Hi! What is your pandemic coping strategy? Apparently, mine involves piping a constant stream of audiobooks into my ears at every moment I’m not working or actively conversing with my family. 

Cooking? Audiobooks.

Dishes? Audiobooks.

Laundry? Audiobooks.

You get the picture. 

I guess that’s how I made it through 78 books this year (on top of the reading I do for research, etc.). Looking back over the list, I see too many amazing reads to make just one book post (as I’ve done in previous years), so this time I’m going to break up my top picks into a few posts that I’ll publish over the next couple of days.

But before that, here’s the whole list. See if you can guess which ones were my favorites.

And please let me know what you read and loved this year. I’m always looking for the next thing!

The List

(In the order I read them)

1. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, by C. L. R. James
2. The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, by Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine
3. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, by bell hooks
4. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
5. The metanarrative of Blindness: A re-reading of 20th Century Anglophone Writing, by David Bolt
6. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
7. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott
8. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, by bell hooks
9. Religion is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the 21st Century, edited by Grace Yukich
10. What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, by Sarah Hendren
11. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, by Sasha Costanza-Chock
12. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories for the 21st Century, edited by Alice Wong
13. Dawn (Xenogenesis #1), by Octavia E. Butler
14. Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis #2), by Octavia E. Butler
15. Imago (Xenogenesis #3), by Octavia E. Butler
16. How the University Works: Higher Education in the Low-Wage Nation, by Marc Bousquet
17. The Instruction Myth: Why Higher Education is Hard to Change and How to Change It, by John Tagg
18. Understanding and Preventing Faculty-on-Faculty Bullying: A Psycho-Social Organizational Approach, by Darla J. Twale
19. The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the 21st Century, by George E. Walker
20. The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible, by Yael Avrahami
21. Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi
22. Blood in my Eye, by George L. Jackson
23. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
24. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by Adrienne Maree Brown
25. Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, by Annette Yoshiko Reed
26. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and how WE Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee
27. Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky #1), by Rebecca Roanhorse
28. Feminist, Queer, Crip, by Alison Kafer
29. Piranesi, by Susanna Clark
30. Decolonial Pedagogy: Examining Sites of Resistance, Resurgence, and Renewal, by Njoki N. Wane
31. Music in Ancient Greece and Rome, by John G. Landels
32. The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family, by Sophie Bjork-James
33. Down, Girl! The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne
34. The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, by Alicia Garza
35. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in this Crisis, by Dean Spade
36. Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr
37. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017, by Rashid Khalidi
38. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
39. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s, by Elizabeth Hinton
40. The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, by Daniel Greene
41. Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything, by William Germano
42. The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
43. All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1), by Martha Wells
44. Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2), by Martha Wells
45. Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3), by Martha Wells
46. Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries #4), by Martha Wells
47. Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries #5), by Martha Wells
48. Their Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, by M. Leona Godin
49. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, by Kevin M. Kruse
50. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and our Polluted Media Landscape, by Bryan M. Milner and Whitney Phillips
51. No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, by Leigh Patel
52. The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #1) by Seth Dickinson
53. Where do we go from here” Chaos or Community, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
54. Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch
55. Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from my Daughter’s School, by Courtney E. Martin
56. Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, by Michael Edwards
57. The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, by Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch
58. Tell the Machine Goodnight, by Katie Williams
59. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1), by Becky Chambers
60. A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2), by Becky Chambers
61. Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3), by Becky Chambers
62. The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4), by Becky Chambers
63. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison
64. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, by Charlene Carruthers
65. We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, by Mariame Kaba
66. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, by Robin D G. Kelly
67. Bullshit Jobs: A theory, by David Graeber
68. Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter
69. Liquid Scripture: The Bible in a Digital World, by Jeffrey Siker
70. Christitainment: Selling Jesus Through Popular Culture, by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe
71. Evangelicals, Incorporated: Books and the business of Religion in America, by Daniel Vaca
72. A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops obsolete, by Gio Maher
73. Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the pursuit of Freedom, by Derecka Purnell
74. Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt
75. The Bright Ages, by Matt Gabriele and David M. Perry
76. The 9.9%: The new Aristocracy that is Entrenching Inequality and Warping our Culture, by Matthew Stewart
77. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, by Harsha Walia
78. Bambi: A Life in the woods, by Felix Salten