Best books I read in 2018

Over the course of the past year I read at least 50 books (19 non-fiction), not counting flipping through a parade of glossy cookbooks borrowed from the public library and bedtime reading at least a dozen Boxcar Children books with my son.

Here are some of the highlights, in no particular order...

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
Part ethnography, part detailed analysis of Milwaukee rental market, part policy brief, this book may change the way you view wealth and poverty in America. The personal stories make the book a page-turner, but those anecdotes are supported with concrete evidence that there are structural flaws in our housing markets. This book should be required reading.

Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (The Midwife Trilogy Book 1)
by Jennifer Worth
I did not find out about the PBS television adaptation of Call the Midwife until months after I read the first book, but even if the series is great viewing, I'm going to recommend the books anyway. Worth's descriptions of 1950s Docklands slums in London, with their coal soot, limited plumbing, and rickets-inducing lack of sunlight are vivid, and her tales of midwifery, family structure, and social norms are compelling.

And I know I'm really late to this party, but The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee was worth every minute spent reading its nearly 600 pages.

And I just started...
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2: The Defining Years, 1933-1938 (Eleanor Roosevelt, 1933-1938)
by Blanche Wiesen Cook
This biography of Eleanor Roosevelt is brilliantly written, meticulously researched, and is at times laugh-out-loud funny. Did you know ER (as the author refers to her) . While ER was imperfect, as all humans are, she was a staunch advocate for women's rights and minority rights. In one incident, a racist woman complained about ER's work on racial equality, so ER replied that she knew black people who were “not only the equal of whites but mentally superior.” Emily Alpert Reyes recommended this book, so now I'm paying that recommendation forward.