2019 Books in Review

[cynic51]

I read 72 books in 2019, of which 5 were graphic novels. That's nearly the same number of prose novels as 2018, which most of the difference being the dramatically smaller number of comics I read. I also didn't finish any poetry collections. Here's the full list.

* = Graphic Novels
Italics - Highlights

Charles C. Mann - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - M 1/01
Ben H. Winters - The Last Policeman - T 1/02
Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Su 1/06
*Si Lewen - Parade: An Artist's Odyssey - T 1/08
James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime - S 1/12
Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Beautiful Struggle - Su 1/13
Ben H. Winters - Countdown City - T 1/15
Annie Lowrey - Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World - W 1/16
L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables - S 1/19
Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow - S 1/26
*Howard Tayler - Schlock Mercenary v.14: Broken Wind - M 1/28
*Howard Tayler - Schlock Mercenary v.15: Delegates & Delegation - T 1/29
Lois McMaster Bujold - The Prisoner of Limnos - R 1/31
Ben H. Winters - World of Troubles - F 2/1
Carl Hiaasen - Double Whammy - F 2/1
L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Avonlea - M 2/04
Jack Belden - China Shakes the World - T 2/19
Robert Louis Stevenson - Kidnapped - S 2/23
John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat - Su 2/24
Studs Terkel - The Spectator - S 3/02
Charles C. Mann - 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - F 3/15
C. Vann Woodward - The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3rd Edition) - Su 3/17
Peter Ackroyd - London: The Biography - W 4/03
Charles C. Mann - The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World - T 4/09
Ben H. Winters - Golden State - S 4/20
William Shakespeare - Measure for Measure - S 4/27
Ernest Hemingway - Death in the Afternoon - M 5/06
J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith - Lethal White - Su 5/12
Wright Thompson - The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business - Su 5/19
Charlie Jane Anders - The City in the Middle of the Night - M 5/27
David Grann - Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - M 5/27
Tom Robbins - Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas - R 6/13
Bill Jenkinson - The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs - W 6/19
James Ellroy - My Dark Places - M 6/24
Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress - W 6/26
Christina Thompson - Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia - F 6/28
J.B. McKinnon - The Once and Future World - S 6/29
Tyler Kepler - K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches - Su 6/30
Bob Gibson w/Lonnie Wheeler - Pitch By Pitch: My View of One Unforgettable Game - M 7/01
Greil Marcus - The History of Rock 'N' Roll in Ten Songs - S 7/13
Randy Shilts - And the Band Played On - R 7/25
John Steinbeck - The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights - T 8/06
Robert Penn Warren - Who Speaks for the Negro? - Su 8/25
Joe Baur - Best Hikes Near Cleveland - R 8/29
James Agee & Walker Evans - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - Su 9/01
Arnold Hano - A Day in the Bleachers - Su 9/08
*Nnedi Okorafor, Tana Ford & James Devlin - LaGuardia - Su 9/08
Walter M. Miller, Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz - W 9/11
William Shakespeare - Othello - S 9/14
John Hersey - Of Men and War - M 9/16
Lionel Shriver - So Much For That - Su 9/22
William C. Rhoden - Forty Million Dollar Slaves - M 9/23
Amy Goldstein - Janesville: An American Story - T 9/24
Edward Glaeser - Triumph of the City - Su 9/29
John McPhee - The Control of Nature - M 10/07
Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko - The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy - T 10/08
Susan Orleans - The Library Book - W 10/09
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated - Su 10/13
Stephen Fry - Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined - F 10/18
Matthew Desmond - Evicted: Poverty and Profit in The American City - Su 10/20
Will Self - The Book of Dave - W 11/06
*Bryan Caplan & Zach Weinersmith - Open Borders: The Science and Facts of Immigration - R 11/07
Geoffrey A. Moore - Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption - W 11/13
Marcus Aurelius (translated by A.S.L. Farquharson & R.B. Rutherford) - Meditations - T 11/26
David Weber - Uncompromising Honor - R 11/28
Bill Bryson - The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America - Su 12/01
Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim - R 12/05
Timothy C. Winegard - The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator - W 12/18
Jessica Valenti - Sex Object: A Memoir - R 12/26
Ferrett Steinmetz - The Sol Majestic - Su 12/29

I went to some effort in 2019 to write about my favorite authors. 18 of them got a profile, and even better I actually went and read books by ten of them. Three more didn't have any new books for me to read, so only five were neglected in 2019. I should throw the Bard in the negelected column as well, as I only finished two plays this year, as well as a big chunk of the sonnets.

In any event, of the authors from my list, three got marked as highlights.

J.K. Rowling's latest Robert Galbraith novel, Lethal White, was the best of the series so far, mixing action with some much desired character development. Book five comes out later this year!

At my sister's recommendation I read Lionel Shriver's So Much For That, which manages to be a scathing critique of American's health care system while also be incredibly moving.

Death in the Afternoon is a piece of non-fiction by Hemingway about bullfighting. Imagine if a reasonably knowledgeable fan wrote a up a "how to" guide, and you've got the basic tone. It was an interesting view into a sport that's dying out today, although if you listen to Hemingway it was already dying out back in the 1920s because "things were so much better in earlier years."

The best book of 2019, or at least the most memorable, was the very first book of the year. Both and its sequel 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created are superlative works of pop history. Charles C. Mann did an excellent job of laying out the current state of the science in a captivating read. It was so good that the related The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator suffered in comparison, as it covered much of the same ground in a much less interesting fashion. I also read Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, which is interesting but a definite notch behind his other two books.

I already talked about my feelings about Salter's A Sport and a Pasttime, and a little time to reflect has not changed that view.

In 2017 I really enjoyed a book by Ben H. Winters called Underground Airlines. This year I went on a bit of a Ben H. Winters kick and read four of his books. The best of them, by far, was The Last Policeman, which follows a detective trying to solve a murder in a world that is falling apart because of the announcement that a giant meteorite will hit the Earth in the next year, wiping out humanity. It asks a bunch of interesting questions about duty and futility. It has two sequels which I felt got a little more far fetched and less interesting. I also read his newest novel, Golden State, which laid out an interesting dystopia which is actually sort of like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 mashed up.

I visited two other fictional dystopias of note. A Canticle for Leibowitz, observes a Catholic monastery as it preserves knowledge after a nuclear war. The first sections flash forward through the centuries, and we learn that humanity will make the same mistakes again and again. In the The Book of Dave we split between the modern day unraveling of the marriage of Dave and Michelle and a post global warming England where Dave's rantings were discovered and turned into an incredibly misogynistic religion. Since Dave is a London cabbie, the Knowledge plays a big part in this future. I'm actually pretty sure this isn't a good book, but lord it was interesting.

China often seems like a modern day dystopia. In 2018 I read Jack Belden's summary of the Burma campaign in WWII, "Retreat With Stillwell". That was good enough to make me seek out his other works, which led me to "China Shakes the World", a first hand account of the Communist takeover of China very much in the vein of Ten Days That Shook the World. The biggest takeaway is that no matter how bad the Chinese Communist party turned out to be (and it was and is pretty bad), it was still so much better than the Chinese Nationalist party is replaced that it's victory was nearly inevitable.

The most interesting baseball book of the year was The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs by Bill Jenkinson. Jenkinson went and read the newspaper accounts of every single of one Babe Ruth's home runs he could find, including regular season, playoff, spring training and exhibition. Given that Ruth played at the height of the American newspaper's media dominance, that's a lot of summaries. He then charted as well as he could how far each home run had been hit and to what field. He also charted plays that might have been long outs due to extremely deep fences. He then charted those against the average modern day park, and concluded that in in a modern park Ruth would have hit 104 home runs using his 1921 numbers, and more than a 1000 in his career. You can disagree with his conclusions, but the sheer level of research that went into this is remarkable. He also concludes that Ruth would have been very good in the modern age, which I actually believe even though I believe the modern players are typically better.

Speaking of baseball and weird stadium dimensions, I got to read Arnold Hano's A Day in the Bleachers. Since that day coincidentally was the World Series game in 1954 when Willie Mays made The Catch, it's worth reading for that alone. Hano is 98 today, and I bet he remembers that moment very clearly.

I also read one good book about music, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus. The specific songs aren't the point, the ride is, but I have to say that Transmission is a perfect choice.

M really respected the book And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. This is the history of the AIDS epidemic, written by a journalist who was on the front lines in San Francisco and who later died from AIDS. You probably won't be surprised that the powers that be don't come off well here. As Shilts points out, a few poisoned Tylenol capsules that killed seven people got far more media coverage than AIDS, even though AIDS had already killed 260 people by that point. It's a searing history that spares none of the guilty.

Similarly interesting is Janesville: An American Story, about what happens to Janesville, Wisconsin, when GM closes the local assembly line. We see the people of Janesville trying to restore their town to old glories, or at least to find a job. We see that some common remedies, like job retraining, rarely work, and others do more to give rich people money than to help the newly jobless.

I pulled Sex Object by Jessica Valenti from my sister's 2018 list. I'm not sure I learned anything I didn't already know or at least suspect, but the telling is well done.

The last book I read in 2019 was one of the best. The only reason I hadn't bought theferrett's newest novel Sol Majestic was because he said it was set in the same universe as my least favorite of his short stories. Of course, when I got it from the library it turns out that the novel is by far my favorite book of the five he has published. The characters just work in every way. I highly recommend it to everyone, not just scifi fans.