Kat Sweet

Security leader. Connector. Pun architect.

What I Read in 2019

December 31, 2019  /  Kat Sweet

Back in the 90s, one of my dad’s cousins decided to switch careers and go to law school. She asked my dad, a seasoned legislative attorney, what advice he had for how to spend her summer preparing for the transition to law school life. His response? “Read novels.”

It wasn’t until I was in the thick of orchestrating my own career change into security that I realized how much my dad’s words rang true. While I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader, and would usually walk away from WisCon with a huge stack of books, my volume of reading for pleasure plummeted in the years when I was going back to school, hunting for a job, and then studying for certs while trying to wrap my head around a new role.

So when my friend Gail invited me to join her in tackling the 2019 Read Harder Challenge a year ago, I was thrilled. Here was an incentive to not only prioritize reading, on average, a book every two weeks, but to expand my reading horizons. 24 categories of books to read, with a notable focus on underrepresented groups, and an additive challenge rather than a restrictive one - I could still indulge my poorly-regulated attention span and read outside of the list. We’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of our respective progress all year long, and we both plan to take on the challenge again in 2020!

I’d read other books by a few of the authors on my list (Jo Walton, Neil Gaiman, Alan Bradley, and Mary Anne Mohanraj - and I’ve consumed a lot of Issa Rae’s screenwriting via “Insecure” and “Awkward Black Girl”), and a couple others had already been in my Goodreads queue (“Hidden Figures”, “Autonomous”) but over half of the entries on my list were books and/or authors I’d never heard of - I even took a few of my choices straight from their list of suggested books.

I read genres that were out of my usual realm: I rarely read true crime but I couldn’t put “Bad Blood” down. Despite growing up around shelves full of my dad’s Agatha Christie novels, I don’t often delve into cozy mysteries (the other mystery I read this year, “Head On” was anything but “cozy”, set in DC with an FBI agent protagonist and a violent opening scene). My grasp of Norse mythology had been mostly limited to Hemsworth and Hiddleston, so even a familiar author still introduced me to unfamiliar lore.

At its core, “read harder” is about exposure to new perspectives, broadening our understanding of the world. I can’t recall having ever learned Australian history in school, let alone from a wide range of indigenous writers via “Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia”. Addiction is rarely portrayed in an empathetic light, and rarely from the viewpoints of those with substance use disorders themselves; “Delicious Foods” took both of these a step further and made the addictive drug itself a point-of-view character. I’m very glad to have read the book “Hidden Figures”, having seen the movie - the movie warped the truths of the NASA women into fake white savior narratives, and falsely portrayed their husbands as roadblocks rather than partners.

Outside of the 22 books I finished for the Read Harder Challenge (there were 24 categories but I double-dipped twice), I read 11 other books this year, though I only finished 10 of those. With an hour and a half left on the audiobook, I unfortunately abandoned “Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube” out of self-preservation. Though I love the way Blair Braverman writes and can’t get enough of her sled doggos on Twitter, her depictions of her sexual assaults at the hands of her boyfriend hit way too close to home for me and I found myself inadvertently triggered for days. Books should make me feel uncomfortable from time to time - discomfort is an important part of growth - but when a book makes me feel unsafe it’s time to step away.

Life never did slow down - I moved to Austin in May, started a new job in October, and have been navigating turbulent family stuff all year. Having a tangible reading goal motivated me to carve out time for getting lost in a book and letting my brain recover from the chaos, whether reading to escape reality or to learn more about it. (Or both.) Read Harder 2020, here I come!

2019 Read Harder Challenge:

  1. An epistolary novel or collection of letters: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  2. An alternate history novel: My Real Children by Jo Walton

  3. A book by a woman and/or AOC (author of color) that won a literary award in 2018: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

  4. A humor book: The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

  5. A book by a journalist or about journalism: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

  6. A book by an AOC set in or about space: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

  7. An #ownvoices book set in Mexico or Central America: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  8. An #ownvoices book set in Oceania: Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss

  9. A book published prior to January 1, 2019, with fewer than 100 reviews on Goodreads: Silence and the Word by Mary Anne Mohanraj

  10. A translated book written by and/or translated by a woman: My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata

  11. A book of manga: My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata

  12. A book in which an animal or inanimate object is a point-of-view character: Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

  13. A book by or about someone that identifies as neurodiverse: The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida

  14. A cozy mystery: A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley

  15. A book of mythology or folklore: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

  16. An historical romance by an AOC: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

  17. A business book: The First 90 Days by Michael D Watkins

  18. A novel by a trans or nonbinary author: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

  19. A book of nonviolent true crime: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

  20. A book written in prison: Doing Time edited by Bell Gale Chevigny

  21. A comic by an LGBTQIA creator: The Pervert by Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez

  22. A children’s or middle-grade book (not YA) that has won a diversity award since 2009: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

  23. A self-published book: The Book of Ann Arbor: An Extremely Serious History by Richard Retyi

  24. A collection of poetry published since 2014: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Other books: