#booklist2018

Happy 2019! 

Along with a whole stack of illustrations & a pile of interesting design projects (which I’ll be yelling about later this week), I managed to read 69 entire books in 2018, which is a personal best!

I’m going to make more of an effort to chat about projects here (not just via insta crossposting) this year, as I miss using a more bloglike format to write about things like process & design thinking & etc. But for now, books! I read them! Hoorah!

The Complete List

Cuentos de Buenas Noches para Niñas Rebeldes de Elena Favilli y Francesca Cavallo

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

Una Habitación Propia de Virginia Woolf

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō

We’re Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

The News by Alain de Botton

Girl at War by Sara Nović

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

La Inteligencia Emocional de Daniel Goleman

El Amante de Marguerite Duras

Cuentos de Buenas Noches para Niñas Rebeldes 2 de Elena Favilli y Francesca Cavallo

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Dancer by Colum McCann

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Érase una vez México 1 de Alejandro Rosas y Sandra Molina

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

El Cielo es Azul, La Tierra Blanca de Hiromi Kawakami

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani

Book #24: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

“You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”

Book #23: El cielo es azul, la tierra blanca de Hiromi Kawakami

Book #22: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson 

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

“In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.”

“These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.”

“We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out.”

“The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them.”

“Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.”

“Behold my recurring nightmare: Are we, too, missing some basic pieces of the universe that once were? What part of the cosmic history book has been marked “access denied”? What remains absent from our theories and equations that ought to be there, leaving us groping for answers we may never find?”

“We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.”

Book #21: Erase una vez México 1 de Sandra Molina y Alejandro Rosas

Book #20: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

“At the heart of Darwin’s theory, as one of his biographers has put it, is “the denial of humanity’s special status””

“Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” - Thomas Kuhn

“A rangy man with bright blue eyes, ginger-colored hair, and a walrus mustache, Graham looked to me like he would have made an excellent pirate.”

“The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it’s just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, “is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.”“

“The Anthropocene is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution, or perhaps even later, with the explosive growth in population that followed World War II. By this account, it’s with the introduction of modern technologies - turbines, railroads, chainsaws - that humans became a world-altering force. But the megafauna extinction suggests otherwise. Before humans emerged on the scene, being large and slow to reproduce was a highly successful strategy, and outsized creatures dominated the planet. Then, in what amounts to a geological instant, this strategy became a loser’s game. And so it remains today, which is why elephants and bears and big cats are in so much trouble and why Suci is one of the world’s largest remaining Sumatran rhinos. Meanwhile, eliminating the megafauna didn’t just eliminate the megafauna; in Australia at least it set off an ecological cascade that transformed the landscape. Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did”

“Before humans finally did in the Neanderthals, they had sex with them. As a result of this interaction, most people alive today are slightly - up to four percent - Neanderthal.”