A Book-of-the-Month Club to Cure Your Existential Dread, Or: The Best Books I Read in 2018

At the end of 2017, I realized I was often falling asleep with a terrible sense of anxiety as I worried about the devastating, soon-to-be-felt effects of climate change, the uncertain future of women’s and minorites’ rights in Trump’s America, and why only 20-some people had liked my latest Instagram post even though it’d been up for half a day. It’s a terrible time to be alive.

Reducing screen time seemed like the only reasonable course of action, so I made a goal to read at least one new book a month in 2018. Turns out I’m still a nerd, and I ended up easily burning through at least two books a month.

These are the books I’ve read (so far) in 2018. The keen observer will notice that the bulk of them are either a) memoirs, b) about running, c) about feminism or d) memoirs about running or feminism.

Fiction

  • Among Ten Thousand Things, Julia Pierpont

  • Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman

  • Enigma Variations, André Aciman

  • Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff

  • Final Girls, Riley Sager

  • A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, Mackenzi Lee

  • The Girls, Emma Cline

  • Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

  • History Is All You Left Me, Adam Silvera

  • The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwon

  • Less, Andrew Sean Greer

  • The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner

  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh

  • Severance, Ling Ma

  • Suicide Club: A Novel About Living, Rachel Heng

  • What If It’s Us, Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

  • The Witch Elm, Tana French

Nonfiction

  • Bad Feminist: Essays, Roxanne Gay

  • Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher MacDougall

  • Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, Thich Nhat Hanh

  • The New Rules of Marathon and Half-Marathon Nutrition: A Cutting Edge Plan to Fueling Your Body beyond “the Wall”, Matt Fitzgerald

  • Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxanne Gay

  • The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity, Sally Kohn

  • What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen, Kate Fagan

  • Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump, Dan Pfeiffer

Memoir

  • Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods, Christine Byl

  • Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness, Scott Jurek

  • Educated: A Memoir, Tara Westover

  • Girl Walks Into a Bar…: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle, Rachel Dratch

  • Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxanne Gay

  • Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory, Deena Kastor

  • My Squirrel Days, Ellie Kemper

  • North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, Scott Jurek

  • Priestdaddy: A Memoir, Patricia Lockwood

  • Sex Object: A Memoir, Jessica Valenti

  • Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, Dean Karnazes

  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami

  • Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation, Adam Resnick

  • You’re Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Death, Sex, and Other Humiliations, Michael Ian Black

Let’s say what everyone’s thinking: Not every book can be Harry Potter. While all the books I read this year were at least “okay” and most of them were “pretty good,” my top five come with the entirely figurative Hannah Book Club seal. The “you gotta read ‘ems” are:

Educated: A Memoir, Tara Westover

I’m far from the first to discover this book, as it’s been appearing on nearly every best-of-2018 list out there, but Educated is both an incredibly powerful tale about escaping from unfortunate circumstances, what a person owes their family, and the power of an education—as well as an incredibly entertaining read. Raised in a hyper-religious, doomsday-prepper family, Westover never went to school and didn’t even have a birth certificate—until she eventually became inspired by an older brother to take the ACT and attend Brigham Young University. It was only there that she realized how incomplete her education had been, illustrated perfectly in an almost unbelievable incident where she asks a college professor what the Holocaust is. Put this book on your list.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher MacDougall

Born to Run was published in 2009, but in case you, like me, lived nine years without reading this, I feel compelled to tell you it’s snagged a place as one of my favorite books of all time. (Seriously—I haven’t shut up about Born to Run since I finished it in July.) If you’re an avid runner, it’s a must-read. If you’re a casual or on-and-off-again runner, this book will still inspire. And even if you truly hate running, you’ll still be taken in by MacDougall’s superb storytelling. Go read it, go run, then read this bummer of an epilogue.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh

This was another find via a quick Google of “best books of 2018.” While I love dark humor, I wasn't entirely sure that the I’d enjoy this book based on the premise: A 20-something art gallery worker living in New York in 2000 enlists a quack psychiatrist to help her sleep her life away through a wicked cocktail of prescription drugs. But for a novel that revolves around its protagonist being passed out, this was a remarkably quick read, and I couldn’t put it down. Something about our anti-heroine’s quest to completely shut out the outside world resonated with me; after all, who among us hasn’t occasionally longed for a year of total oblivion? Between reading her profound depiction of ennui and a fascinating profile about the author herself, I’m looking forward to seeing what Moshfegh comes out with next.

The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity, Sally Kohn

It can feel pretentious to call books important, but if any book deserves the adjective, it’s The Opposite of Hate. Political commentator Sally Kohn sets out to examine the root causes of hate between in-group and out-groups from her Twitter trolls and Trump voters to white supremacists and participants in the Rwandan genocide. (Side note: Speaking of incomplete educations, how the hell did I know next to nothing about the Rwandan genocide before this book?) It can be difficult to read at times. Kohn’s conversations with her Twitter trolls exposes the baffling ways people will behave badly online that they wouldn’t in real life, and her interviews with Rwandans who suddenly and viciously turned on their neighbors are staggering. But she weaves bits of humor throughout the book, and ultimately offers hopeful ways for us to move forward as a species—something we desperately, desperately need.

Priestdaddy: A Memoir, Patricia Lockwood

Lockwood’s family life sounds like fiction, not memoir. When she and her husband were broke, they moved back in with her parents—in her father’s rectory. Her father is one of the few married Catholic priests, and he has a host of other quirks besides. Lockwood recounts them with equal parts fondness and exasperation and enough wit to make me LOL. Almost every book list named this a best book of 2017, and if you missed out on it last year, consider picking it up for 2019.

Finally, a pro tip: Check out your local library, where you can get most of these to read fo’ free.

Read any of these? Let me know what you thought in the comments, and tell me if there’s anything I need to add to my list for 2019!