Ocean Vuong: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
Leslie Jamison: The Recovering. Intoxication and Its Aftermath.
Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House.
Alice Bolin: Dead Girls. Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.
Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror.Natasha Lennard: Being Numerous. Essays on Non-Fascist Life.Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing.
George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
George Packer: Our Man. Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Stuart Schrader: Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
David France: How to Survive a Plague. The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS.
Fiction:
Seth Dickinson: The Monster Baru Cormorant.Rory Power: Wilder Girls.Becky Chambers: To Be Taught If Fortunate.Lisa Ko: The Leavers.Crystal Hana Kim: If You Leave Me.Esmé Weijun Wang: The Border of Paradise.Chloe Benjamin: The Immortalists.
Tanwi Nandini Islam: Bright Lines.
Andrea Lawlor: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.Ausma Zehanat Khan: The Unquiet Dead.Elizabeth Hand: Generation Loss.Laura McHugh: The Wolf Wants In.Kristen Lepionka: The Last Place You Look.Paul Tremblay: A Head Full of Ghosts.Stephen King: Duma Key.Stephen & Owen King: Sleeping Beauties.
My favorite novel this year is The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson's long-awaited follow-up to The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Baru navigates a growing world, struggles with newly discovered power structures, and we learn more about the past to give us a more complex picture of power. But the best thing about the novels is its complicated and now literally split protagonist Baru (backed up by a whole cast of other women). Closely followed by Rory Power's Wilder Girls, which sometimes feels like it is set in Jeff VanderMeer's Area X, except it adds the genius twist of considering what the biological transformation that happens on its island would do to girls who are going through puberty. At Wilder Girls' center is a boarding school on an isolated island in which a mysterious and unexplained infection (the Tox) has affected every single inhabitant - and is slowly transforming them into something else, a process that seems to inevitably kill the girls. The novel follows three girls - Hetty, Byatt and Reese, as they try to escape somehow. 
I spent much of this year re-reading and catching up with the new novels of Stephen King. I started reading him when I was nine or ten, and then stopped abruptly (as far as I remember, the at the time most recent of his novels I finished was Dreamcatcher), with the exception of re-reading It every four years because it felt good to track my own progress as a reader by the novel that I remember vividly reading for the first time in the summer of 1998. I stopped doing that after I just couldn't get over how the book ends, how weird it is to read these scenes now (there's a reason why they were adapted differently in both films). I've not managed to read all the novels, but I did read examples from all the decades (the oldest I managed was The Shining, the most recent one The Outsider, even though I'm looking to finish The Institute before the year is over). I've still not managed to even begin the Dark Towers series, and the one story that I feel has influenced me the most, or stayed with me the longest, is the 1995 television adaptation of The Langoliers, which I must have watched not that long after it originally came out with my grandmother and my cousin, perhaps years before I read any of his books. 
In any case, here are the novels that stood out from the re-read: The Stand (along with the television miniseries), which at the time contributed significantly to my love for apocalyptic narratives, even if it still weird to count this on the same list as Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, The Tommyknockers, which I like more than 90% of other readers, Insomnia, Duma Key, Under the Dome, 11/22/63, the Mr Mercedes series (which has its issues, and I'd argue that the television show is actually better than the books), and Sleeping Beauties, which he wrote with his son Owen King. This was the first time that I appreciated the range of genre as well as the recurring tropes in all of his stories (I think Sleeping Beauties profits immensely from having a second, younger voice in there). I did not re-read Dolores Clayborne, which I remember I used to count as my favorite especially because it was so unlike the others. I also didn't re-watch Stand By Me. 
An aside here: I was re-reading Stephen King, but the horror novel that will stay with me longer than most of these books is Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, which finds an incredibly interesting form for its story about a suburban teenager who is either possessed by a demon or suffering from a severe mental illness - the interpretation of her suffering becomes determined by powerful economic and ideological interests, which is maybe true of teenage girls' bodies in general anyway. The story is told from the perspective of Merrie, the younger sister of the girl who may be possessed (Marjorie), but then also features television episode reviews from Merrie as an adult of the reality show that was eventually made of Marjorie's suffering. It all inevitably ends in a catastrophe.
I also read a lot of crime fiction this year, especially most of Laura Lippman's non-Tess-Monaghan novels, all of which feature complex characters and great twists. I read both of Kristen Lepionka's Roxane Weary novels (The Last Place You Look and What You Want to See). I read the thriller-crime novels of Laura McHugh, which are particularly good at capturing the places in which they are set (Arrowood, The Weight of Blood, her most recent The Wolf Wants In, which is one of the greatest portrait of an economically deprived, oxycontin-ravaged area that I've read). Also, Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, an accidental crime novel set on a remote island, a novel of photography as much as about the serial killer that haunts the protagonist who stumbles right in the middle of his artwork. And Ausma Zehanat Khan's Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak novel's, which are always about history and culture, about international conflicts translated into local crimes (The Unquiet Dead for example would make a great companion piece to Juli Zeh's Adler und Engel, which has a similar approach). 
And - Lisa Ko's The Leavers, about a boy who loses his mother in the maze of immigration law and is adopted by a white family, and slowly unravels what happened, attempting to explain his trauma. Crystal Hana Kim's If You Leave Me, a complex family saga set before and after the Korean War, the portrait of an unhappy marriage. Chloe Benjamin's The Immortalists, four siblings learn when they will die from a future teller and we follow their lives as they unfold, questioning if they are determined by fate or by free will, painting a portrait of the decades as much as of the four characters. Esmé Weijun Wang's The Border of Paradise is haunting, and impossible to describe, but an essential read.And Tanwi Nandini Islam's Bright Lines about a Bangladeshi family living in Brooklyn in 2003, a portrait of characters struggling to figure out who they are. And Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, whose shape-shifting main character Paul (who thinks Orlando comes closest, but he himself never had the luxury of quiet servants) navigates what it means to be able to inhibit a body that can present as male or female.
Becky Chamber's To Be Taught, If Fortunate, her first novel set outside the universe she created in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows four astronauts who are sent on a long-haul space-flight to study the flora and fauna of exoplanets. It's a short novel, but it beautifully tracks their scientific excitement, the details of their work studying worlds that have never been visited by humans, the bonds of their lives together so far removed from the world they came from that news from Earth travels fourteen years before reaching them. There's more to it, and inevitable drama, but I highly recommend this for imagining what it would be like if the future held exploration and science in store for humanity, rather than exploitation of resources. And maybe this is as close to Ursula K. Le Guin's implicit comprehension of the connection between the environment and everything that inhabits it as we can get in 2019.This year, I also applied for citizenship in the country that I have been living in for the past five years. It is difficult to explain the complex thoughts and feeling that I have about exchanging a citizenship in a country that I have always struggled with for one of a country whose history of colonization and violence is unresolved in a different manner. The way I have decided to do it is to try and find an intellectual connection, an understanding of the debates and approaches to Australia - and I have been reading the diverse writings in Meanjin and The Lifted Brow to get started on something that will take a lifetime.
Also, The Habitat podcast.
Meanjin: The Trouble With Journalism, December 2019
The Atlantic: How Labour Lost the Culture War, December 13, 2019
The New Yorker: How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real, December 16, 2019
The Washington Post: At War with the Truth, December 9, 2019
Foreign Affairs: The New China Scare, December 6, 2019
Autostraddle: Toward an Applicable Theory of Just Not, December 3, 2019
Eater: What Does 'Authenticity' in Food Mean in 2019?, December 3, 2019
Film Comment: Present Tense: Kristen Stewart, December 5, 2019
The New York Review of Books: Lessons in Survival, November 21, 2019
Vice: The Creator of the Shitty Media Men List Isn't Done, November 19, 2019
Vulture: Watchmen Recap: … and Justice for All, November 24, 2019
Longreads: Every One of Us is Other: Looking Back on Representation in "Heavenly Creatuers" 25 Years Later, November 15, 2019
Wired: The Race to Bring Meat Alternatives to Scale, November 8, 2019Popula: Fuck “civility”, November 1, 2019
Bookforum: Cutting Up, October 2019
Slate: “Hot Topic”: The Complete Annotated Lyrics, October 31, 2019
NPR: Trump Impeachment Inquiry: A Guide To Key People, Facts And Documents, October 28, 2019
Bright Wall/Dark Room: Sparking Joy. Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019), October 28, 2019
Texas Monthly: When ‘Angels in America’ Came to East Texas, October 13, 2019The New York Review of Books: The Culmination of Republican Decay, October 10, 2019Bright Wall/Dark Room: Hang On Girl, October 9, 2019Insider: The story of Jamal Khashoggi's murder and how the world looked the other way, October 2, 2019
The Cut: The Toll of Me Too Assessing the costs for those who came forward, September 30, 2019The New York Times: How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted an Impeachment Inquiry, September 29, 2019Longreads: Regarding the Interpretation of Others, September 19, 2019Meanjin: Unearthed. The Last Days of the Anthropocene, September 17, 2019The New Republic: The Remaking of Susan Sontag, September 12, 2019Quartz: The Zimbabwean writer who was Robert Mugabe’s nemesis, September 7, 2019The New Republic: The Danger of a Domestic Terrorism Law, August 16, 2019LARB: Sally Rooney: The Dark Side, August 15, 2019
The New York Times Magazine: The 1619 Project, August 14, 2019Dazed: Two conversations with Sleater-Kinney: first as a trio, then as a duo, August 13, 2019Quartz: Hong Kong’s police are rolling out harsh new tactics against protestors, August 12, 2019New York Times Magazine: The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison, August 8, 2015Slate: Toni Morrison Reshaped the Landscape of Literature, August 6, 2019Slate: Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us, August 4, 2019The Paris Review: Not Gonna Get Us, July 29, 2019The New York Times: What Is the Chinese Military Doing in Hong Kong?, July 25, 2019Rolling Stone: Kamala Harris’ Moment, July 23, 2019The New York Magazine: I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked, July 17, 2019The New Yorker: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Trump's Crisis at the Border, July 10, 2019LitHub: In Patriarchy No One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing Machine, July 10, 2019The New York Review of Books: Reckless in Riyadh, June 2019ICWA: Austria’s far right faces life after scandal, June 21, 2019The New Yorker: The Unimaginable Reality of American concentration camps, June 21, 2019The New Yorker: Inside a Texas building where the government is holding migrant children, June 21, 2019Newsweek: 8-year old migrants being forced to care for toddlers in detention camps, June 21, 2019New York Magazine Intelligencer: E. Jean Carroll: “Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman.”, 21 June 2019Buzzfeed: Going Overboard, June 18, 2019Longreads: The 19th Century Lesbian Made for 21st Century Consumption, July 6, 2019n+1: Game of Groans, June 4, 2019The Atlantic: Nothing Prepares You for Visiting Omaha Beach, June 2, 2019Vulture: The Decadent, Visceral Pleasures of Killing Eve, May 29, 2019Vulture: What We Left Behind Boldly Argues for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Place in the Black TV Canon, May 17, 2019Bandcamp: The Power of Community: Team Dresch Return, May 16, 2019Bright Wall/Dark Room: It’s a Secret. Christine, May 15, 2019
KCRW Lost Notes Podcast: To Chan Marshall: A Letter to Cat Power, May 2, 2019GRANTA: Where Is Kigali?, May 2, 2019TASTE: When the Next Big Thing in Food Isn’t Actually Next, April 29, 2019Buzzfeed: “Fixer Upper” Is Over, But Waco’s Transformation Is Just Beginning, April 20, 2019
Lawfare: Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary, April 19, 2019Quartz: Astronomers have finally captured an image of a black hole, April 11, 2019NY Times: A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy, April 6, 2019The Intelligencer: What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of?, April 1, 2019Patricia Lockwood: You kick Miette, March 20, 2019The New Statesman: How Australia incubated far-right terror, March 20, 2019
Pacific Standard: Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries, March 4, 2019The New Yorker: The New Yorker: An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew, February 20, 2019The New York Review of Books: Undefeated, ISIS Is Back in Iraq, February 13, 2019Undark: Psychologists Seek a Broader, Healthier Definition of ‘Masculinity’, February 13, 2019The New York Review of Books: Syria’s Torture Photos: Witness to Atrocity, February 9, 2019The New York Review of Books: America’s Original Identity Politics, February 7, 2019Longreads: The Lost Boys of #MeToo, February 1, 2019The New York Review of Books: Climate Signs, February 1, 2019Popula: Grocery-store nationalism, January 30, 2019Autostraddle: How My Cat’s Anxiety Helped Me Be Gentler With Myself About My Own, January 28, 2019Bright Wall/Dark Room: Disobedience as a Path to God, January 28, 2019BuzzFeed: Does LGBT Media Have A Future?, January 25, 2019The Atlantic: ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You’, January 18, 2019Los Angeles Review of Books: Feasting on Precarity, January 14, 2019The Paris Review: On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted, January 7, 2019Buzzfeed News: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, January 5, 2019
