A year-by-year account of what I was reading and what it says about me, with receipts from my Storygraph data
There is a genre of social media post where someone lists their personality traits and pretends it is confession. I am going to do that. But with evidence. I have the Storygraph data. I know exactly what I was reading and when. The lore is extensive and somewhat incriminating.
Here is what I have learned about myself, one year at a time.
2020: Reading Like I Was Administering My Own Emotional First Aid
The year was 2020. The situation was obvious. I coped the way the slightly dramatic and deeply bookish have always coped: I read until the problem was smaller than the book in my hands.
My reading that year was not casual. It was triage. I read Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo and gave it five stars and then stared at a wall for twenty minutes. I read Educated by Tara Westover and felt weirdly grateful for my unremarkable childhood. I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid and thought: yes, this is the kind of beautiful mess I need right now. I read Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, a very quiet Japanese novel about a coffee shop where you can travel back in time, and found it was exactly what I needed and I cannot explain why.
I also gave five stars to Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth by Oliver Jeffers. It is a children’s book. I was an adult. I stand by this completely.
I read Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa, about an old woman who makes dorayaki filling and the shop manager who does not know what to do with his life. Four stars. Quietly devastating. Exactly right.
“Apparently my favourite genre was emotionally devastated but trying to heal gently.”
Diagnosis: correct. No further questions.
2021: I Read 80+ Books and Half of Them Were About Whether Humanity Deserved Nice Things
Something happened in 2021. I kept reading, but differently. I wanted proof. Proof that people were good. Proof that things could be okay. I was, looking back, conducting my own informal research project into whether human beings merited continued investment.
I read Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb and gave it five stars. It is about therapy and it is also about the fact that everyone is trying their best and it costs so much and you often cannot see that from the outside. I read Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and gave it five stars and then listened to Japanese Breakfast for a week. I read A Promised Land by Barack Obama and gave it five stars and felt briefly hopeful about institutions, which was generous of me given the circumstances.
I also read How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery, a memoir told through thirteen animals, and gave it five stars. It argues, gently and specifically, that the world is full of beings who are doing their best and who deserve our attention. I needed that argument. I made it my own.
I gave five stars to The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal, which is about women and beer and stubbornness and love and makes you feel, unreasonably, that things will probably work out. I gave five stars to The Mermaid from Jeju by Sumi Hahn, about Korean women who dive for seafood and survive occupation and love people who leave and stay anyway.
In between all of this, I read approximately seven Penny Reid novels. Including that for honesty. The heart wants what it wants. The heart, in 2021, wanted fictional small-town communities and slow-burn romance and at least one character who was unexpectedly good at knitting.
I also gave five stars to Dolly Parton, Songteller. Dolly is humanity’s proof of concept. That was load-bearing reading.
“Coping by reading books that reassured me humanity was salvageable.”
The research concluded: probably yes. Provisionally.
2022: The Year I Discovered I Have a Type and the Type Is a Lonely Person Who Behaves Well Anyway
I did not plan this. I want to be very clear about that. I picked up A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles thinking “I hear this is good.” I did not know I was about to spend the rest of the year chasing that exact feeling.
Count Alexander Rostov: confined to the Metropol Hotel for thirty-two years, conducting himself with irony and dignity and genuine warmth. Five stars. He is not bitter. He is not defeated. He is correct about wine and also, somehow, about life. I was undone.
And then, as if my reading brain had filed a form, I spent the rest of 2022 in that territory. I read Agatha Christie compulsively. Not just one or two. Many. Hercule Poirot is emotionally repressed, fastidious, privately tender, and always right. And Then There Were None: five stars. A Christmas Tragedy: five stars. Miss Marple is elderly, underestimated, and correct about everything. I loved her without reservation.
I read Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman and gave it five stars. Britt-Marie is a middle-aged woman who has spent her entire life being overlooked and who, when she finally has a chance to start over, is so terrified and so brave that reading it felt personal. It should not have felt personal. I am not Britt-Marie. But I gave it five stars.
I read My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, also Backman: four stars, another difficult and loving and complicated person. I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: four stars, grief so controlled it becomes almost unbearable. I read I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se-hee: four stars, a book about depression so honest it reads like confession. I read I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy for the same reason.
“Unfortunately I discovered I love emotionally repressed but kind people.”
In retrospect: yes. Obviously. Looking at the rest of my life, this tracks completely.
2023: My Reading Taste Stopped Wanting Escape and Started Asking What It All Means
This year felt different. I was not running from anything. I was moving toward something, though I could not have named it at the time.
I read The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese and gave it five stars. It is a novel about a family in Kerala across three generations and a hundred years, and it is the kind of book that makes you feel the world is old and large and worth attending to. I read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and gave it five stars. It is seventy-eight pages about a man in a small Irish town who does the right thing at personal cost, and it will stay in your chest for weeks.
I read Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman and gave it four stars. Alan Rickman was deeply and quietly serious about his craft, took his work with something close to moral seriousness, and also kept meticulous records of what he ate for dinner. I found this extremely comforting. I want to be the kind of person who notices what they ate for dinner and also cares about what they made.
I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and gave it four stars. It is about creativity and love and work and how those three things ruin each other and sustain each other in equal measure. I read The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith and gave it four stars and three quarters, because Mma Ramotswe is wise and specific and good and reading about her felt like spending an afternoon with someone who had actually figured some things out.
I read The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama and gave it five stars. I am not entirely sure if it helped me or if I just needed someone competent to look me in the eye and tell me things will be difficult and survivable. Either way: five stars.
“My reading taste stopped wanting escapism and started wanting wisdom.”
Wisdom, or at least the company of people who appeared to have some.
2024: I Needed Exhausted People to Explain Things to Me
There is a stage you reach, somewhere in adulthood, where you stop wanting people younger than you to explain life. You want someone who has been tired for a long time and kept going anyway. You want someone who has made mistakes at scale and lived through the consequences and is still here. That is what 2024 was about.
I gave Sonny Boy by Al Pacino five stars. It is a memoir by a man who has lived an enormous life and is now old and looking back at it from a great height. He is honest about the mess of it. I needed that honesty. I gave A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E. Grant four stars and three quarters. It is about grief and gratitude sharing a body, specifically after the death of his wife of thirty-five years. He is funny about it and specific and real. I cried on public transport.
I gave Foster by Claire Keegan four stars and three quarters. Seventy-nine pages about a child spending a summer with relatives who are kinder than she expects. So gentle it should come with a warning. I gave Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck four stars and three quarters. I knew the ending was coming from page twelve. It hit me like a small freight train anyway.
I read Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, which is a murder mystery narrated by a flock of sheep, and gave it four stars and three quarters. I am including this because it is true and because the sheep are, in fact, excellent detectives. I gave The People on Platform 5 by Clare Pooley four stars and three quarters, about strangers becoming friends in a train station. I cried at that too. 2024 was a year for crying at things that earned it.
“Apparently I wanted exhausted older people to explain life to me.”
They did. It helped. I recommend it.
2025: Heal Me Gently but Also, Immediately, Entertain Me
I appear to be in a new era. The evidence suggests I have developed range while remaining deeply sentimental. These are not in conflict. I have checked.
I read How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa and gave it five stars because I needed to be reminded that courage is a decision you make repeatedly and under duress and without guaranteed results. I read Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan and gave it five stars because it is a Filipino crime novel set in Manila and it is meticulous and quiet and excellent, and I am embarrassed it took me this long. I read The Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor and gave it five stars because sometimes you need a horror novel about a vicar who moves to a village with a dark history and everything is terrifying and it is great.
I read My Friends by Fredrik Backman and gave it five stars, because Backman is apparently my emotional support author and I accept this about myself. I read The Choice by Edith Eva Eger, a memoir by a psychologist who survived Auschwitz and then spent decades helping other people survive their own losses. Four stars and three quarters. I read it slowly. It earned that.
I read The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna and gave it four stars and three quarters. It is cozy and warm and about found family and it is the reading equivalent of putting on a very good cardigan after a week that was trying to finish you off. I read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman and gave it four stars and three quarters, and then immediately read the next three books in the series because of course I did. A group of elderly retirees solve murders. They are my people. I would join that club without hesitation.
“Heal me gently but also entertain me immediately.”
Both things. At the same time. This is what we call growth.
So What Does the Lore Mean?
I don’t think it means I’m predictable. I think it means I’ve been paying attention to what I need and finding books that could answer it. Sometimes the answer was Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Lori Gottlieb, 2021, literally). Sometimes the answer was a count confined to a hotel who conducted himself beautifully (Amor Towles, 2022, metaphorically). Sometimes the answer was a Filipino crime novel and a cozy witch novel, back to back (2025, empirically).
The reading taste has lore because lore is just documentation. Every year I needed something and I found it between pages. That is not embarrassing. That is the whole point of books. The lore is proof that it was working.
The TBR pile is still approximately 400 books tall. That is a problem for future me, who will presumably cope with it the same way I always have.
By reading.
Data from Storygraph export, May 2026. Opinions are my own. Emotional damage was consensual.
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