Adrian Walker’s “The End of the World Running Club” is an odd one. It tells the story of an overweight schlub who, along with his small family, survives a meteor strike on the U.K. In the immediate aftermath and chaos, he falls in with a militaristic group of survivors, and is subsequently separated from his family in the ensuing evacuation. Separated by hundreds of miles, with no reliably functional modes of transportation, he and a group also left behind decide to run to catch the departing ships full of survivors, all the while avoiding marauders and bandits on the way. There are definite shades of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” but the overall effect here is lighter. The scenarios stretch plausibility, but there are some distinctive characters, and it’s a fun ride.

I’ve honestly never read anything like Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” and that’s too bad because it’s a fantastic book. It reads more like a collection of short stories than a single, cohesive narrative, spinning through different perspectives, time periods, narrative styles and tones. One memorable chapters is even presented as a series of PowerPoint slides, which isn’t as twee as it sounds. The effect leaves the head swimming. I went in knowing pretty much nothing about the plot or structure, which is the way to go, so I’d recommend you stay as uninformed as possible, except to know that it’s completely awesome. I’ll be reading more Egan in the near future for sure. 

Having started the year with Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” it’s probably fitting that Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House” ended up on my Kindle toward the end of the year. Woodward obviously writes the better book, with more clear sourcing and a more cohesive through-line. It’s both less gossipy and more interesting than Wolff’s book, even as it’s rapidly becoming out-of-date. Still, it’s the best chronicle I’ve seen so far of the first two years of the Trump presidency, and I’m glad Woodward is still doing this kind of work. Honestly, most of the best parts have been excerpted already, but there’s still plenty to discover if you’re interested in modern politics or the current state of our democracy.

Jake Tapper’s “The Hellfire Club” is… fun. It’s not particularly memorable, and it has some clunky moments, but Tapper tells its story of a young congressman struggling with Washington corruption during the McCarthy era with a journalist’s eye for detail. The story veers into some Dan Brown-ish territory, with double- and triple-crosses, red herrings and movie-ready characters and dialogue. It’s creaky in places, but Tapper’s committed and keeps things from getting boring. His mixture of fictional and real-life characters works most of the time, but some of the plot twists are projected too obviously.

“The Incomplete Book of Running” is, as the title implies, a book about running by NPR “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” host Peter Sagal. I’m a big fan of Sagal’s radio work and his old Runner’s World column, and the book doesn’t disappoint. It’s a candid, honest, funny memoir about the physical and emotional healing power of running. Maybe it’s because Sagal and I are at similar times of life, or maybe it’s because we’re both decent amateur runners who have no chance of going pro, but the book really hit home with me. I came away with a deeper appreciation for why I spent the time I do running around the Atlanta sidewalks at all hours of the morning.

The late Hans Rosling recorded one of the most popular TED Talks of all-time and his Gapminder Web site has been an extraordinary teaching tool over the years. “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think” boils down Rosling’s worldview – that, statistically, the citizens of the world are, on average, better off than we’ve been in recorded history – into ten data-heavy chapters. It’s a welcome book for our national moment, when our political system seems helplessly broken, and it’s worth remembering that, by almost every measurable metric, the world is moving in the right direction. It’s clearly-written, and the data is presented in a powerful and compelling way.

I finished the year with Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated,” and it is absolutely the best book I read all year. Westover was homeschooled in a deeply-religious farm family that eschewed both formal schooling and basic healthcare. Through contemporaneous journals and family interviews, she has pieced together the often-harrowing, always-fascinating story of a young woman overcoming extraordinary odds to find her place in the world. Working in higher ed, it’s heartening to see the system recognize her talents and give her the hand-up that has clearly been life-changing. The writing is crisp, the pacing is perfect and the story is mesmerizing, moreso because, once you’ve finished the book, you can read about the fallout with her family since its release. Highly, highly recommended.

In general, I dig science fiction, but I’m picky when it comes to what I read. I was intrigued enough by the trailers for “Annihilation” that I read Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name and came away pleasantly surprised. There’s a surrealistic quality to the goings-on with a plot that oscillates between straight sci-fi, horror and a psychological thriller. I still haven’t seen the movie, though I intend to, and I may end up reading further into the two books that follow up this one, but it kept me engaged and was quite a novel, er, novel. Having all the main characters be women, despite being what would typically be male archetypes, actually worked really well.

I went to see Joe Biden on his book tour and, reasonably, felt some obligation to read the book about which he was touring. “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose” is his account of a year of his life in the White House, his consideration about running in 2016 and, ultimately, the last year of his son, Beau’s, life. Biden’s writing is breezy and sincere, and one gets the sense that he actually wrote most of the book himself. It’s an easy, worthwhile read and makes you wonder what could have been.

“The Last Jedi,” by Jason Fry, is the novelization of the movie and… it’s just not very good. I usually read these because they’re often based on earlier drafts of the screenplay, so sometimes there are missing scenes or details. “The Force Awakens” novel, for example, had a dark-matter-powered Starkiller Base. If that’s not interesting to you, don’t bother with this book. If it is, you can still probably skip it.

 John Elder Robison’s “Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s” is one of the first book any autism parent should read, so I was interested in where “Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening” would take his story. This time he documents an experimental brain stimulation treatment he underwent that, by his description, unlocked new emotional areas of his personality. The treatment is fascinating, but the impact on his relationships with his spouse and child are even more interesting. The book could have probably worked just as well as a long magazine article – it’s not clear there’s a book’s worth of material here – but Robison’s account is detailed and honest.

I’ve previously only read one David Sedaris book, “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” but I was intrigued by the New York Times Book Review review of his newest collection of darkly comic essays entitled “Calypso.” I know Sedaris mostly through his work with NPR, so it’s odd to read him again, recreating his distinct voice and tone in my head. There’s nothing here that would disappoint fans. It’s funny; it’s melancholy; it’s insightful. Loosely, the book centers itself around his sister’s suicide and the family’s purchase of a beach house. It ends too soon, and makes me want to dig through his back catalog in the coming year.

I read my first Jack Reacher book this year. I think it was called “One Shot,” but reading the descriptions I can scarcely be sure. I read it during lunch over about a week, and it was a perfect book for reading during lunch. Perhaps the best thing about it is that this Twitter thread came along at about the same time, and I felt in on the joke because I had read this book. If you like this kind of thing, this is definitely that kind of thing. Someone actually says “Get Reacher for me,” which is kind of awesome. To be honest, I liked it well enough, but I’m not in a rush to read another one.

“Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History” is Katy Tur’s behind-the-scenes memoir of covering the Trump campaign, and it’s a pretty terrific read. She comes across as consistently human, which flies in the face of what seems on its face to be a glamorous lifestyle. She even meets a boyfriend on Tinder, which I thought was the kind of thing that only regular folks have to do. There are lots of hotel drinks, nasty tweets, boring flights and fascinating insights on what it was like to cover Trump’s rise. Tur is a talented writer thrown into a historically unprecedented situation, and her story is breezy and worth a read.

Chris Hayes’ “A Colony in a Nation” is a sober – and sobering – look at the on-the-ground societal implications of race in America. Hayes asserts that US laws claim to focus on freedom, but the actual effects often manifest in aggressive policing and civil rights violations that undermine the outcomes desired by all sides. It would be easy for a book like this to come across as a left-wing polemic, but the net effect is powerful and hopeful. It’s not a long book, but it’s well-researched, dense and very, very smart.

“The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck,” by Mark Manson, isn’t remotely scientific, but it also doesn’t really pretend to be. It’s basically a blog post expanded to a full book, so don’t feel like you really need to read the whole thing. The core message – that if you care too much about everything you can’t really focus on the things that matter – is good enough advice, but by the end of the book it’s been beaten well to death. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator seemed kind of smarmy, but that also fit the overall tone of the book. I agree with some aspects of the overall message, but it often felt like an article you’d find between pictorials in a Playboy.

Dave Eggers caught my attention years back with his fantastic, indulgent memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” Since then, he’s cranked out a novel or narrative nonfiction work about once a year. This time around, it’s “Heroes of the Frontier,” a story of a woman who takes her children to Alaska to flee a failed marriage. Eggers is a consistently fascinating writer and has a rare ability to lovingly observe the positives and negatives in people. It’s often the case that men have a difficult time writing women, but the lead in “Heroes” is a mostly convincing, deeply-written character trying to make good decisions and often making questionable ones.

Last for this quarter was Tom Rachman’s “The Italian Teacher.” I went to grad school with Tom, and following his career as an author fills me with a mixture of awe and, I’m not going to lie, a bit of jealousy. “The Italian Teacher” is a brilliantly-written novel tracking decades of a relationship between an overbearing, talented artist and his underperforming son, along with a sharply-drawn side case of friends, spouses and lovers. The book is full of awkwardly funny moments mixed with a palpable sense of melancholy over mistakes made and things left unsaid. Highly recommended.

Michael Chabon is one of the best writers working today. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay” is probably my favorite book of the last 20 years, and the guy just keeps on producing novels, magazine pieces and memoir. The uniform quality of his output is seriously intimidating, and I read two of his books this year: “Manhood for Amateurs” in audiobook format and “Moonglow.” “Manhood for Amateurs” is the more straightforward of the two works. It’s a collection of previously-published and new essays about his relationship with his parents as a young boy up through his own marriage and fatherhood. He and I were similar in many ways as children, nerdy and bookish, comic-book obsessed, and he tells his story with wisdom and humor.

“Moonglow” is an interesting beast. It’s a fictionalized memoir of the author’s grandfather’s life in World War II and in America beyond. There’s a “Big Fish” quality to the story, where it’s not always altogether clear what’s real and what’s imaginary, but that is really what makes the whole thing so fascinating. The book is billed as “Moonglow: A Novel,” which helps to free the reader, and I suspect the author, from being bound strictly to facts. Per typical Chabon, it’s beautifully written.

Hey, look, more Dan Brown. “Origin” popped up as available in Overdrive, so I downloaded it and, of course, tore through it. This time, know-it-all Robert Langdon is doing something to do with human evolution or some-such nonsense. Same deal goes with “Inferno” (which was better) – if you like this stuff, it’s more of the same. It’s not great literature, but it goes down easy enough. It’s a tube of Pringles in book form.

I read Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” for my book club, and found it just okay. Dick’s works always seem to adapt better to film or TV than the novels themselves, and this is no different. It’s an alternate history where the US lost World War II and the country is divided in half between the East Coast, governed by Germany, and the West Coast, governed by Japan. There’s a sci-fi/supernatural element to the whole affair that, honestly, comes off a little half-baked. I find it hard to recommend – Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” with Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh beating FDR for the presidency, is a much more cohesive book.

Last for this quarter was Robert Crais’ “The Monkey’s Raincoat,” a modern LA detective story featuring a lot of the tropes one would expect from the genre. Truthfully, it’s pretty terrific, with a main character, Elvis Cole, who almost certainly had some inspiration for The Dude in The Big Lebowski, and one of my favorite side characters in the straight-laced Marine Joe Pike (who has his own spinoff series). There are a whole bunch of these novels now, but this is the first and, so far, the only one I’ve read. If you like offbeat detective stories, it’s highly recommended.