Hello friends and foes and folks who I don’t know! It’s that time of year: time for Thomas to share their top ten books of 2021 as if anyone cares, haha it’s okay though, I’m used to people not caring, okay I’m kidding I do have people in my life who care about me, anyway. This year I finished 94 books, and I feel proud of myself for doing that amidst defending my dissertation, applying to my final internship/residency year of my PhD program, and maintaining healthy relationships with my friends and myself. Similar to last year, I felt a bit more impressed with my fiction reads than my nonfiction reads, perhaps because my top three fiction selections featured amazing friendships and romances between people of color. As always, I included links to my full Goodreads reviews of each book and you can see previous years’ lists at the bottom of this post.
Tag Archives: nonfiction
Thomas’s Top Ten 2021 Reads
Filed under Books
Thomas’s Top Ten 2016 Reads
Hello all! As per tradition, here lies the top 10 books out of the 114 I read in 2016. While the United States’s political climate may have sucked this year, I did read a ton of stellar nonfiction, so that served as a coping mechanism for me to escape the bigotry and prejudice so prevalent within our country benefits this blog post, at least. Fiction, on the other hand, did not satisfy me as much this year – perhaps because I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara in 2015, a masterpiece that has ruined my ability to appreciate less-than-stellar writing forever. I would love to see if any of our top picks match up, so without further ado: Continue reading
Filed under Book Reviews, Books
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison
Rating: 5/5 stars.
*Note: I do not post all of my book reviews on this blog. For more, check out my Goodreads page.*
“Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense, and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death not uncommonly is violent and grisly. The suffering of the suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends, and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.”
A gripping, masterful book about a topic shrouded in horror and sadness. Continue reading
Filed under 5 stars, Book Reviews, Books
Personal Update: Thomas, Revisited
About a month and a half into summer vacation, I still have not published much on this blog. I ask myself why: is it a bad case of writer’s block, or have I lost interest? At first I wondered whether I was just waiting until after I got my license to start anything serious, but even after attaining it after endangering the lives of me and my examiner, here I am writing this post. Continue reading
Filed under Personal
Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman
5/5 stars.
I first fanboy squealed on page 11, when Judith Lewis Herman created a connection between mental illness and feminism, two of my favorite topics. Continue reading
Filed under 5 stars, Book Reviews, Books
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Rating: 5/5 stars.
Bird by Bird is my new bible. Not just for writing, but for life – it is my favorite work of nonfiction so far. Continue reading
Filed under 5 stars, Book Reviews, Books
The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean
Rating: 3/5 stars.
Have you ever wanted to hoard cats? Did you know that there’s a sonic hedgehog gene that can make your skin peel off? Can you fathom that pheromones could make you fall in love?
The Violinist’s Thumb contains chapters on all of these topics – it combines shocking facts with biological premises with the history of DNA discovery. Continue reading
Filed under 3 stars, Book Reviews, Books
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
Rating: 5/5 stars.
As someone possibly striving to become a teacher, I appreciated How Children Succeed. Paul Tough variegates his writing style enough to keep the book entertaining without losing track of the message he puts forth – one way he does this is by including various anecdotes. He does not just share stories about kids who have suffered in the current education system, but he reveals parts of his own journey, such as when he dropped out of Columbia University.
Tough connects these tales to psychology too, by examining several pertinent ideas like character, conscientiousness, and what it truly takes to succeed in an academic environment. Continue reading
Filed under 5 stars, Book Reviews, Books
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson
Rating: 3/5 stars.
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened acts as the autobiography of Jenny Lawson, better known as The Bloggess. She writes about various anecdotes, ranging from her experience with a talking squirrel to her social anxiety issues at parties. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, it will most likely please fans of her blog, as well as others who want a funny book to read.
While I liked Jenny Lawson’s voice and her crazy life, I myself did not find Let’s Pretend This Never Happened funny, which was the foundation of the book. Continue reading
Filed under 3 stars, Book Reviews, Books