2019 was not a stellar reading year. I abandoned more books than I’d like to admit, a lot of them books that I really liked. And I spent much of December going back and trying to finish many of those books that I, for unknown reasons, could not seem to check off the list. One of them turned out to be on my best of the year list, so the problem was clearly me. I logged in a total of 51 books, which seems like a lot, but for me is a marked decrease. I’m hoping to get over that rut in 2020. We shall see.

Sing, Unburied, Sing won all kinds of awards last year and I was super excited to see it hit my library reserve list.  This novel is beautiful, brutal and simple.  It tackles all kinds of challenging topics and does it with the simplest story line.  A woman and her two children drive across the state to pick up their father who is getting out of jail.  By and large the story takes place over the course of 48 hours, but it’s got some flashback and even a supernatural element splashed in (which I’m not usually here for, but it was really effectively done).  It was an incredible story, worth all the accolades and one I’d definitely recommend.

Small Great Things will stick with me for a while, I think.  Told from three different perspectives, the story begins when a black labor and delivery nurse is told not to interact with the baby of two white supremacists (at their request).  Understaffed, the baby goes into distress on her watch and ends up dying, at which point the nurse is charged with murder.  The story is told through the perspectives of the nurse, her public defender and the father of the baby. 

The Heart’s Invisible Furies was probably my read of the month(s) this time.  I LOVED the main characters of this book.  It follows an Irish man over the course of his life, as the adopted son of an eccentric family, to a teen in boarding school, to a young and then middle aged and older man who leaves Ireland and then comes back again.  He is incredible endearing and the story wove it’s way in and out of Ireland, particularly Dublin.