My Year-Changing Books

Fiction and non-fiction that changed my outlook, behaviour, and creative direction

It’s mid-December and Bestof has become a single, meaningless word. Favourites and bests and books of the year. So to find a little space for myself as a list-maker, instead of picking favourites when I took stock of my reading, I only sought books that have been catalysts for change.

In a year of personal shock, grief and new responsibilities, professional milestones and stage-of-life wrestling, here are the books that altered my year.

If you never want to write a newsletter, skip this bit

My first post for Voracious was called I Can’t Promise Anything — cautious to say the least but over the course of the year I’ve devoted time to studying what makes a readable publication. The single most useful piece was Write Less, Please from Sarah Fay’s

Substack Writers at Work

. It contains sobering information such as “Most of your subscribers stop reading after about 118 words” — which has encouraged me to edit ruthlessly — as well as the reminder that allowing someone to send you a newsletter is a privilege, inboxes being what they are.