For a long time now – three or four or five years – I’ve been mostly unable to read due to a combination of severe depression, time constraints, and a touch of internet addiction. This has been excessively painful to me because books and reading is a very huge part of my identity. I have been a reader my whole life. In high school and through most of my undergrad, I could read somewhere around 4-6 books a month. That number grew smaller and smaller as I got further into grad school, and by 2015 I was reading practically zero.

I simply could not physically READ. Could not focus on the page, could not absorb the words, could not digest what I was seeing.

The thing that finally broke books back into my life, and frankly, SAVED my life, was audiobooks. I started “reading audiobooks off and on back in 2013 or 2014, but in 2019 they became my lifeline. After a years-long reading drought, I “read” 29 books in 2019 – mostly audiobooks, with a handful of ebooks and just a couple print books.

A lot of the books I read in 2019 were not new releases. They were older books I’d been planning to get to for years, but there were a few new releases in the mix. Out of all the books I read in 2019, here are my favorites in no particular order (some new, some not):

Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz (published 2000) – this book is the memoir/autobiography by Gene Kranz, the head flight director of NASA during the Apollo era flights who was immortalized in the movie Apollo 13 (as portrayed by Ed Harris). This book covers Gene Kranz’s experiences from his entrance into the space program in its earliest days during the Mercury era flights, all the way through his rise to becoming one of the head flight controllers, and his eventual retirement. It is an absolutely fascinating look into one of the greatest times in human history, which is both astounding and inspiring. Of course, I’m a huge space/NASA nerd, so I might be biased.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (published 2018) – I am a huge fan of nonfiction books in general, and especially both biographies and books about science. This book is both – as Michael Pollan set out to write a well-researched book about the science of psychedelics and ended up writing about how personal life and experiences as well. Plus, as a person who has suffered from depression my entire life, I was especially fascinated by and invested in the topic of this book. To put it succinctly, this book blew my mind, and I have been recommending it to every person I know since I finished it.

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan Mcguire (published 2018) – this book is the third installment in Seanan McGuire’s series of novellas called The Wayward Children series. The first book, Every Heart a Doorway, remains one of my favorite books ever. And this, the third installment, is also absolutely fantastic. Seanan McGuire captures the breathless excitement, but also the pain, inherent in portal fantasies in ways that break my heart every time. She also always portrays diverse characters such as those who are LGBTQIA, PoC, and fat (*gasp*), with enormous sensitivity, humanity, compassion, and JOY. She has two more installments (so far) that I have not gotten to yet, but they are on the TBR list for this year.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (published 2019) – I love science fiction/fantasy novellas (like the aforementioned Wayward Children series, as well as such brilliant books as Binti and The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe) so I knew had to read this novella, especially after seeing such glowing reviews. I mean! An epistolary novel about two kickass women spies on opposite sides of a time war who accidentally fall in love? How could anyone in the world resist such a story?! This book is written with the kind of lush poetic language that cracks your ribs open and tears your heart out with so much tenderness and beauty you don’t even mind. I can only dream of writing like this. Everyone should read it. Period.

Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger (published 2019) – my favorite novel of the year, by far, was Steel Crow Saga – only Paul Krueger’s second novel in what is definitely going to be a long and glorious career. The tagline for this book was “Pokemon meets Avatar: the Last Airbender,” which was definitely the thing that first sold ME. And I can say that while the book definitely fits and lives up to this comparison, it is far more than just a mere mashup. Come for the cool pokemon-like animal-spirit partners, kickass fight scenes, and enormously hilarious snarky characters… stay for the deep, incisive, and insightful critiques of colonialism and imperialism, power and responsibility, family loyalty, guilt, and genuine atonement. Plus you get amazing LGBT characters, hilarious one-liners, a bunch of excessively nerdy anime/pop culture references, and gratuitous descriptions of adobo.

So that’s my top five favorite books I read in 2019. Not all newly published in 2019, but whatever…. *shrug*

If you’ve read any of these books, please tell me what you thought! And please feel free to share your personal favorites of 2019 in the comments! I’d love to hear what everyone else was reading last year, what touched your heart (or kicked in the face – in a good way!), what books I should have read and didn’t (I’m always looking for more books to add to the insanely-long TBR list!)