I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read since 2018. Reading became my primary hobby around the time I had kids - it is easier to pick up and put down a book than it is to type on the laptop, and my daughter doesn’t usually try to steal the book from me or ask what I’m doing :-) I read a lot as a kid of course but as an adult I always feel like I’m behind. It’s quite common for me to find an amazing book published in the last 10 years that everyone besides me has heard of.

I’ve been slowly reading through Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, a literary history of the Second Empire. I just love the way Zola describes 19th century France, an era of time that’s always been fascinating to me. I find Zola’s writing quite compelling - he has a way of describing everything with such exactness as to put you directly in the scene. The people are monsters, the goverment is simultaneously inept and all-present, and the books go into incredible detail as to how the economy works for everyone, rich and poor alike. This journey was spurred by reading Germinal during a trip to Europe in 2017 and Nana on a backpacking trip to Lake Aloha during COVID. As of 2026 I’ve read 8 of the 20, so maybe I will actually finish them all some day.

Grad School

I read a bunch in grad school, mostly from the “modern canon”.

• In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (all of the books over the course of 3 years)
• Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, The Waves, To The Lighthouse, The Voyage Out
• Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is
• Franz Kafka: Amerika, The Castle, The Trial
• Vladamir Nabokov: Lolita, Pale Fire, The Eye, Bend Sinister, most of Invitation to a Beheading, The Eye
• Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49
• Haruki Murakami: Norweigan Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After the Quake (I’m super over this guy)

Did Not Finish

Some books are great and I love them. Others I enjoy drop-kicking out of my life.