The List Of My Heart: Excellent Reads That You'll Hate Me For Suggesting Because You'll Inevitably Add Them To Your Already Out Of Control TBR

In what is currently masquerading as my day job, I was asked to list my top 5 books for the year. For various reasons, I wasn’t able to list the books that I had read and REALLY loved, so here is the list of my heart: books I read (that were not necessarily published) last year, and would bore anyone about at a dinner party/bus stop/ queue for overpriced pastries in some hipster laneway, as long as they were stupid enough to ask me about what I’d been reading:

The Answers - Catherine Lacey
I love this woman’s work so much I would read a toilet roll if she wrote on it. Just amazing, amazing, amazing; here is another review if you want to know more.


Swing Time - Zadie Smith 
I’ve never read any other Zadie Smith, but this book got completely under my skin. It's one of those books that tackles big, broad themes yet also delves into a really captivating small, character-based story, and I adored it.

Enright won the Booker a few years ago but this is the first book of hers I have ever read. It's also the best book about the complicated emotions and mental machinations of intergenerational family and sibling life I have ever read, hands down. I was so impressed by it that I have now made a list of all her previous books, and stuck it up on my fridge for future purchases. 

Another big name author I read for the first time this last year. Patcher’s writing is so nuanced, so assured and so completely pitch perfect that I gobbled this book up. Her books are also on my fridge list.

Evicted - Matthew Desmond
This book was a dark, devastating read, but told with such humanity and casual lightness of voice that I was completely compelled to keep reading, even when I wanted to shout and scream at the page. It’s the story  of breathtakingly massive inequalities and unfairness in the rental housing market in America.  

It’s amazing how much joy and fun you can pack into a book that is also excrutiatingly awkward and rather sad. This is actually one of the best books I have read in years.

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