2018 was a very good year in books. I read thirty, but two stood above all others. In fact, I liked them both so much, for the first time, I am picking co-books of the year. Emmy Favilla’s A World Without Whom and Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color do the two things books I enjoy do best - they inform and entertain. But more than that, both authors write with wit and élan, cheeky good humor and just the right amount of bawdiness (at least for me). Click on the links to read my full reviews.
My honorable mentions are several. Erin Carlson’s I’ll Have What She’s Having was not just an homage to the brilliant Nora Ephron, but a meditation on modern romance and how it is portrayed in movies. Marve Emre’s The Personality Brokers was a beautifully written and extensively researched history of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and how it became ubiquitous in society while also lacking any scientific grounding. For immersive experiences, Miles Unger’s Picasso and the Painting that Shocked the World, read like the first part of a multi-part biography of the 20th century’s unquestioned grand master. While the book is ostensibly about the creation of the proto-cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, it is much more than that. It is the story of a prodigy who, before he turned thirty, had moved through three distinct phases (Blue Period, Rose Period, and Cubism) that have influenced modern art ever since. Finally, Rebecca Traistor’s Good and Mad is a rip-roaring polemic against the patriarchy and encourages women to stop apologizing for wanting to exercise their power. I am here for it. All of it.
Other good reads included Hope Never Dies, a fanfic imagination of Joe Biden in his post-Obama Administration years becoming an amateur gumshoe, The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, Age 83 1/4, a fictional account of an elderly man’s life in an assisted living facility that captures the poignancy, small joys and absurdity when the final grains are passing through the hourglass, and Broadway, a historical journey of the great Broad Way that has defined New York City for more than 400 years.
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Prior years-in-review:
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