The thing I remember most from this little stretch of books is the feeling that I was SO CLOSE to being finished with this project. I wasn’t traveling, so a lot of these photos are just from places around my house that I hadn’t used for backgrounds up to this point. Pretty early in the project, I decided I was going to try and use a different background for each photo and, for the most part, I was about to do it. There were a few similar photos — it’s easy to hold a book up to an interesting skyscape and snap something — but for the most part I don’t think there were any obvious repeats. These aren’t the most exciting bunch, in terms of photos, but I was trucking along to the finish line.

81. The Residence by Kate Andersen Brower

Books in the wild, this time on a “Nonfiction to Read” table at Barnes and Noble. The Residence by Kate Andersen Brower is a sort of Downton Abbey-esque look at the daily lives of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and other staff who serve the First Family and make the White House function. Brower conducted a ton of interviews with White House staffers and former First Family members to fill out this book, and the depth of research shows. The book manages to shed light on the lives of the residents and workers at the White House, with just a little bit of gossip to make the book feel more intimate. I really liked getting inside the workings of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and feeling like I heard stories I wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. Brower has another book on a similar topic, First Ladies, that I’m looking forward to reading.

82. Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is on fire this year, with a new memoir, Hunger, and this short story collection, Difficult Women, now on the bestseller list. It’s hard for me to put my thoughts on this collection into words. The characters are fierce and funny and real, put in impossible situations yet making their way through them. I loved how unique and focused each voice was. These women speak on some universal issues, but each from a place of great specificity. I feel like that can be hard to pull off in a short story collection, but Gay does it really well here. I checked this one out from the library, but hope to make it part of my permanent collection soon.

83. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

The Harry Potter series holds a special place in my heart… can the first book really be 20 years old? I literally grew up with Harry, Ron and Hermione – I was 12 when the first book was published in the United States, and 21 when the final installment hit the shelves. This series matured with me, matching the experiences I was having in a way few book series could. I never battled wizards, but I had crushes on boys who didn’t seem to like me back. I never learned spells, but I did get anxious preparing for my first real high school dance. I never became an advocate for house elves, but I did learn to raise my voice in support of causes that matter. The books aren’t perfect – rereads as an adult have show some pretty big blind spots – but I still love these books with my whole heart.

84. Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley

Henry Jones and his family own Howling Books, a used bookstore best known for the Letter Library – a section of the store with well-loved books where people can leave letters, write notes, highlight passages, in the hopes of finding a connection with other readers. But the bookstore is in trouble, and the future of the Letter Library is in jeopardy. About this time, Henry’s old friend, Rachel Sweetie, returns to the city and the bookshop. She’s grieving the sudden loss of her brother, and wants to avoid Henry if at all possible. Before she moved, she confessed her feelings for Henry in a letter… but he never responded. As they work together, Henry and Rachel start to find comfort, solace and friendship in each other, and see the value of connecting through words. I read Words in Deep Blue last fall and just loved it to pieces – it’s a wonderful young adult read about love and loss and connection and finding second chances in a world that is often out of our control.

85. Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

At 24 years old, Susannah Cahalan was poised to begin her adult life, setting out on her first post-college job and just settling into her first serious relationship. A month later, Cahalan woke up strapped to a hospital bed, unable to move or speak, after a terrifying autoimmune disorder almost took her mind and her life. In Brain on Fire, Cahalan reconstructs her month of madness through medical records, interviews with friends and family, and a journal her father kept throughout her ordeal to tell the story of what happens when our minds and bodies betray us. This book is stellar, and really interesting example of a reported memoir that is both terrifying and exciting to read. I like that Cahalan does the work to put her illness in context, and help a reader understand how something like this could happen (even if, for the most part, contracting a rare disease is entirely unpredictable).

86. Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Well, Five Days at Memorial is another uplifting choice, huh? Not really. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, leaving most of the city flooded and thousands stranded, the staff at Memorial Medical Center were faced with trying to care for patients until help arrived. As the water rose, power failed, and heat climbed, certain patients were designated last for rescue. Later, several of the health professionals at the hospital were criminally charged with injecting numerous patients with drugs that would hasten their death. In Five Days at Memorial, journalist and doctor Sheri Fink reconstructs the five days after Katrina, putting together a carefully sourced and brutally factual account of choices that range from criminal to morally reprehensible amidst increasingly terrible conditions. I was struck by a lot about this book, including how the issues raised here – access, economics, corporate concerns, and complicated decisions about treatment – are reflective of larger issues in our healthcare system. This is book is hard to read, but very, very good.

87. Wonder Woman Unbound by Tim Hanley

After seeing Wonder Woman on the big screen earlier this month, I wanted to learn more about the character and her history. After digging a bit, I settled on Wonder Woman Unbound by comics historian Tim Hanley and the first two volumes of the current Wonder Woman run from DC Comics. Hanley’s book was a delight, a perfect mix of nerdy humor, data and close reads of the Wonder Woman comics published since the 1940s. Hanley convincingly argues that portrayals of Wonder Woman – more than those of most comic book heroes – reflect the motivations of a particular creator rather than the complicated, slightly subversive values of her original creator William Moulton Marston. I thought it was a ton of fun, and I’m excited to pick up Hanley’s other books on Lois Lane and Catwoman. I was less enamored with the DC Comics I chose to read. Volume 1: The Lies felt like it required too much background on recent DC Comics runs for a newbie like me to enjoy without a lot of outside work. Volume 2: Year One was a lot better, especially as an origin story for the character, and it had some really beautiful illustrations. Despite the mixed review, I’m curious enough about the rest of the 25 issue run (which just wrapped up recently) to finish it digitally or later this fall in trades.

88. Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

While working as a journalist in South Korea, journalist Barbara Demick met members of a small but growing community — residents of North Korea who had escaped and defected to South Korea. Through the stories of six of these escapees, plus her own limited exposure to North Korea, Demick tries to show what life is like for ordinary people living in an unordinary country. Nothing to Envy is a book that’s both difficult to read and impossible to put down because of how well Demick is able to reconstruct what life is like for the people who live there. This book made me sad and angry and frustrated, which is what some of the best narrative nonfiction ought to do.

89. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists takes places an English-language newspaper in Rome, which has been a source of international news for expats for 50 years. The book is a series of connected short stories about the tumultuous personal and professional lives of the journalists, editors, and publishers of the paper, set against the monumental shifts from print to online in the newspaper industry. As a journalist by training, I was (in some ways) predisposed to love this book. But I think others will enjoy it too. Each of the stories has both humor and sadness in it, a mix of both the best and the worst of what people can be. Many stories were funny, others cringe-inducing, and others quite sweet… I didn’t want to put it down.

90. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbaugh

The Art of Fielding is a tricky book to recommend – not everyone is going to fall in love with a more than 500 page book set at a small college in Wisconsin that pays homage to baseball and Moby Dick, but I was charmed by it. The main character is Henry Skrimshander is the baseball team’s star shortstop. A wild throw upends Henry’s life, as well as those of four other people, which the book follows through the baseball season. I loved the way author Chad Harbaugh was able to write about so many different kinds of things – life at a small college, the life of a sports team, what it’s like to grow up and try to find a career, finding yourself, moving back home, illicit affairs, confused sexuality, natural talent versus practiced excellence, the pursuit of perfection. It’s a book about baseball… but also a lot more than that.

The end is near! You can check out Days 1 through 10, Days 11 through 20, Days 21 through 30, Days 31 through 40, Days 41 through 50, Days 51 through 60, Days 61 through 70, and Days 71 through 80 on the blog, or follow me on Instagram for more bookish photos (outside my 100 Days project).

As I was looking through my photos from 100 Days of Books, I realized that this little batch — books 71 through 80 — have some of my favorite photos from the entire experiment. I think maybe by this time I’d really started finding my groove, and I was out and about a little more so I could find some fun backgrounds further away from home. For those keeping track, I’ll have two final long posts like this wrapping up my project, and then a more reflective post on lessons learned and what I’m hoping to do next. Thanks for reading!

71. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble is such a hilarious book, especially for those of us who grew up during the height of the Beanie Baby craze. The book has, no joke, some of the best quotes from interviews that I’ve ever read in a reported work of nonfiction — a testament, I’d guess, to both what a good reporter Zac Bissonnette is and to how much people who worked with Ty Warner (the creator of Beanie Babies) actually hate him now. In addition to being really fun, the book also is smart primer on some consumer economics issues like speculative markets and the way behavioral fallacies lead to bad economic decisions. This one is highly recommended.

72. Portage by Sue Leaf

I bought Portage by Sue Leaf impulsively at an independent bookstore in Duluth, Minnesota. I was traveling along the North Shore, so a collection of essays about life on the water seemed like a good choice for that place. I was pleasantly surprised at the way I fell in love with this book, which one of the blurbs describes as “a guidebook to canoeing or how to raise a family, a natural history, a meditation on the significance of wild places, an intimate portrayal of a marriage.” From the first page, I wanted to be in a canoe with Leaf and her family, seeing the natural world in a new and challenging way. I loved thinking about wildness, family, and aging, and learning about the history of wild places close to where I live. It was just so, so good.

73. Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden

When cartoonist Sarah Glidden decided to accompany two journalist friends on a reporting trip to Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, she was hoping to better understand the purpose of journalism and how journalists do their work. The trip, organized to report on the effects of the Iraq War and the lives of refugees, is complicated by a fourth traveler, a childhood friend and former marine who was deployed to Iraq in 2007. Throughout the trip, Sarah and her companions interviewed civilians, refugees, and officials, trying to find interesting (and marketable) stories about the impact of the war they can share with American audiences. I thought Rolling Blackouts was an interesting read, although parts already feel dated given the volatile and violent situation in Syria today. I loved the illustrations, and appreciated the way Glidden had a sense of empathy for everyone she encountered (her companions as well as their interview subjects). Her book clearly shows the importance of stories – those gathered by journalists and those we choose to share ourselves – in building a shared sense of humanity.

74. The Last Castle by Denise Kiernan

The Last Castle (out September 2017 from Touchstone). Even among the wealthiest Gilded Age Americans, George Vanderbilt’s 125,000 acre estate in rural North Carolina was noteworthy. The mansion he built there, Biltmore House, was designed by celebrated architect Richard Morris Hunt, with landscaping by Frederick Law Olmstead. When George died it was up to his widow, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, to try and preserve the 175,000-square-foot home, along with the priceless antiques and artwork and sprawling village that grew up around the estate. The Last Castle is a lovely history of the Gilded Age and how America has changed since then. Biltmore House was one man’s dream and legacy, but the story of the house touches a vast array of artists, politicians, writers, and citizens of the country. This is the first book I read from BookExpo, and I enjoyed it immensely.

75. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

The Robber Bride is set in present-day Toronto, Ontario, and focuses on three college acquaintances turned friends, Roz, Charis, and Tony. At the beginning of the book, they’re meeting at a restaurant for lunch when Zenia, a “frenemy” who they believe recently died, shows up, very much alive. Drama! The book then splits off to tell the three stories of how Zenia became part of each of their lives, stealing away their beaus and leaving a mess whenever she went. I love how good Margaret Atwood is at writing distinctive female characters. With Roz, Charis and Tony, she perfectly captures the sense of how friends work – covering for each other, dropping everything when needed, but still being able to be annoyed with quirks you dislike. And then Zenia is so awful, a malevolent spirit that comes into each of the women’s lives, pretends to be a victim, then wreaks havoc before disappearing again. It’s all just so great!

76. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle is one of those memoirs that everyone who is deeply immersed in the genre has read, but I only just got around to picking it up this month, prompted by seeing trailers for the movie coming out later this year. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings grew up with loving but deeply neglectful parents. Her father could be “brilliant and charismatic” when sober, but became “dishonest and destructive” when he’d been drinking. Her mother was free spirited, uninterested in a domestic life or the work that comes from raising a family. Throughout her childhood, Walls’ family roved from city to city, keeping just ahead of law enforcement, debt collectors, and criminals, until they settled in a barely habitable shack in the Appalachian mountains. Once there, the siblings did what they needed to get by until they could make their way on their own. There’s so much about this memoir that is shocking and difficult to read, but I was struck with the warmth Walls still holds for her family. This is a book about survival, looking back with clear eyes and an empathetic heart – it’s simply remarkable.

77. Startup by Dorree Shafrir

Startup by Doree Shafrir read like two different novels to me. The first half is a sharp and funny look at tech startup culture, everything from ridiculous employee perks to the constant race for funding and buzz. The story follows three main characters – Mack, a startup CEO on the verge of a major investment deal; Katya, a journalist looking for a big scoop; and Sabrina, a mother trying to reenter the industry in her 30s. The second half, a more serious (but still sharp) look at gender and journalism in tech, takes off after Mack sends an inappropriate text message to one of his female employees, setting off a chain of events that brings the the characters crashing together. I stayed up way too late last night finishing this book because I really wanted to see how Shafrir was going to bring the story to a close. I’m not totally sure what I thought of the ending, but really enjoyed the ride to get there.

78. Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge

Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge takes a sobering look at American gun culture through the stories of the 10 young people who were killed by guns in the United States on one random day, Nov. 23, 2013. The stories range quite dramatically, and reflect the way gun violence affects people across the country in similar and different ways. Younge uses their stories to explore what it means to live in a county that can’t seem to enact meaningful gun control measures, despite a near constant drum of people killed each day and each year by guns. It’s a sobering, emotional read that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be getting any less relevant as time passes.

79. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

At an artsy summer camp in the 1970s, six teenagers meet and, in the way that all summer friendships go, vow to remain close forever. In the case of “The Interestings,” the nickname they give themselves, this turns out to be somewhat true. Decades later, they are still connected, although an incident at camp remains a complicated cloud in the background of their varied adult successes. The Interestings is a novel that has a lot of ideas about creativity, art, friendship, and growing up. I loved the twisting plot, which shifts back and forth in time and perspective in a lovely way. And I loved the way that Meg Wolitzer wrote about the particular jealousy of friends. She perfectly captured that sense of rooting for the people you love while simultaneously wondering and feeling insecure about how your own life is working out. I think this would be a good vacation read if you like your novels with big ideas and a little darkness.

80. 100 Pep Talks by Elisa Blaha Cripe

I’ve been sharing book photos and short reviews for the last 80 days as part of The 100 Day Project, a global art initiative where people around the world commit to doing something creative every day for 100 days and sharing it on social media. I’m not an artist, but I felt like it was something I could do as a writer because of Elise Blaha Cripe (@elisejoy). Her 2016 project was to write 100 pep talks, which she then collected and self-published in this book. I’ve given copies of this one to friends when I feel like they need a boost, and often pick it up and skim through when I feel like I need a boost myself. No single pep talk is revolutionary, but it’s lovely to have a little push… just start, say your big dreams out loud, you’re not going to run out of ideas, celebrate your wins, you’ll get better at this, you can change. The book makes me smile, and I’m grateful that the project it came from has given me such a creative boost during the last few months. You can learn more about The 100 Day Project at the100dayproject.org and more about 100 Pep Talks at www.elisejoy.com/100peptalks.

Reviews finished! You can check out Days 1 through 10, Days 11 through 20, Days 21 through 30, Days 31 through 40, Days 41 through 50, Days 51 through 60, and Days 61 through 70 on the blog, or follow me on Instagram for more bookish photos (outside my 100 Days project).

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how, for me, sitting down with an absorbing book can be an almost meditative activity for me. It helps me settle into a rhythm, silence the voices in my head, and stop multi-tasking in a way few other activities do. Which is why I am so, so excited for this weekends 24in48 Readathon, hosted by Rachel, Kerry and Kristin.

If reading for 24 hours over a 48 hour weekend is a marathon, then I’m trying to run the half marathon — 12 hours between 12:01 a.m. on Saturday and 11:59 p.m. on Sunday (Eastern Standard Time). That feels like a reasonable goal to me. It’s long enough that I’ll have to consciously choose reading over other activities that I like to do on weekends, but not so long that I feel like it’s impossible.

The biggest challenge is going to be Sunday. My sister signed us up for cooking class to learn to make donuts, and then we’re going to have a bit of a girls day in Stillwater (a super cute town along the river at the Minnesota/Wisconsin border). There’s a winery, ice cream, and bookstores… so of course we’ll be spending some time there. But, I plan to read most of the day Saturday, and as much as I can on Sunday before and after our adventure.

I didn’t spend as much time making up a possible readathon book pile this time around, mostly because I feel like I haven’t had the mental space to think much (I’ve had a busy week of job searching activities). So, these are primarily the books sitting on the shelf in front of my face or that have come into the house fairly recently.

• Evicted by Matthew Desmond — I’m partially through this one, which normally I try to avoid ahead of a readathon, but I need to finish it for a book club meeting next week.
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — I’m working on a Book Riot post where I might include this book… but I have to read it first!
• Terrier by Tamora Pierce — This is another Book Riot-adjacent pick, a group is doing an informal readalong of all the Tamora Pierce books that I am trying to participate it.
• Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen — Essays on unruly women should be a nice break at some point, I think.
• All Day by Liza Jessie Peterson — I grabbed this book at BookExpo, but haven’t made time to read it. Excuses, excuses.
• Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong — This is one of my Book of the Month picks this month. Reviews have been mixed, but I”m hoping the format will be readathon friendly.
• American Fire by Monica Hesse — And this is my other Book of the Month pick. I am really curious about this one, and I also feel like it will read quickly… something I find really satisfying during a readathon.

I definitely want to finish Evicted — I’m about two-thirds done, and need to finish it for my book club meeting next week. I’m also excited to dig into American Fire, but I’m worried it’ll be a little heavy on top of Evicted. We’ll see… if for some reason none of these catch my eye tomorrow, I’ve got quite a few other books to choose from!

I’ll be posting all of my readathon updates over on Instagram, so follow me there: www.instagram.com/kimthedork.

Are you participating in this weekends 24in48 Readathon? What books are you excited to pick up?

I’m really excited and a little bummed to say that 100 Days of Books officially wrapped up on Instagram last Wednesday, July 12. I’m excited because I never really thought I’d be able to see it all the way through, and bummed because I’m a little sad that it’s over. But, I’ve still got the reviews to share here. I think I am going to keep with the schedule of putting up a post each Monday, wrapping up with the last 10 reviews in early August. So, if you haven’t been following along in real time, you can look forward to that content here soon.

61. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things is a really wonderful collection of advice columns novelist/essayist Cheryl Strayed wrote at The Rumpus under the persona of Sugar. Sugar is, for me, like that one person in your life that will recognize when you’ve gone off the rails, then get you back on track in the most kind and generous way possible. Strayed is an amazing writer, and her style is on display in everyone one of these lovely, profane, honest and frustrated columns. As a word of caution, I don’t recommend reading these essays straight through – they can start to feel a little repetitive – but they’re perfect to dip in and out of when you need a little bit of kick-in-the-pants empathy.

62. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing starts with the story of two half sisters living in different villages in Ghana. Effia is forced to marry an Englishman who is part of the British slave trade in that region. Esi is a prisoner of the British who is eventually sold into the Gold Coast slave trade and send to America. Each chapter of the book follows the generations on both sides of the family, looking at the way the slave trade affected individuals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, touching on colonization, the Civil War, the Great Migration, and on into the present. I loved the structure of this book, which is right in between interconnected short stories and an epic family drama. You get a sense of the big story of these families and how they fit into history, but every chapter is also a portrait of an individual at those times. It manages to be both very specific and incredibly broad, which feels like such an achievement, especially given that it’s a really compelling read.

63. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is a debut essay collection about “growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in western culture, addressing sexism, stereotypes, and the universal miseries of life.” In this collection, Scaachi Koul shows a real skill at moving between funny and poignant moments. She writes about her parents with a lot of love, and a fair amount of frustration, but manages to always look at them with a generous eye. I especially loved the pages between chapters, where Koul would include brief email exchanges with her father. They weren’t really about anything, but captured their relationship succinctly and perfectly, and gave some added roundness to the last (and best) essay of the book, about the consequences of Koul telling her parents about her long term relationship with a white man. I thought this collection was great.

64. The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

Monsieur Jean Perdu makes his living has a literary apothecary, prescribing novels to ease the difficult moments of life. His expertise comes from years of experience and his own broken heart – 20 years earlier, his first great love disappeared, leaving only a letter which Perdu never opened. When he finally reads the letter, Perdu is inspired to shake his life up, beginning a journey by boat through the south of France, making new friends and recommending books for the trials that affect everyone he meets. I read The Little Paris Bookshop on a recommendation and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be for me. The first two thirds, Perdu’s river journey, were a little too charming for me. But the final third, in which Perdu begins to actively process his loss while stepping away from the demands of his life and job, resonated with me in a way I can’t quite articulate. I’m not sure it’s a book I’d universally recommend, but it is one that meant a great deal at this moment in my own journey through loss and young widowhood.

65. News to Me by Laurie Hertzel

When Laurie Hertzel joined the Duluth News Tribune in the mid-1970s as a clerk, she didn’t know if journalism would be her career. News to Me is a self-deprecating and charming coming-of-age story about life in the newsroom, a story that I am almost perfectly suited to enjoy. But I also think this memoir has a lot to offer other readers, including a clear-eyed look at the challenges that have always faced those working in newsrooms, and the slow shift from journalism as a job to journalism as a profession. I appreciated Hertzel’s sense of humor, measured nostalgia, and sense of optimism for the future.

66. My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows

Lady Jane Grey is famous for being a short-lived queen, sitting on the British throne for just nine days in July 1553 before being betrayed by her advisors, imprisoned, and executed. My Lady Jane reimagines the relationship between King Edward, Jane, and Jane’s husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, suggesting that Edward didn’t die, Jane escaped execution, and all three are able to transform into animals at will. In terms of silliness and fun, this book was really a delight – a cotton-candy read for a summer afternoon.

67. Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson

The morning of Sept. 8, 1900 began in an unremarkable way for most of the residents of Galveston, Texas. U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist Isaac Cline noted some “strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds” coming off the Gulf of Mexico, but failed to attribute them to a more significant weather event. Hours later, a devastating hurricane hit the coast, killing 6,000 people and destroying the seaside town. In Isaac’s Storm, written in 2000, Erik Larson follows the storm, the lives of those in Galveston, and the mistakes (aka hubris) of the fledgling U.S. Weather Bureau that contributed to the widespread devastation. This book doesn’t move as easily as some of Larson’s other book, but it is a riveting look at a particular storm and the institutional history of weather forecasting at the turn of the century.

68. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Young lovers Ifemelu and Obinze leave Nigeria together, but are separated when Ifemelu makes it to America and Obinze finds himself stuck in England. Fifteen years later, they’re reunited in back at home, but have to find out whether time and culture have pulled them too far apart. I’m not going out on a limb by saying that Americanah is a truly great novel. It’s a quietly funny and incisive look at race and family and how our relationships are affected by where we come from and the identities we carry with us. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie doesn’t hold anything back as Ifemelu makes her way through some less-than-flattering parts of modern America, but it felt like she approached her commentary with a generosity of spirit that I appreciated.

69. Ten Letters by Eli Saslow

Every night during his two terms in office, President Barack Obama received a briefing book that included policy memos, scheduling details, and a purple folder with 10 letters from American citizens who wrote to the president. Every day, specific staff members at the White House sifted through the thousands of letters and e-mails that arrived to choose these letters — 10 voices that presidential aides said helped inspire the president and gave him a more person sense of what was happening across the country. In Ten Letters, Washington Post journalist Eli Saslow profiles 10 people whose letters to delivered to the president in late 2009 and 2010, creating a portrait of the people and issues that were affecting our country in that moment. Saslow is a remarkable profile writer, and I loved the way the book explored the relationship between citizens and their president through the written word.

70. Self-Inflicted Wounds by Aisha Tyler

Books in the wild! I listened to Self-Inflicted Wounds as an audiobook, but when I saw it on a display at my local library I had to snap a photo. In this collection of essays, comedian Aisha Tyler (who I recognized from voicing Lana Kane on Archer) shares “heartwarming tales of of epic humiliation” and the wisdom she’s gained from those moments throughout her life. I listened to this audiobook during my long commute last fall, and really enjoyed it. There were a bunch of laugh out loud moments, but they never felt mean-spirited or fake, which sometimes can happen in celebrity essays. This is fun, if you get a chance to listen.

Reviews finished! You can check out Days 1 through 10, Days 11 through 20, Days 21 through 30, Days 31 through 40, Days 41 through 50, and Days 51 through 60 on the blog, or follow me on Instagram for more bookish photos (outside my 100 Days project).