction,, 109

In the first class of the day I became anxious that management might look in the door and wonder what the hell I was doing.

The students sat, some on the heater, one on the floor, a few at desks. Each was reading a book for the most part. Occasionally one checked a phone but got back to reading pretty well given that I teach at-risk kids who have been bounced from their regular schools and most of whom come to me admitting that they hate to read.

I wasn't anxious the about the students. I worried management would take me to task.

I was sitting at a student desk, one leg crossed over the other, a book in hand, and had been reading for fifteen minutes, ever since I had helped Frank understand the word agape which had come up in his book. I had read ten pages of Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction, looking up after each paragraph to scan for kids having or making trouble. There was none of that, so I had kept reading until anxiety interrupted me.

I haven't had the best relationship with management during my tenure. Imagining some manager looking in, I could hear them asking why wasn't I moving about the room checking in with kids. How could I know what they were doing if I wasn't teaching?

I almost wasn't teaching, but that was because I had set the structure of the class and was allowing them to learn. I got them into books today and over the last three months. Once they start reading, my job is to just keep things going. The only teaching left to do was to be a reader too.

It's a safe bet that management would see things in another way. That's the way it goes in schools. Management is paying me to do something and there I was looking like I was doing nothing much at all. Observing a class for a few minutes is no way to understand what is really going on. It takes understanding all that we have been doing in that classroom since September. The room full of silent readers doesn't just happen. Kids aren't wired for that. None of us are. It's a learned behavior, one that I've worked to help them learn, and from this they learn more than I could ever teach.

I tamped down the anxiety by remembering that I would hear the beeper on the outside door should any managers come by. Then I could get up and act like I was doing something management would appreciate. Or maybe I would stick to what I know is true and let the kids read. I scanned the room again, saw that everyone was still reading, and went back to my book. We all have so much left to learn and so little time to read.

Reading List

Alan Jacobs, in The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction makes a case against reading goals, speed-reading, and the rush to have read. I nodded reading all that but also thinking about my reading list and why I keep and post it publicly.

I keep a reading list in part because my memory is all too fallible. I've read books twice because seeing the book again I've found it terribly interesting I dig in, dogged by a feeling of familiarity, but not giving into it for a few hundred pages in. This doesn't happen often, but more than once is enough.

Often, I half recall some idea, character, scene, or some such and want to revisit it. This happened this summer when I remembered a cogent argument about unions but couldn't remember where it was from. Going over my list, I found Richard Russo's The Identity Thief and remembered him discussing summer work alongside his father. I found the book, reread that section, and felt all kinds of better.

Beyond memory, I like knowing how many books I've read in a year though I have no goal. The number simply pushes me toward a habit of mind, a habit of reading. I'm on my fifty-ninth book of the year, a number meaningless on any scale, but useful to me. It's not objective since two of those books were single essays packaged as books, two were graphic novels, and seven or eight were young-adult books. Someone else's fifty-nine books would be more or fewer pages and that couldn't matter less.

But why publish the list on the web?

As a kid I was hooked on end-of-the-year TV shows that rewound the news, songs, movies, and deaths of the year. I didn't care about the ball drop but I was all over the year in review. There aren't enough of those kinds of shows any more. There are, however, plenty of reading lists marking the turn of the calendar. Major news outlets and magazines come out with best-of-the-year lists, but I'm more into the blogs on which individuals list their favorite books, the ones they are still thinking about. I eat those lists up and so I wanted one of my own. I hope that it proves interesting to someone.

My list is nothing spectacular save for one thing: it is my reading list and a peak inside my brain. This is where I'm back to Alan Jacobs's "commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim" (Pleasures, 15). I read what interests me and one thing leads to another. There's a lot of nonfiction on my list because that's what I tend to favor. There is nocourse of study there because I don't read to elevate myself though I like to read things from which I will learn. Luckily, I can learn from just about any book.

I'm a better man when I'm reading and keeping a reading list. It's the act of reading that does it. Reading helps me reflect, consider others, and find solitude. I've been known to take the solitude too far, withdrawing from family and work in favor of some written world, but more often than not reading makes me a better person.

What have you been reading? Leave a comment below with your reading list, top five, or current book. Other than a book, I can't think of anything I would rather read.