The Best Books I’ve Read September-December
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
With the Big Move, I haven’t had as much time to read as usual, but I’ve read some great books in the past few months. If you’re looking for last-minute gifts, these are some to consider!
Designing Your New Work Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Companion and sequel to their Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, which I’d read previously, this book takes on the area of work specifically, while the first book was more holistic. It offers many guided exercises to help you identify what is working for you in your work life now, how to redesign your work to better fit what you love, and how to design something brand-new if it’s time to move on. Their exercises are always thought-provoking and fun to do, and will definitely get the wheels turning even if things are “okay” at your job right now.
Another book that focuses on your Best Life is Michael Hyatt’s Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals. He focuses on mindset, and determining why you want to achieve a particular goal, as well as figuring out the steps to get there. He’s the designer of the Full Focus Planner, which many people swear by as a tool for staying organized and achieving goals. His system may be a good fit, or you can take what you need and design your own.
I’ve been taking a Pema Chödrön course on dealing with emotions, and one of the texts is Emotional Awareness, an annotated series of dialogues between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Dr. Paul Ekman, a Western expert in the psychology of emotion. The dialogues are fascinating, looking at our experience of emotions from a Buddhist and Western psychological perspective, and discussing ways to be more emotionally skillful, especially in terms of the more challenging emotions like anger. Both perspectives have a lot to offer, and it’s a fascinating look at how our emotions control us, when we don’t control them.
My final nonfiction recommendation is one that, deservingly in my opinion, has landed on many recommendation lists this year: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, by David Grann, the author of Killers of the Flower Moon. He is a terrific writer, able to bring you right into the situation he’s describing, and to paint compelling portraits of the characters involved. And this is an incredible story – one that will probably make you very glad you aren’t a sailor in the 18th Century. It reads like a gripping thriller; no dry history here.
In Fiction, I have a few picks as well. Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem won a ton of awards when it came out, and I can understand why. It’s science fiction at its finest: taking a real “problem” in science, and extrapolating from there what might happen. Starting in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and moving forward in time, it’s also an alternate history. Even if you don’t understand all the science behind it, it’s a fresh (and disturbing) take on the idea that alien life might see our planet as a viable alternative to their own distressed world. I haven’t read any sequels yet, but I’m eager to find out how it all gets resolved.
I also finally read Maggie O’Farrell’s gorgeous Hamnet, about the brief life (and death) of Shakespeare’s son (you’ll notice the bard himself is never named in the novel). A splendid imagining of Shakespeare’s family and the world of Stratford-Upon-Avon, O’Farrell digs deep into her characters’ psychology and the tiny details of their lives and world, in beautiful, lyrical prose. And the ending just made me heave a huge sigh of satisfaction – it may not be how it really happened, but it’s plausible and a wonderful way to think of it.
My most fun read by far was the fourth book in the Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman. The gang returns to solve their latest mystery, the murder of one of their friends. Lots of old friends and foes show up, and the quartet also deal with serious issues of love, friendship, and mortality – a mix which is part of what makes the series so delightful and even poignant at times (as well as laugh-out-loud funny at others).
There you have it – the final picks for this quarter. I read 48 books this year - not that there is a contest! I do like to keep track of what I read in general, and look over my list at the end of the year. I can never pick a favorite, though.
What about you? Any favorites for the year? Let us know in the comments!
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