I usually present this list straight up, in the order that I read the books, but this year I noticed some themes in my reading, so I’m sharing the list broken down by categories. Links to order go to my favorite local bookstore, BookPeople. Enjoy!

“Quit Lit”

• Quitter — Erica Barnett
• The Recovering — Leslie Jamison
• Not Drinking Tonight — Amanda White *good for those early in their sobriety journey
• Nothing Good Can Come From This — Kristi Coulter
• Sunshine Warm Sober — Catherine Gray
• Soberful — Veronica Valli *good for those early in their sobriety journey

Feminism, Baby

• Hood Feminism — Mikki Kendall
• Girlhood — Melissa Febos
• Sexual Revolution — Laurie Penny
• White Feminism — Koa Beck *required reading for white ladies
• The Right to Sex — Amia Srinivasan

Addition and Mental Health

• Dopamine Nation — Anne Lembke
• In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts — Gabor Maté
• The Biology of Desire — Marc Lewis
• Prozac Nation — Elizabeth Wurtzel

History

• In the Garden of Beasts — Erik Larson
• Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn — Daniel Gordis
• My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel — Ari Shavit
• The Pale-Faced Lie — David Crow
• As Texas Goes… — Gail Collins

Big, F*cked Up Systems

• American Prison — Shane Bauer
• The New Jim Crow — Michelle Alexander *required reading for everyone
• Highway of Tears — Jessica McDiarmid
• People Love Dead Jews — Dana Horn
• The Color of Law — Richard Rothstein
• Undoing Drugs — Maia Szalavitz

Relationships (to Self and Others)

• Opening Up — Tristan Taormino
• Attached — Ami Levine & Rachel Heller
• Anxiously Attached — Jessica Baum
• Polysecure — Jessica Fern
• The Ethical Slut — Janet Hardy and Dossie Eaton
• The Lonely Hunter — Aimée Lutkin

Other?

• Social Startup Sucess — Kathleen Kelly
• Educated — Tara Westover

Fiction

• Transcendent Kingdom — Yaa Gyasi
• Pachinko — Min Jin Lee *received as a gift and highly recommend
• Waiting for the Night Song — Julie Carrick Dalton
• The Incendiaries — R. O. Kwon
• There, There — Tommy Orange
• Firekeeper’s Daughter — Angeline Boulley
• A Thousand Miles from Nowhere — John Gregory Brown
• To All Who Call in Truth — Michael Oren
• Ruin’s Wake — Patrick Edwards
• The Water Cure — Sophie Mackintosh
• The Mars Room — Rachel Kushner
• Filthy Animals — Brandon Taylor *highly recommend
• White Fur — Jardine Libaire *the only word to accurately describe this is: delicious
• Docile — K. M. Sparza
• Valentine — Elizabeth Wetmore
• California — Edan Lepucki
• The Power — Naomi Alderman
• 1Q84 — Haruki Marukami *at nearly 1,200 pages, a good vacation read
• Hell of a Book — Jason Mott *read this
• The Nickel Boys — Colson Whitehead

I’ve talked pretty extensively about my sobriety on social media and in real life, but I haven’t talked much about the drinking that preceded it. I think that’s an important part of the story because if someone can see themselves in my drinking, maybe they can see themselves in my sobriety too. So in honor of my 31st birthday and recently hitting the 6-month milestone of sobriety, here’s how things began:

I’m pretty sure I had my first sip of alcohol when I was around 13. I remember sneaking some of my parent’s vodka into my ice cream (???) to make some kind of boozy milkshake while talking on AIM late into the night. Apparently, I didn’t hate it.

I’m 14 and sitting in the hot tub at J’s house, drunk on screwdrivers with him at his older brother’s party. It feels very cool to be hanging out with high schoolers.

I’m 15 and ripping shots of vodka on a school night at A’s apartment. I think I blackout. I’m hungover in biology class the next day and B can smell it on me.

I’m 16 and get my first car. I drive up to visit C and we sneak out to drink with a bunch of boys in a trailer park.

I’m 17 and at another party with C. We’re both wasted, far too drunk to attempt driving, so I let a stranger drive my car. I think I yell at her for something, while she’s driving.

I’m 18 and away at college. I’m always significantly more disappointed than is reasonable when us silly little freshmen can’t find a party to go to (read: can’t get drunk.)

I’m 19 and studying abroad in Australia. I get super drunk at a party and stumble home, alone, in the dark, when I’m ready to leave. I don’t tell anyone.

I’m 20 and back in Ithaca and drunk in the basement of the football house. I decide I’m done, so I walk back to campus alone in the dark. Again, not telling anyone I left.

I’m 21 and can finally (legally) go to bars. I blackout on Long Island Iced Teas within an hour on Halloween and spend the entire next day in bed, unable to move. To this day I can’t stand the smell of them.

I’m 22 and about to graduate. We stay drunk for the entire week after classes end.

I’m 23 and back in Middletown. D drives me home from Poor Bobby’s in the plow truck and makes me promise that I’ll stay home. I swear I will, then I promptly get in my car and drive, drunk, in the dark, in the snow, to B’s house.

I’m 24 and marathon training, finally taking a break from drinking. And it actually isn’t hard.

I’m 25 and brand new to Austin, going on dates (and drinking) and to brunch after CrossFit (and drinking).

I’m 26 and I’m getting more into fitness, so drinking takes a back seat again, and it still isn’t very hard.

I’m 27 and barely drinking. I work out multiple days per week, eat well, sleep well, love my job, have great friends, and still can’t figure out why I feel generally pretty terrible almost all the time. (Spoiler alert: it’s depression.)

I’m 28 and in Marfa with a guy that I’ve known for a month. He’s an alcoholic but I don’t realize that until later. We drink every single day, well into the night, and then end up fighting and breaking up. We drive back to Austin hungover, in silence.

I’m 29 and drunk alone in my apartment on a Tuesday night. I’m finally on antidepressants and generally feeling better, but still can’t shake the feeling that things are pretty worthless (January 6th, anyone? I drank at that for sure.)

I’m almost 30 and drunk alone in my apartment, again. I’m scared that things have escalated beyond what I would consider “normal.” I can’t bring myself to ask for help when I’m sober, but when I’m one bottle of wine deep, I reach out to M, and G, and C and tell them I’m not sure I should be drinking. They respond with love and grace and help. One day I’ll look back at the messages I sent in desperation, but I don’t quite have the wherewithal to do it now.

I’m 30 and I’m two months sober and surrounded by sunshine and people who love me at Zilker Park for my birthday. Life is really good.

I’m 30 and I try moderation and I learn that it doesn’t work for me.

I’m 30 and I say goodbye to booze on a sunny fall day. It feels good to be a little drunk, (hopefully) one last time.

I’m 31 and I’m 6 months sober. Holy shit. I’m 31 and I’m 6 months sober. I’m 31 and I’m 6 months sober!

31-year-old Shayna has never had a sip of alcohol. That sentence gives me chills.

She’s never blacked out, never drove drunk, never been mean to her friends, never chased a mediocre man desperately at the end of the night, never thrown up in her bed, never drunk texted an ex, never said something embarrassing, never made an ass out of herself.

31-year-old Shayna lives in integrity. She keeps promises to herself. She sits in her feelings instead of trying to numb them or run away from them. She’s vulnerable and honest and confident in herself. She knows her worth. She’s present for her family and friends and pets.

If this journey looks somewhat tame compared to what you picture when someone tells you they don’t drink anymore, that’s because it kind of is. I never hit “rock bottom.” I never got arrested or spent time in the drunk tank or destroyed property or anything really terrible.

And to be clear, it would be disingenuous of me to say that it was all bad. It wasn’t even really mostly bad. I had FUN. A lot of fun.

But I always come back to a quote from Laura McKowen, author of We Are The Luckiest and founder of The Luckiest Club, my sobriety support community:

“The typical question is, ‘is this bad enough for me to have to change?’ The question we should be asking is, ‘is this good enough for me to stay the same?’ And the real question underneath it all is, ‘am I free?’”

Were things bad enough? Not necessarily. But they weren’t good enough either. And I certainly didn’t feel free.

Here’s the big takeaway for you, dear reader: you do not have to have a major problem with alcohol to question your relationship with it. You do not have to call yourself an alcoholic to stop drinking.

Sobriety is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder even than running a solo marathon during COVID. (Yep, I did that.) But it’s also the most worthwhile. 6 months of sobriety has brought me more joy and connection than 15+ years of drinking ever did.

Phew, what a year, huh?! I don’t need to remind you of the shitshow that was 2021. I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for my love of books for allowing me to find an escape hatch in a sometimes hellscape of a world.

In 2019, I decided that I wanted to read more nonfiction. More meaning… more than zero. To bribe myself, I made a plan that for every nonfiction book I read, I’d get to read a fiction book. It worked amazingly and I read so many interesting things. I’ve continued that trend for the last 2 years and am on track for it again in 2022.

In the last year, I read some fantastic stories and learned a lot. (I also got sober, as evidenced by that streak of quit lit!)

Here are the books that got me through the year, beginning with my top 5. (NF = nonfiction, F = fiction)

All links go to my favorite local bookstore, Black Pearl Books:

Quit Like A Woman
by Holly Whitaker

“When Holly Whitaker decided to seek help after one too many benders, she embarked on a journey that led not only to her own sobriety, but revealed the insidious role alcohol plays in our society and in the lives of women in particular… Fueled by her own emerging feminism, she also realized that the predominant systems of recovery are archaic, patriarchal, and ineffective for the unique needs of women and other historically oppressed people — who don’t need to lose their egos and surrender to a male concept of God, as the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous state, but who need to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own identities and take control of their lives.”

The Gilded Razor
by Sam Lansky

“By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out. Yet as he journeyed from the glittering streets of Manhattan, to a wilderness boot camp in Utah, to a psych ward in New Orleans, he only found more opportunities to create chaos — until finally, he began to face himself.”

Long Division
by Kiese Laymon

“Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.

Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson — but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called…Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.”

Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem.

Untamed
by Glennon Doyle

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

1. Devil in the White City — Erik Larson (NF)
2. Lies You Wanted to Hear — James Whitfield Thomson (F)
3. She Always Knew How (Mae West) — Charlotte Chandler (NF)
4. The Immortalists — Chloe Benjamin (F)
5. The Night Watch — Sarah Waters (F)
6. The Alcohol Experiment — Annie Grace (NF)
7. Quit Like A Woman — Holly Whitaker (NF)
8. Blackout — Sarah Hepola (NF)
9. High Achiever — Tiffany Jenkins (NF)
10. The Gilded Razor — Sam Lansky (NF)
11. What I Had Before I Had You — Sarah Cornwell (F)
12. The Tattooist of Auschwitz — Heather Morris (F)
13. We Are The Luckiest — Laura McKowen (NF)
14. Long Division — Kiese Laymon (F)
15. Death in the Air — Kate Winkler Dawson (NF)
16. Delirium — Lauren Oliver (F)
17. We Stand Divided — Daniel Gordis (NF)
18. House of Sand and Fog — Andre Dubus III (F)
19. Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight — Julia Sweig (NF)
20. As Night Falls — Jenny Milchman (F)
21. Reinventing Organizations — Frédéric Laloux (NF)
22. Blood in the Water — Heather Ann Thompson (NF)
23. Broken People — Sam Lansky (F)
24. Running is a Kind of Dreaming — J.M. Thompson (NF)
25. Creativity, Inc.— Ed Catmull (NF)
26. Reasons to Stay Alive — Matt Haig (NF)
27. The Midnight Library — Matt Haig (F)
28. The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober — Catherine Gray (NF)
29. Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi (F)
30. How The Word Is Passed — Clint Smith (NF)
31. The Fortress — S. A. Jones (F)
32. No Hiding in Boise — Kim Hooper (F)
33. A Dark and Secret Place — Jen Williams (F)
34. Emotional Sobriety — Tian Dayton (NF)
35. Untamed — Glennon Doyle (NF)