Growing up, I spent most of my free time reading. I was that kid who could read on the bus on the way to school, or in a car on a road trip (not any more, though 😷). I'd even have a book out while walking in the hallways between classes in middle school and high school. Almost every night, I'd stay up late reading and inevitably wake up with the light still on and the book still open, and definitely not to the page I was on before I passed out.

I don't read books that often anymore, and this year I'm holding myself accountable for reading more. When I was working at The Body Shop, I'd read while commuting and on my break and managed to read a few books over the summer, so I'm going to bring that philosophy into my daily life whenever I'm on the subway now, instead of spending time playing Panda Pop. I'm also putting a time limit on how long I spend on my computer - it's getting shut off at midnight, at the latest, so I can read until I get too tired. I'm giving myself a goal of three books a month, bringing the total for the year to thirty six books.

I'm actually almost done with a re-read of one of my favorite fantasy series (The Mallorean, by David Eddings. Highly recommend if you're looking for a simultaneous inflation and subversion of high fantasy tropes, all done with really lovingly drawn characters), so this list will begin with what I'm reading after that. So I guess technically I'll be reading 38 1/2 books this year, but I think that may be splitting hairs. Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions to add to this list, or to store away for next year, please let me know! If anyone else has fallen out of reading regularly, I hope this inspires you to start reading again with me.

1. Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty

2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte

3. The Book of Dust, by Philip Pullman

4. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

5. Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

6. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

7. The German Girl, by Armando Lucas Correa

8. Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler

9. Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

10. Queen of the Conquest: England's Medieval Queens, by Alison Weir

11. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix

12. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy

13. Children of the Jacaranda Tree, by Sahar Delijani

14. The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish

15. Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

16. The Art Forger, by B.A. Shapiro

17. The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende

18. The Japanese Lover, by Isabel Allende

19. The Gene, by Dr. Siddartha Mukherjee

20. The Martian, by Andy Weir

21. And The Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

22. Oleander Girl, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

23. A Little Life, by Hanya Hanagihara

24. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

25. The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley

26. This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women, collected by Dan Gediman, Jay Allison, and Studs Terkel

27. The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri

28. Mary, Queen of Scots: And the Murder of Lord Darnley, by Alison Weir

29. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

30. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

31. The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

32. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

33. And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, by Randy Shilts

34. Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

35. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, by Neil Degrasse Tyson

36. Letter to My Daughter, by Maya Angelou

This isn't in any particular order, and honestly there are books I want to read not on this list, so with any luck I'll end up reading far more than 36 books this year. And if you have any recommendations, fiction or non-fiction, genre or literary, please send them my way! Maybe we can do this thing together.