Melissa’s Top Reads of 2020
By Melissa Myers
At the start of 2020 I resolved to read one book a month. I got even more optimistic with my goal once COVID hit, because I thought I’d have a lot more free time. While I did not, in fact, end up with extra time in 2020, I remained committed to a reading routine and did indeed read 12 books. Rather than read one per month, I read most titles overlapping throughout the year. This approach worked really well for me because there was always a flavor available to satisfy my current appetite, so there was never an excuse to not read. In 2020, almost every book I read felt like a “lifer,” each one with a deep lesson and a complexity of layers that will require me to re-visit again and again. Here are the six that topped my list and that I recommend to you, dear reader, to pick up in 2021.
Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
In short: It’s a workshop-in-a-book that instructs you step-by-step how to use design thinking to find a career path that energizes you rather than drains you.
I haven’t been able to pick a lane when it comes to career choices. Even at present I am a high school Spanish teacher, a college readiness instructor, a test prep tutor, a movie review writer...but I’ve also been a sushi waitress, grocery store cashier, invasive species chainsaw maven, and a tantra temple receptionist. What can I say, I like to try a little bit of everything to see what sticks. Designing Your Life validated my experience a bit by highlighting the ways you can free yourself from a career rut, and more importantly, find joy and fulfillment in what you choose to spend your working hours doing.
So many of us have experienced career upheaval in 2020. But you don’t need a pandemic to excuse that many of us have been stuck in jobs that don’t align with our values, our desires, our mission. In their book, Burnett and Evans posit, “In the United States, only 27 percent of college grads end up in a career related to their majors.” So at least amongst the college-educated, we eventually realize that where we thought we were headed when we started is not where we ended up. Based on a Stanford course on design thinking, Designing Your Life is a practical guide with action items to help you explore a path to career fulfillment. How this book will contribute to my wildly fulfilling future career remains to be determined, but it has already allowed me to recalibrate my work day so that I am spending less time on tasks that energetically and emotionally drain me, and more time on tasks that energize and fulfill me.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl
In short: Find purpose and meaning in your own life using gratitude and positivity, but not in the way that Multi-level Marketers are trying to sell you on that concept.
If the unequivocal answer were out there, it wouldn’t be such a cliche to ask “what is the meaning of life?” The likelihood of a true meaning to life is slim, because it’s wholly subjective. However, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl gets as close as I have seen to providing a guide for the meaning of life in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
Part one of his book explores Frankl’s experience imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps and follows through in part two to his founding of the theory and practice of logotherapy--a theory which proposes that an individual’s primary motivation in life is to seek life’s purpose. This book brings a more grounded counterpoint to the trend toward toxic positivity that I’m seeing more and more in the “woke” hippie/crystals/yoga/self-care community. Frankl does still claim that a positive attitude is the key to survival, as it was in his observations in the concentration camps, but this philosophy takes on a more grounded dynamic in the context of his experience.
Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris
In short: Come for the lesson on why you should default to the Oxford comma, stay for the example sentences: “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.”
I have developed a disturbing love for proper grammar usage in my seven-plus years as an SAT tutor. I’d say I’m pretty good at demystifying proper grammatical techniques without putting my teenage students to sleep, but Mary Norris—former proofreader for The New Yorker—takes the cake when it comes to making punctuation use with nonrestrictive clauses entertaining and funny.
Using proper grammar and punctuation is an important skill for written communication, and arguably it is a dying art, or so it seems any time I enter the comments section of even the most legitimate online publication. But it is inherently boring for most people. Norris makes it a little less boring, even for the most staunchly opposed.
salt. by Nayyirah Waheed
In short: Get back to the simple pleasures of verbal aesthetics through poetry.
I don’t want to over-intellectualize this one. I wrote a poem about leaves in middle school that got published and thought I was going to be a poetry goddess. As you may have noticed, that gig did not make it into my list of trades at the beginning of this list.
Waheed certainly has a gift for two things I don’t: poetry and brevity. Most of the pieces in this work are short, sweet, and powerful. Perfect for a daily mantra. Pick up the book. Open to a page. Here’s a beautifully tragic one I turned to today:
you broke the ocean in
half to be here.
only to meet nothing that wants you.
— immigrant
The Art of Money by Bari Tessler
In short: Does money make you sad or anxious? Do you want to not be that? The Art of Money won’t solve your distaste for capitalistic economics but it will help you shake off your money anxieties.
Nothing gets my partner’s and my hackles up more than a conflict around finances. And it’s no wonder, when you realize the deep-seated connections between money and sense of self, particularly in a capitalistic society. We’re in a weird time of aggressive money tactics and frightening uncertainty with astronomical unemployment rates due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I used to get nauseous every time I opened a banking app or student loan envelope. But not anymore.
In The Art of Money, Financial Therapist Bari Tessler takes the kindest, most gentle approach using mindfulness to help her readers get to the heart of their “money stories” to unpack and heal the dark corners from where their money hang ups come. I am not exaggerating when I say that this book has changed by life for the better when it comes to budgetting, savings, and debt. It truly feels like a magic wand in the way that my finances have improved since reading this book, seemingly with very little effort on my part.
Sanctuary by Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher
In short: There is always room for more YA future dystopia novels, don’t you think?
A “Great American Wall,” extreme censorship, a cashless society reliant on electronic tender, rampant xenophobia... sound familiar? Well, it’s a common trope to include familiar elements of governmental control in novels that take place in a future dystopia, but Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher paint a convincingly dismal American landscape using very current problems specifically pertaining to US immigration policy.
I wanted to include a novel in my list for 2021 reads, but I wanted it to be something that would be more than an escapist pleasure read. Sanctuary fits the bill as a page-turner (so not too pedantic) a Young Adult novel (so not too dense) and the most-recently-published book I read in 2020. Although I’m an eternal pessimist, I needed the hopeful message of Sanctuary. It is a message that I hope lights a fire under its (mostly) young readers to act to prevent any more measures that will push us closer to the edge of the reality depicted therein.
Purchase books from your local community bookstore whenever possible!
Melissa’s Favorite Stores in Asheville, NC
Chicago Bookstores
Semicolon Bookstore
Women & Children First
*The Chicago Independent Bookstore Map