One More Terrible Thing About 2016

As though the year just ended wasn’t horrible enough – annus horribilis as Queen Elizabeth would say – I was appalled to discover, thanks to Goodreads.com, that in the entire 12 months I read a meager five books.

Five books?! High school students do better than that in a single semester.

Appalling, dreadful, upsetting, dismaying, and inexcusable don’t begin to describe my disappointment, but for what it’s worth, here are the volumes that captured my attention in 2016:

1. Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America by Jonathan Kozol
2. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
3. In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
4. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
5. The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean

Having finished Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking before the new year was even 12 hours old, I guess I’d count this one as well.

Although I’m not generally the resolution-making type, determined, dogged, firm, unwavering, and single-minded barely scratch the surface of my tenacity to do better this year.  

With that in mind, I’m off to my reading chair, Anne of Green Gables in hand.