2018 in Books

Even if not for movies, 2018 turned out to be a great year for reading. Per my accounting on Goodreads, I read 95 books—a personal record. Most of it was good, a few things were great, and very few stinkers made it into my reading. You can see everything I counted toward my Goodreads reading challenge here.

For this year-in-review rundown of my reading, I’m going to try to keep things positive and focus on favorites. I use the word favorites purposefully—I’m not declaring these the “best” books of the year, but the ones I enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about the most, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.

I will address the two worst books I read this year, but I’m going try to keep it brief. Because that’s all they deserve.

I’ve sorted things into three broad categories: fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books. And because I can’t keep these things to a set number, you’ll find a top ten—in no particular order—with a few runners up in most of them. I also have a list of things I revisited.

Enjoy! If y’all are looking for something good to read in 2019, I hope you can find something in these lists.

Ten fiction favorites:

Last Stand at Saber River, by Elmore Leonard. An excellent western, pitting a Confederate veteran returning from the war with his family against a pair of brothers attempting to steal his land with the Union as their excuse—all of which an amoral storekeeper works to manipulate to his advantage. This might sound like a collection of western staples, but the plotting, pacing, characterization, and the strength of Leonard’s writing set this apart. A really good good guy, some really bad bad guys, and a wonderfully realized western setting. I enjoyed this immensely.

The Line that Held Us, by David Joy. A gripping tragedy set in the mountains and hollers of Jackson County, North Carolina. Dark and suspenseful but with some hope of redemption. This is one of the best novels I read this year; I’ve picked up Joy’s two previous books and hope to read them soon, too. Read my full review here.

Unknown Soldiers, by Väinö Linna, trans. by Liesl Yamaguchi. One of the best war novels I’ve read, Unknown Soldiers follows a Finnish machine gun company through the Continuation War against the Soviets (1941-44) and has a huge flock of finely drawn, interesting characters. Linna evokes every bit of the pathos and tragedy of modern warfare in a moving and action-packed novel. Read my full review here.

Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard. It is apparently the incorrect opinion among Leonard fans, but so far I don’t actually like his crime novels as much as his westerns. This is the exception—and I loved it. Freaky Deaky follows a pair of ex-hippie ex-lovers who try to revive their Weather Underground-style terrorism for fun and profit. A parallel plot follows Chris Mankowski, former Detroit bomb squad technician turned sex crimes investigator, as he begins a new relationship and crosses paths with the terrorists. It’s hard to summarize, but it’s wonderful to read and really funny. Here’s Leonard himself reading the first chapter.

Above the Waterfall, by Ron Rash. Perhaps my new favorite novel by Rash. Read my full review here.

The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh. Think Barton Fink crossed with Bernie. One of the funniest, blackest, most shocking comedic novels I’ve read, a blistering send-up of Americans’ unhealthy refusal to confront death. This was just the second book I read this year, and it was never in danger of being unseated from among my favorites. Read my full review here.

The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. I don’t think I’ll ever make myself watch the movie, but an old episode of the First Things podcast featured an interesting segment on the spiritual power and sacramental physicality—often manifested as grossness—in this novel. It’s not the best written piece of fiction you’ll pick up, but it’s gripping and powerfully creepy, building a deep sense of dread because of human weakness in the face of supernatural evil. Father Karras’s struggles with his own faith should prove familiar to a lot of readers, and the subtle grace that comes through and finally offers salvation and redemption makes the book moving as well. To summarize from my short Goodreads review: “Brutal, gross, terrifying, and—surprisingly—uplifting.”

The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin Jr. The most delightfully and wonderfully weird book I’ve read in years. Part Chaucer, part Narnia, part Lovecraft, the novel follows Chauntecleer, king of a barnyard full of animals, in a struggle against Wyrm, an ancient force that threatens to wreck creation. A strange and gripping meditation on good and evil, love, beauty, creation, leadership good and bad, and populated with strange and memorable characters. Perhaps my favorite is Mundo Cani, a depressed dog almost pathetically devoted to Chauntecleer but who possesses a surprising reserve of courage. If you want to read a fresh, beautifully written fantasy that is by turns charming and dark, but beautiful and weird throughout, definitely pick up The Book of the Dun Cow.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. A classic. I had only read the abridged, illustrated version as a kid and finally got around to the real thing this summer. That’s probably providential; it’s so good that if I had read it before I wrote Griswoldville I might not have tried. Read my full Goodreads review here.

Favorite of the year:

The Good Shepherd, by C.S. Forester. I picked this up because it’s the basis of Tom Hanks’s forthcoming film Greyhound. I’d never read anything by Forester—creator of Horatio Hornblower—and was blown away by this book. The story, set in World War II, follows Commander Krause, captain of a US Navy destroyer on convoy duty in the north Atlantic during the height of U-boat activity. As the novel begins, he comes to the bridge after a few scanty hours of rest. After his convoy blunders into the middle of a wolf pack, Krause will barely sit down, much less sleep, for the next several days.

The novel is intensely interior, with almost no characterization or backstory for anyone else on the ship. Even his own backstory—with a dead end position in the navy, a tragically failed marriage, and a transfer from San Diego—doesn’t come in until over halfway into the book. Things come to the reader as they come to Krause. Throughout, the reader thinks through what’s happening with Krause, doing the hard work of calculating speed, fuel, distance, the number of ships and depth charges remaining, where the U-boats are, how fast their torpedoes can travel—and on and on. It’s an incredibly cerebral novel that is also physically exhausting. I was tired when I finished it, a sensation I haven’t experienced since reading Deliverance ten years ago. It’s a rare accomplishment for a work of fiction.

The Good Shepherd is a great look at the guts and endurance it took to ferry supplies across the Atlantic during World War II, but the primary reason to read it is that it’s an excellent and unusual novel. It also has some wonderfully evocative religious overtones, as scripture springs uninvited into the devoutly religious Krause’s mind, sometimes in the middle of torpedo attacks. Check it out if you’re at all interested in the underappreciated side stories of World War II, or if you plan to see Tom Hanks’s film adaptation this spring.

Runners up:

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. A withering satire of the modern press, c. 1938, Scoop follows William Boot, a young man mistaken for his fashionable novelist cousin and sent to the impoverished African state of Ishmaelia to cover a war. Scathing in its critique of the media, modernism, statism, and propaganda, and also laugh-out-loud funny. Comparable to the earlier Black Mischief, which is also blisteringly satirical toward European hubris, but even funnier.

• A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh in a more morally serious mode, dramatizing the disasters unleashed on both the innocent and the guilty by selfishness and infidelity. Read my full review here.

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry. A hilarious dose of lighthearted, touching Christmas nostalgia from a kid’s-eye perspective—if that kid is young Dave Barry. A lot of fun to read aloud; I had to stop a few times to catch my breath, I was laughing so hard.

• Fools and Mortals, by Bernard Cornwell. An interesting departure for Cornwell, from sociopathic historical hardasses to the world of Shakespeare. Engaging, a brilliantly detailed historical world, a good plot, and, importantly, a lot of fun. I’ve previously blogged about it here.

• Gunsights, by Elmore Leonard. I believe this is Leonard’s last western, and he goes out with a bang. Exciting action and suspense, believable character-centered conflict, and a realistically detailed and well-realized historical setting, plus some barbed commentary on the way the media attempts to shape events in the name of coverage.

Ten non-fiction favorites:

Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw. An excellent look at Dante’s work by a scholar with a lifetime of experience, winsomely presenting Dante’s genius and beautifully written.

The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, by Carolyne Larrington. An excellent guide and introduction to the religious and mythic landscape of the Norse, with a careful presentation of often tricky or widely misinterpreted material by a good scholar. The best book of its kind that I’ve come across. Read my full review here.

Semmes: Rebel Raider, by John M. Taylor. A shorter version of Taylor’s biography of Raphael Semmes, a commerce raider for the Confederate navy whose activities severely disrupted Northern shipping and business. I enjoyed this little biography so much I wrote a very long review of it here last month.

Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen. A strong, much-needed, perceptive diagnosis that most of our proposed cures for the illnesses of our time are actually just part of the illness. Deneen daringly questions Lockean liberalism, especially the concept of the autonomous individual, and convincingly argues that both “sides” of our political divide today are fighting over the same vanishing patch of turf. I’ve previously blogged about this book here.

A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of England, by Marc Morris. A detailed and deeply researched new biography of Edward I. Worthwhile if you’re at all interested in High Medieval Britain, Scotland and Wales, or medieval kingship and military history at all. Read my Goodreads review here.

A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. A lyrical, wistful recounting of the author’s youthful walk across Europe from the English Channel to Constantinople. (This volume, the first of three, ends with his journey into Hungary.) Especially interesting as Fermor made his trip just as the Nazis rose to power, so this travelogue takes the reader through a lost world in more ways than one. You can read my thoughts on the book while I was reading it, with some generous excerpts of my favorite passages, here.

Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity, by Helen Castor. An excellent entry, brief but insightful, in the Penguin Monarchs series. Read my full review here.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson. I mean to review this more fully at some point, but this is a rewarding dig into what makes human beings tick and how to resolve some of the issues that plague anxious modern people. 95% common sense, eloquently expressed, supported, and argued for, with about 5% Jungian hoodoo that is nevertheless interesting. I think it says more about our culture than Peterson that he has become controversial.

Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age, by Alan Noble. A much needed meditation on Christian accommodation of the prevailing culture, resulting in a thin, shallow, brittle, commercialized, commodified faith that will not disrupt the world but follow after it, pulling on its apron strings. Concludes with calls for “disruptive” habits—personal habits, including even simple things like prayer before meals, and church habits, like more regular and more heavily emphasized sacraments and giving greater space to solemnity, reclaiming worship from the rock concert. Resonated quite a lot with what I had already read by Deneen (see above) and Scruton (see below), and with James K.A. Smith’s You Are What You Love, which I read a few years ago. Noble gave me a lot to think about, especially as troubled as I’ve been by the state of American Christianity for some time.

Favorite of the year:

How to Be a Friend, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. In the words of Albert Finney’s elderly gamekeeper in Skyfall: “Sometimes the old ways are best.” This is a new translation, in a nice bilingual edition from Princeton UP, of Cicero’s essay De Amicitia (On Friendship). I’ve been meaning to do a full review and recommendation since I read it, but unfortunately I finished it at about the busiest time of the semester. Suffice it to say that Cicero offers a lot of wisdom here that we could stand to recover or, at least, refresh ourselves on. True friendship is a discipline, something purposeful, and cannot demand evil, immorality, or injustice in its name. True friends should help each other to virtue—iron sharpening iron—which means that they should be devoted to something larger than themselves: truth. Good friendships, in Cicero’s estimation, must be founded on truth. In our “post-truth” age, this ancient message is the healthy counterprogramming we need. Pick this up and read it as soon as you can.

Runners up:

• On Human Nature, by Roger Scruton. An excellent series of lectures examining what it means to be human—that is, crucially, a person—and what obligations that places upon us. Insightful and especially relevant.

• The Demon in Democracy, by Ryszard Legutko. A powerful one-two punch with Why Liberalism Failed, Legutko’s book expands on Deneen by examining Western liberalism and Communism as rivals for the same basic ground, philosophically and politically speaking, which is why both tend toward tyranny, authoritarianism, and the suppression of traditional institutions.

• The Year of Our Lord 1943, by Alan Jacobs. An interesting look at the lives and thought of five Christian writers and their responses to the pressures of the Second World War. Read my Goodreads review here.

• Doors in the Walls of the World: Signs of Transcendence in the Human Story, by Peter Kreeft. A freewheeling discussion on our intuitions of transcendence through our lived experience. Read my Goodreads review here.

• Finnish Soldier versus Soviet Soldier: Winter War 1939-40, by David Campbell, illustrated by Johnny Shumate. A brisk, informative, lavishly illustrated examination of what combat was like during the Winter War. Read my Goodreads review here.

Worst reads of the year:

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. This book is garbage. A “hot mess” or a “dumpster fire” for the meme-addled. It’s a judgment on our culture that it’s become as popular as it has. Lazy, poorly written, overindulgent, philosophically and morally bankrupt, with insufferable characters, a contrived plot, and a completely phony moral platitude tacked on at the end, this book has skated by on the black ice of its pop culture “references,” the most vacuous and ephemeral brain candy available. Read some of my early reactions in my Goodreads review here. In April I was a guest on the Sectarian Review for a discussion of Ready Player One—primarily the film version; you can listen to that here.

The Terminal List, by Jack Carr. I wanted to enjoy this book, because it’s in a genre I’ve enjoyed and I was intrigued by the fact that it was written by a former SEAL. While true, its author’s service was essentially a gimmick used to sell the book, along with the handful of passages redacted by the Department of Defense. The “too hot for TV!” tactic. Unfortunately, this is a poorly written and plotted mess, with serious pacing, characterization, and tone problems, loads of typos (in a professionally edited and published book!), and sometimes incomprehensible description.

The biggest problem for me, though, was its complete lack of reflection on the meaning of its story. SEAL James Reece miraculously survives an ambush that wipes out everyone in his entire unit but himself and a buddy. Upon making it home, the buddy mysteriously commits suicide and Reece starts getting ominous results on medical tests. Then Reece’s family is murdered and he sets out for revenge. Turns out that the ambush was a setup to wipe out SEALs and other special forces personnel who had been illegally used for pharmaceutical testing, a project sending kickbacks to a powerful, ambitious, high-ranking female politician with her sights set on the White House. Doesn’t sound familiar enough? Well her husband is also a former politician who was disgraced because of sexual scandal. Hm.

Turns out everyone—including the SEAL commanding officer—was in on the plot, and Reece laboriously kills all of them, working from a list kept on the back of one of his dead daughter’s crayon drawings. Not only is it obvious and manipulative, it’s a chore to read.

This was a bad enough book for artistic reasons but it crossed the line into morally bad territory. What The Terminal List and Ready Player One have in common is a gross indulgence in fantasies that simply affirm or titillate the reader. In Ready Player One it’s an affirmation that all the ephemeral video game crap you love matters—matters more than anything else in the world! It then titillates its reader with the adulation and glory heaped upon its protagonist. In The Terminal List, it’s an affirmation that all your darkest suspicions about elites and globalists are true. The titillation comes in the elaborate and gleefully relayed revenge killings.

Carr invites us to participate in Reece’s campaign of gruesome revenge, which is otherwise fairly standard for a thriller, but by making his villains obvious proxies for real world people, he’s inviting the reader into an obsessively imagined murder spree—and invited them to enjoy it along with him. That’s not a good habit of mind to cultivate, and in Carr’s book the resentment—of the Clintons, of Washington insiders, of the objects of paranoia like Big Pharma, and even of fellow SEALs who just haven’t seen as much action as Reece—drips from every page. It’s not just a bad book, but an ugly one.

Read my much shorter Goodreads review here.

Rereads:

Old favorites that I reread this year. Several of these I revisited after more than a decade (or two). Others I listened to on my commute. All were worth it—check any of these out. They’re great.

• The Aeneid, by Virgil, trans. by David Ferry. A solid new translation in blank verse. I read this shortly after my grandfather died, just before Christmas 2017, and it resonated powerfully with me, something I blogged about here (the most popular post of the year, incidentally).

• The Earliest English Poems, ed. and trans. by Michael Alexander. A great collection of Old English verse, including riddles, epic (The Battle of Maldon), religious poems (The Dream of the Rood), elegies (The Seafarer and The Wanderer), and much more. Good translations with good scholarly apparatus like notes and introductions. Alexander’s translation of Beowulf is also worth seeking out.

• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Reread for the first time since high school, when I read it because Stephen King featured it so prominently in Hearts in Atlantis. Far, far more powerful than I gave it credit for back then. Justly regarded as a classic. Read my Goodreads review here.

• The Screwtape Letters and The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis. I listened to both of these as audiobooks. The Four Loves is an early version of the talks that eventually became the longer, expanded book of the same title, read by CS Lewis himself in recordings made for American radio during the 1950s. He’s great to listen to. The Screwtape Letters was the second audio version I’ve listened to, after John Cleese’s wonderfully manic and wrathful recording (now very hard to find). This version was read by prolific British actor Joss Ackland, whose wry, self-satisfied bass gave a new spin to Screwtape as the smug bureaucrat who can only be roused to wrath out of self-interest. A great performance of a great book.

• A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Also an audiobook, brilliantly performed—accents and all—by Barrett Whitener. Reading the book is indispensable—no performance can be as funny as how Toole’s book will play out in your head—but this was really enjoyable.

• The 39 Steps, by John Buchan. I reread this for the first time in ten years in preparation for a podcast discussion of Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation. The 39 Steps still works—a fast-paced adventure thriller that you can read in one or two sittings. You can listen to our discussion of the film, with reference to the book as well, here.

• The Perilous Road, by William O. Steele. Reread for the first time since perhaps fourth grade. My copy still had an old Garfield bookmark and a sheet of stickers in it. Anyway, a very good Civil War novel for children, capturing some of the messiness in the South, particularly in areas politically divided between secessionists and unionists. Read my Goodreads review here.

Favorites kids’ books:

Every night before bed I read a chapter or two to my wife from a book we’ve selected—something fun and relaxing, with a dash of adventure, often for kids or young adults. I also read a lot of picture books to my kids, which has been a refreshment after the last few years of Serious Adult Literature. These are the best of this year’s lot, in no particular order:

• The Door in the Wall, by Marguerite de Angeli. This was a nice surprise—a novel neither my wife nor I had heard of, that we only discovered while looking through a list of Newbery Medal winners (1950). This is the story of a spoiled noble boy crippled by illness who learns humility through acceptance of his condition and his submission to the practice of an art. Also nice as a medieval novel for young readers that doesn’t present a lot of Dark Ages stereotypes, but brings the reader into that world on its own terms. Read my Goodreads review here.

• Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen. A gripping adventure story, part Robinson Crusoe, part Jack London (take your pick), part Lord of the Flies. Hatchet tells the story of a boy, already stressed by his parents’ divorce, who finds himself stranded in the Canadian wilderness following a plan crash. I blitzed through this in a few days during breaks at work—it’s excellent.

• The Hawk of the Castle, by Danna Smith, illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. A medieval picture book about falconry, following a falconer and his daughter on a hunting trip. Based on the author’s own experience with falconry, and lovingly—and beautifully—illustrated. Read my Goodreads review here.

• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis. For whatever reason, I’m just now getting around to reading all of the Chronicles of Narnia, and this stands out as one of the best entries in the series (though my favorite is probably still The Silver Chair). An epic sea voyage with allegorical, chivalric overtones—one part Faerie Queene, one part Odyssey. It’s great. Reepicheep, the embodiment of honor and chivalry, is perhaps my favorite character, but everyone has a chance to shine in this one and some parts are profoundly moving.

• In Grandma’s Attic, by Arleta Richardson. A wonderfully fun, funny, and gentle collection of frontier stories presented as the reminiscences of a grandmother. Reminded me somewhat of Little House on the Prairie, but more episodic and with a nice dash of more specific religiosity. My wife’s grandmother read these to her growing up. There are ten in the series, so there’s plenty more to enjoy. Read my short Goodreads review here.

• Shakespeare’s Spy, by Gary Blackwood. The final volume of a trilogy following a young boy, originally tasked with stealing a well-protected copy of Hamlet, through his apprenticeship and finally membership in Shakespeare’s company of players. A fun, kid-friendly introduction to Shakespeare, drama, and the Tudor world. I’ve blogged about this series here before, in this post about Cornwell’s Fools and Mortals.

Favorite of the year:

John Ronald’s Dragons, by Caroline McAlister, illustrated by Eliza Wheeler. A beautifully illustrated picture book about the first half of JRR Tolkien’s life, from his childhood, through World War I, to his professorship at Oxford and the creation of The Hobbit. I’ve previously reviewed this wonderful book on the blog here.

Looking ahead:

I was going to conclude with a section on my two favorite new writers—meaning dead guys I’ve just discovered—of 2018, but this post is quite long enough. I’ve set myself a lower bar for my Goodreads challenge this year, for three reasons: my wife and I expect our third child this year, which will, naturally, affect my time—and sleep schedule; I aim to read a few longer, heavier books I’ve been meaning to get to; and I want to set aside time to work on new writing projects. We’ll see how all that goes this time next year. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting.

Thanks for reading! Happy new year!