2019 in Books

Not only was 2019 a good year for movies, my reading this year was unusually good. I dialed my ambitions back a little bit, setting my Goodreads Challenge goal as 55 books and intending to make several of those longer, heavier novels. I ended up reading 80, finishing the last—Ian Fleming’s short story collection For Your Eyes Only—a few hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve. You can look at everything I read here, but below are my favorites from the last year.

Per my usual year-in-review lists, I’m focusing on favorites, meaning those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories. The books fall into three broad categories: fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books, with a top ten for the latter two categories and, because I can’t keep these things to a set number, a few runners up. The books appear in no particular order, but I do save my favorite of the year for each category until the end.

Another thing I’ve been trying to discipline myself to do is reread good books. CS Lewis wrote that “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once,” a line that has always bothered me because I so often fail to live up to it. I feel keenly the desperation to read everything I’m interested in and the list is unending, so revisiting something I’ve already read can sometimes feel like falling behind. But this year I did reread a lot of old favorites, and I’ve included a list of those as well.

I hope y’all enjoy! If y’all are looking for something good to read in the new decade, I hope you can find something in these lists.

Ten fiction favorites:

Presented in no particular order. Rereads are marked with an asterisk.

The Moonshine War, by Elmore Leonard—A fun Depression-era adventure from the moment of Leonard’s career in which he was transitioning from Westerns to crime novels. Like many other Leonard novels, The Moonshine War pits multiple implacable bad guys against a single stalwart who has something they want. In this case, the bad guys are ostensibly on the side of law and order, the stalwart is Son Martin, and what everyone wants is a massive stash of high quality moonshine hidden somewhere on Son’s land. This has everything I enjoy about Leonard’s Westerns, such as a strong, silent hero who stands up against overwhelming odds and survives through quick thinking, backbone, and a stubborn refusal to quit, plus an unusual and well-realized setting and a great ending. As a bonus, it also takes place in a 1930s Appalachia that does not feature any condescending or grotesque Southern stereotypes.

Andersonville, by Mackinlay Kantor—The longest, weightiest book I read this year, Andersonville is a modernist masterpiece of Civil War fiction, harrowing and brutal in its realization of life in the sprawling, badly run Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. It’s not a perfect book, but it has a breadth of imagination and sweep of life in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century that are engrossing from start to finish. I wrote a longer, more detailed review early in the year which you can read here.

Past Master, by RA Lafferty—I read perhaps two sci-fi books per year, and this was one of them. It was the most delightfully weird novel I read this year. Past Master begins with Astrobe, a future society founded and planned as a Utopia, struggling to maintain its utopian standards despite decline and collapse. The planet’s fractious leaders decide to go to the man who coined the very word utopia, Sir Thomas More, and bring him back from the past to advise them. More—witty, urbane, skeptical, with a sly wit (much as in real life)—comes along and, in his travels, shows us the dark side of utopianism. I don’t want to say much more, but Past Master is weird and wonderful, an unjustly overlooked dystopia that has more to say to us now than the more faddish 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale.

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming*—One of the classics of the spy genre and the novel that introduced James Bond, Casino Royale is short, sharply written, and much more internal and psychologically grounded than the Bond series’ reputation would suggest. Fleming enjoyed experimenting with plot and especially structure, and the three acts of the novel—casino, capture, and the tragic denouement—are an early indication of that impulse. But the main draws are the characters—richly drawn and memorable, from Bond himself to Vesper Lynd and Le Chiffre, the immensely threatening villain—and the plot, which races along from beginning to end and takes Bond through attempted assassination, torture, and more. There’s a reason this character has proven immortal. Do yourself a favor and give this first book of the original series a try sometime.

Pronto, by Elmore Leonard—One of Leonard’s crime novels, and the book that introduced Raylan Givens, hero of the TV series “Justified” (which I haven’t seen), to the world. Pronto deftly follows multiple overlapping plots involving the Mafia, a bookie on the run, and US Marshal Givens, and hops back and forth between Miami and Italy. It’s one of Leonard’s most enjoyable crime novels, long on character and tension and the thrill of the chase, and I look forward to reading the other Raylan Givens stories he wrote: Riding the Rap, Raylan, and one of the short stories in When the Women Come out to Dance (aka Fire in the Hole).

Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis*—An underappreciated novel by an underappreciated novelist. Masters of Atlantis follows bland Midwesterner Lamar Jimmerson over several decades, from the tail end of World War I through the 1960s and 70s, as he is hoodwinked into founding a secret society—based on the supposed last surviving text from Atlantis—which briefly flourishes before collapsing into a few small cells of esoterica-obsessed mystics, eccentrics, and con men. It’s a hoot. I first read this seven or eight years ago and liked it even better this second time around.

Cain at Gettysburg, by Ralph Peters—I wrote a little about this novel in my summer reading list, but it’s an excellent piece of Civil War fiction, gritty, hard-eyed, and shockingly violent, but with a humane sympathy toward its diverse cast of characters—squads of German immigrants from Wisconsin and mountaineers from North Carolina, generals and officers from both sides and all levels of command, and at least one legitimate war hero—that makes it a powerful read.

The Weight of This World, by David Joy—A grim story of poverty, addiction, friendship, and betrayal, this novel takes place in rural Appalachia near where I grew up but among the people of a completely different world. Set during the lowest days following the 2008 financial crisis, best friends Aiden and Thad, a wounded veteran, get by on the copper they steal from abandoned summer homes and sell to scrapyards. They use most of their cash on booze and meth, and Aiden, the responsible one of the pair, worries about how long this life can last. He wants out, a new start in Asheville or points east. Thad vows he’ll never leave the mountains again. Then, during a drug deal gone wrong, the pair come into enough wealth in cash and drugs to make their mutually exclusive dreams come true, and the tension between them and the lowlifes jealous to get a piece of the action threaten to destroy them both. A cross between Ron Rash’s settings and well-drawn relationships and the darkness and brutality of Cormac McCarthy—especially No Country for Old Men—The Weight of This World is a crushing tragedy beautifully told, with hints of the power of redemption.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy*—I first read The Road as a college senior, shortly after it was published. I loved McCarthy, and while I enjoyed The Road I didn’t class it among my favorites of his work at the time. Now, almost thirteen years on and as the father of three children, I’ve reread it to a totally different effect—it destroyed me. The Road is all of fatherhood in a book. The difficulty of raising a child and passing on as much as you can of what you know, the nagging anxiety for the future and the uncertainty of how much time you have, the gut-deep sense of the dangers of the world and the instinct to protect and teach, the panic when the danger becomes real, the frustration, the exhaustion, the fear, and, despite everything, the joys too deep for words—all are given powerful expression in the story of this father and son and their harrowing journey through a post-apocalyptic South. I was rapt from the first page and wept at the end. The Road is a deeply moving and meaningful book, and a monument to all fathers seeking to “carry the fire” and pass it on to their children.

Honorable mentions:

Dune, by Frank Herbert—A monumental work of imagination with a vividly realized setting and a palpably vast history. I enjoyed Dune much more than I thought I would, given that I had tried and failed twice to get into it in college. To my surprise, I found the sandworms thrilling, but I did feel the plot dragged in one or two places and resolved rather too quickly. Going to give at least one of the sequels a shot this year.

Big Trouble, by Dave Barry—A comedic crime romp across Miami with more than a little of an Elmore Leonard vibe (Barry apparently knew Leonard and thanks him in the acknowledgements) and the distinct comic voice and running gags of classic Barry humor. There’s ultimately not much to it but it was a ton of fun. You can read my longer review here.

Liberator, by Dominic Hall—This is a bit of a cheat, as I read Liberator in manuscript. It’s a forthcoming Christian action thriller by my old friend Dominic Hall and follows a young man through his first few days as the member of an elite special ops group operating out of San Diego. It was a blast to read and I look forward to its release. Y’all should definitely check it out when it becomes available later this year.

Favorite of the year:

A Bloody Habit, by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson—If you had told me last January that my favorite novel of the year would be about vampires, you’d have to forgive me for scoffing. And yet here we are. I heard an interview with Eleanor Bourg Nicholson on John J. Miller’s Great Books podcast in which she both sang the praises of and critiqued Dracula. When Miller asked her a few questions about her own vampire novel, a novel I found I had heard of—A Bloody Habit—I was sold.

A Bloody Habit takes place across about a year in the last days of Queen Victoria. It’s the memoir of John Kemp, a middling London lawyer who, through a case involving a strangely behaving aristocrat and his foreign wife, who has disappeared, falls in with Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, an unassuming Dominican friar—and vampire slayer. (The “habit” of the title is a pun on the serial predation of the vampire and the bloodstained clothing of the monks who hunt them.) Kemp, who shares all the materialist progressive assumptions of a cultivated Englishman of his day, is dismissive of the quiet but persistent little friar at first but, as weird incident upon weird incident piles up around him and he sees the aftermath of more than one brutal murder, he seeks the man out for help and counsel.

There are grisly murders, seemingly supernatural events that Kemp struggles to explain, and the gradual revelation of even greater dangers than Kemp is at first aware of.

The characters are all fun and finely drawn, from Kemp and the friar (think Father Brown crossed with Dr. Van Helsing) to the more traditional detective of Scotland Yard, the various women who pass in and out of Kemp’s life, and scads of suspiciously cadaverous and threatening men. The tone is one of genuinely creepy horror—the first appearance of a vampire in the novel actually nauseated and spooked me—but also of goodnatured fun. When a team of vampire hunters consisting of a lawyer, doctor, detective, a few cops, and a throng of Dominican monks troops out into the streets of London near the end I was laughing for pure enjoyment. And speaking of London, the setting is nicely researched and presented. Fans of anything late Victorian—Sherlock Holmes, H. Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, even steampunk—will enjoy Kemp’s world.

But what really sets A Bloody Habit apart—there are, after all, a lot of vampire novels out there—is the seriousness with which Nicholson treats the evil Kemp and Father Thomas Edmund confront, and the rigor with which she, through the friar, presents the truth that will set the victims free. Kemp proves an extraordinary vessel for this story, and his transformation over the course of the novel is well done and quite moving. He finds his condescending attitudes—toward the priest, toward Catholics, toward foreigners and rural peasants who still believe in both God and vampires—challenged, and he wrestles with the implications of this trip beyond himself and his assumptions. Nicholson weaves some powerful theological themes through the book but dramatizes rather than preaches them. It’s incredibly effective and well done, a model any Christian concerned to convey some measure of the truth through his writing would do well to emulate.

If you’re looking for a fun, atmospheric, genuinely creepy and inventive adventure novel with its heart and mind aligned to the truth, A Bloody Habit is for you. I highly recommend it.

Ten non-fiction favorites:

Symbol or Substance? by Peter Kreeft—I owe an enormous spiritual and intellectual debt to Peter Kreeft, as I discovered his book Socrates Meets Jesus in college and was heartened by his vision of the friendship of faith and reason. Symbol or Substance?, like that earlier book and many of his others, is written as a dialogue, with CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Billy Graham debating the nature of the Eucharist. Are the bread and wine just symbols, as the low church Graham maintains? Or something more, per Lewis? Or do they become the literal flesh and blood of Christ, as Tolkien believes? Winsome, fun, and fair to all sides, this is an excellent and persuasive book.

God is Not Nice: Rejecting Pop Culture Theology and Discovering the God Worth Living For, by Ulrich Lehner—A brisk, readable rebuff to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the polite, affirming, undemanding (and therefore unnecessary) God of most modern Americans, including Christians, and a call to greater commitment to a God worth believing in and following. An excellent short read.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, by Flannery O’Connor—A collection of O’Connor’s writings on a variety of often overlapping topics—writing and art, story and character, the South and Christianity. It’s excellent, full of wisdom and not a little of O’Connor’s mordant, self-deprecating sense of humor. One of the best books on fiction writing out there, from one of the great masters of the mid-twentieth century short story.

Normandy ‘44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, by James Holland—An outstanding new history of the Normandy campaign, from its planning stages through the beach landings to the breakout from the hedgerows at the end of the summer of 1944. Wide-ranging and well-researched, with good attention to all levels—and both sides, Allied and German—of this grueling campaign, from Eisenhower down to the infantrymen and tankers on the ground.

Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism—A new edition of Kirk’s book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism, a short, briskly written handbook to the fundamental priorities or dispositions of conservative thought. You won’t find policy proposals or sloganeering here, but rather a guide to the nesting layers of relationships and “permanent things” that conservatives should seek to protect and preserve. I hope this book gets a wide readership; conservatism today can only benefit from its vision. I wrote a full length review which you can read here.

The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures, by Roger Scruton—I won’t even try to summarize this one, but it’s a strong critique of materialism, reductionist philosophies grounded in the overzealous application of empirical methods, and a work of anthropology, the philosophy of man, of people. Scruton masterfully works his way through his arguments about being, self, will, art, beauty, and the transcendent. It’s a challenging but not impossible read—challenging because of the ideas, not the vocabulary—and I’m still not sure I’ve fully digested it. (N.b.: This would pair well with his later book On Human Nature, which I actually read before this one.)

Letters to an American Lady, by CS Lewis—A collection of letters written by Lewis to an American correspondent named Mary over the course of the thirteen years between 1950 and Lewis’s death in 1963. Wide-ranging, witty, and thoughtful, with Lewis’s thoughts on a huge number of topics big and small. Well worth reading.

CS Lewis: A Very Short Introduction, by James Como—Speaking of Lewis, here he is again, in this excellent short book from Oxford UP. Como crams a solid biography and full accounting of Lewis’s work into just over 100 pages, an astonishing feat worthy of the subject himself. If I were to recommend any one book about Lewis to someone wanting to get to know him and his work, but who is daunted by the longer biographies available, this would certainly be it.

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, by Karen Swallow Prior—A winsome and insightful guide to learning and practicing the virtues through our reading. Prior examines a wide variety of novels and short stories—including some of my favorites, like Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy, and Flannery O’Connor, as well as authors I’ve never read before, like George Saunders—for examples of virtue in action and encourages us to lead better lives with these stories as models. A good guide to the roles of beauty, goodness, and storytelling in shaping our lives.

Favorite of the year:

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner*—I first read Gardner’s books The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist for my senior novel writing class in college. I’ve reread one of them every time I’ve completed a rough draft since. This fall, upon completion of the manuscript for what I’m calling The Wanderer, I reread The Art of Fiction.

The Art of Fiction has exerted a profound influence on my work, especially in how Gardner conceptualizes the way a good story works. Gardner makes paramount what he calls the “vivid continuous fictive dream,” the state a reader enters into as they read the story. Nothing should interfere with or disrupt that dream, and anything that does, anything that wakes the sleeper, has to go.

This is a good way to express how fiction does what it does and also leaves a lot of room for flexibility, careful experiment with style and form, and what Gardner calls “jazzing around,” the seemingly improvisatory but expertly disciplined grace notes of a writer in full command of his talents. Gardner rightly avoids being prescriptive, offering good guidelines but emphasizing throughout that what is permissible in fiction is whatever a good writer can make work, the way to make it work being to develop and sustain the fictive dream. There’s a lot of room.

Finally, Gardner presents the best account I’ve seen so far of the process of conceiving of and writing a novel—or any fictional work—and includes a lot of helpful advice on matters stylistic and mechanical as well as a host of useful exercises to keep the writer’s mind limber.

I’ve benefited a lot from Gardner’s book, and this trip back through it—my third or fourth—was no exception. If you’re looking for a good book on the fiction writing process, I always recommend this one. It’s encouraging, inspiring, and challenging, and I always finish it determined to be a better writer than I am.

Runners up:

Stories in the End: Short Letters from a Long Life, by Tom Poole and Jay Eldred—A wonderful and unusual epistolary memoir by a man who saw an enormous amount in his long life. From the killing of John Dillinger to the attack on Pearl Harbor to surviving a night in the English Channel after a U-boat attack to turtling along the North Carolina coast, Tom Poole led an extraordinary life and this book wonderfully captures his understated wisdom. You can read my full review here.

Æthelred the Unready: The Failed King, by Richard Abels—Another good, short book from a series, Richard Abels’s volume on the reign of Æthelred is an excellent short biography and introduction to the period of late Anglo-Saxon England. It also offers a good reassessment of an easily caricatured and much maligned figure. You can read my longer Goodreads review here.

Ætheflæd: England’s Forgotten Founder, by Tom Holland—An even shorter book on an Anglo-Saxon ruler, Tom Holland’s Ladybird Expert book on Ætheflæd began through his research into her nephew Æthelstan for the Penguin Monarchs series. The daughter of Alfred the Great and de facto ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia after her husband’s death, Æthelflæd was a powerful and influential woman and ably defended her people against the Vikings at a time when many kingdoms succumbed to their repeated attacks. This little book is beautifully written and illustrated and offers a fascinating look at a truly great woman, well worth remembering.

Knight of the Holy Ghost: A Short History of GK Chesterton, by Dale Ahlquist—A solid short book on the life and works of Chesterton, one part biography, one part literary history, and one part apologetic, making the case for Chesterton’s influence and defending Chesterton’s memory against some common present day critiques.

Homer: A Very Short Introduction, by Barbara Graziosi—Another solid entry in Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series, this concise little book covers what we (think we) know about Homer and his life, and gives a concise but thorough exploration of the plots, characters, and themes of his two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Disappointments:

The Reckoning, by John Grisham—An intriguing premise very, very badly executed. I’ve already written about this one in my summer reading recap.

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson—Some genuinely spooky moments and a vividly realized setting, but the characters and dialogue were too clever by half and annoyed me. A lot. The book’s greatest strength is its atmosphere, but unfortunately that isn’t enough.

Last of the Breed, by Louis L’Amour—I love escape stories and anything about desolate arctic landscapes, but for all the adventure, cunning, and survivalist exploits in this book, I found it pretty dull. I think some of its subplots could have been removed with no damage to the central story and a more fully realized antagonist would have helped. Nevertheless, I’ve had this novel recommended to me by many trusted friends over many years, so I may give it another go in the future.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer—Part of the problem with this novel is simply historical: the Sherlock-Holmes-cocaine-addiction trope has been done to death now, though it probably felt pretty fresh when Meyer published this story. The plot is bifurcated—in the first half, Watson tries to cure Holmes of his addiction with Sigmund Freud’s help. In the second, Meyer cooks up a quick and simple mystery for the now-clean Holmes to solve. It’s fun but falls far short of the best Holmes adventures, and there’s also a lot of very silly Freudian hoodoo, which Meyer apparently intended us to take seriously.

Rereads:

The books I read for the second or third—or, in the case of Dante, fifteenth? twentieth?—time this year, in no particular order. For those that I have briefly reviewed on Goodreads I have provided a hyperlink to the review. These were all well worth the reread.

• True Grit and Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis—See above. I gave the top ten slot to Masters of Atlantis because with True Grit in the race it’s just not fair. Both are great.

• The Art of Fiction and Grendel, by John Gardner

• Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus

• The Poetic Edda, trans. Jackson Crawford

• Inferno, by Dante, trans. Anthony Esolen—Read for a group discussion during Lent. Any excuse to read Dante is a good one.

• Iliad, by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles—Read for The Core Curriculum Podcast, the first series of which covered the entire Iliad in eleven episodes. I appeared in four (episodes 3, 8, 9, and 11). It was great.

• Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, and Octopussy and The Living Daylights, by Ian Fleming

• The Shining, by Stephen King—Read for the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s annual Halloween crossover event, in which Jay Eldred and I discussed the novel with The Book of Nature Podcast’s Charles Hackney. You can listen to the episode here.

• A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Read to Sarah before bed every evening. We usually read a chapter of something to relax before turning out the lights. For the first of these, we read just about the entire second half in one go.

• All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, trans. AW Wheen

• The Man Who Was Thursday, by GK Chesterton

• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy—See above. One of my favorite reads of the year, and one of the most striking rereading experiences I can remember.

Favorite kids’ books:

By the Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleischman—A fun Gold Rush adventure about a wealthy Boston boy and his butler and their voyage to California. Emphasizes courage, toughness, resourcefulness, and good cheer through hardship. We really enjoyed this. You can read my Goodreads review here.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle, by Beverly Cleary—I somehow passed through childhood without ever reading Beverly Cleary. On my wife’s recommendation I read this to our daughter as a bedtime story and we both enjoyed it a lot.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins, by Richard and Florence Atwater—One of my childhood favorites, I was excited to share this with my daughter as a bedtime story. She especially enjoyed the idea of penguins living in the freezer and, eventually, a frozen lake in the basement. (Now, as an adult, I mostly worried about the mess and the Popper family’s food budget.)

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, by CS Lewis—I didn’t read the Narnia books until I was in college, but my father-in-law read them to my wife when she was very small so we introduced them to my daughter this year. She loved them, though the flashback structure of Prince Caspian proved a little confusing for her. We’re carrying on into the new year—we just started The Voyage of the Dawn Treader last night!

Looking ahead

I’ve set my Goodreads goal for 2020 and have a stack on my desk and nightstand ready for me to plow through. I’m excited for the new year and all the reading—and living—in store for us. I hope y’all had a great New Year and have a lot of good reading ahead of you, too. Thanks for reading!