2014 was a great year for my family - and my reading! We'll get to books in a minute, but to catch you up on the year: I left Dell in January and started working at a software startup in Cambridge in March. Webster continued to work for his west-coast-based software startup, so at least we're geographically diversified.
We bought our next door neighbors' condo when they moved to Hawaii (tough life, right?) so we now have more light and more space - the latter of which has been necessary as Sasha is now talking up a storm and running around constantly, often in pursuit of Lucy's tail. The extra space will also come in handy when Sash becomes a big sister in May :)
But enough of the chatter, let's get to the books. This year I read an even 50 books, 19 of them non-fiction, including memoirs. That's a lot of books - which I credit somewhat to having a month off in February between jobs, and somewhat to having a bus/subway commute rather than a car commute, so I get an extra 20-40 minutes of reading time a day.
Here were my favorites, in alphabetical order:
Fiction:
Crow Lake - after their parents' untimely death, two elder brothers raise their younger sisters
February - a woman raises her children as well as she can after losing her husband to an oil rig disaster
Maya's Notebook - a young woman flees her dangerous lifestyle, finding solace in a small island off the coast of Chile
Ordinary Grace - murders shock a small town as a minister's son comes of age one summer
Orphan Train - orphans, separated by two generations, lead parallel lives of growing up
Secret History - a deadly secret bonds six college students together in a small liberal arts school
Shoemakers Wife - young lovers, first in Italy, then in the United States, have decades of "almost" reuniting
Silver Star - two young sisters make the best of the situation when their flighty mother abandons them
Skeletons at the Feast - a unique set of perspectives in this Holocaust novel
Sycamore Row - Grisham revisits the attorney from A Time To Kill and his latest case
The Time in Between - a young woman flees the Spanish Civil War and ends up in a life of espionage
Non-fiction:
Behind the Beautiful Forevers - the lives of several families who live in Mumbai's poorest slums
Collision Low Crossers - a journalist embeds with Rex Ryan and the New York Jets for the 2011-2012 season
Exploding the Phone - the history behind the phone company and the hackers who found ways to exploit early technology
Lean Startup - arguably the quintessential book on strategy for startup company success
Sliver of Light - three Americans captured in Iran share the story of their imprisonment
Someone Could Get Hurt - a popular sportswriter's humorous memoir of parenting young children
Townie - a famous author's childhood memoir, caught between his mother's poverty and his father's carefree university existence
When They Come for us, We'll be Gone - a thorough and fascinating history of Jews in the USSR from the 1960's through the 1990's
Wild - after her life falls apart, this memoirist hikes much of the Pacific Crest Trail on her own
