Here's a list of books I read this year

Through the wild and sometimes topsy turvy months of 2018, these books were an anchor. I've bolded the books that I couldn't resist evangelising, the books I've been talking about to anyone who will listen. An asterisk means I loved it. Some even get comments.

1. Hack Attack - Nick Davies
2. 33 Revolutions - Canek Sánchez Guevara*
3. Pachinko - Min Jin Lee* (the kind of multigenerational tale of heartache and loss I love, great insights on the relationship between Korea and Japan)
4. Bright Lights, Big City - Jay McInerney*
5. Meanjin - Summer 2017, Autumn 2018 (is it a stretch to include these? they feel like books, dense reads!)
6. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy* (what can I say that hasn't been said already, I don't mind arriving at the party late)
7. Notes From a Coma - Mike McCormack
8. The Museum of Modern Love - Heather Rose* (an inventive and fascinating but also warm and poignant story)
9. The Music Shop - Rachel Joyce*
10. Synners - Pat Cadigan*
11. Red - Stephen Moline* (still halfway through this beautifully written, dense piece of research on a mostly unheralded part of Australia's history)
12. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson* (a truly extraordinary piece of narrative non-fiction/book length journalism that tells the story of the great migration of African American people out of the south)
13. The Hidden Persuaders - Vance Packard
14. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe* (essential read. I was inspired to pick it up after reading an interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose writing I love, and after reading this I completely got what she was saying. A truly brilliant book)
15. Getting Naked - Patrick Lencioni (new job means learning how to be a good consultant, not just a good communication strategist)
16. Underground Airlines - Ben H Winters (recommend from a new workmate that felt like a pair to Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad, a similarly speculative take on slavery and escape)
17. Mo Meta Blues - Ahmir Questlove Thompson (an occasionally great book reflecting on an incredibly fertile period of music, and one that Questlove was pivotal in creating)
18. The Intuitionist - Colson Whitehead
19. Less - Andrew Sean Greer*
20. The Little Book of Yes - Noah J Goldstein, Steve Martin, Robert B Cialdini 
21. All Out War - Tim Shipman* (the constant pace of a good but very long feature in a weekend paper, lacked a strong narrative arc, but gave me a much deeper understanding of the roots of anti-EU feeling in the UK and the campaign successes and failures that led to the Leave result)
22. Homesick For Another World - Ottessa Moshfegh*
23. Liu Cixin - Three Body Problem* (a breathtakingly broad vision for science, humanity, the past and the future. Must read)
24. Follow the Leader: Democracy and the Rise of the Strongman (Quarterly Essay) - Laura Tingle (looks at Australia's federal leadership woes through the prism of Heifetz, very insightful and thought provoking)
25. Liu Cixin - The Dark Forest* (once I started this trilogy, I couldn't stop)
26. The Trusted Advisor - David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford
27. Leadership On the Line - Ronald A Heifetz (revisited after reading Laura Tingle's great essay, midway through this)
28. Standout 2.0 - Marcus Buckingham
29. Liu Cixin - Death's End* (seriously, I'm jealous if you're yet to begin this)
30. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future - James Bridle* (midway through this spectacular look at technology and the future present)
31. The Voice of Business: Hill & Knowlton and Post War Public Relations - Karen S Miller (an interesting if dry read on the birth of corporate PR, with John Hill's work for steel, margarine and tobacco)
32. House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time - Martin Kihn
33. The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet - Henry Fountain (a truly spectacular but often glacially paced story, would benefit from a tighter edit)
34. One Hundred Years of Dirt - Rick Morton* (being thrown onto the buffet table and panic eating the lot, in this case food = tough things, where most of us would struggle with a couple of courses. And then telling the story with good grace and a fair bit of humour. Couldn't put it down)
35. The Overstory - Richard Powers* (a good book that compressed a multigenerational tale of heartache and loss into every chapter of the first third of the book, while the trees live their epic lives around us. It didn't sustain that impact in the second two thirds, but I'm still looking at the trees I walk by very differently now)