2020 Books in Review
I read 46 books in 2020 for the first time, of which 11 were graphic novels. That's substantially down from 2019 and actually less than my prior low in 2011. As noted a few times, between M not being comfortable with the library, my lack of mental focus for longer reading tasks, my binging of web comics and an inordinate amount of time spent on a bike, the numbers for new books this year just weren't there. Even the 11 graphic novels were saved by the late addition of nine collections of web comics ( all ones that I read regularly) that were added to my library late in the year. I did a lot of re-reading, but as usual I'm not counting those.
With that said, 46 books is still more than most people read in a year, which based on extensive research (aka, I did five minutes of searching) appears to be an average of about 12 books per year based on one study a few years ago. All the articles I found said that number was unduly raised by people who love reading, and the median appears to be closer to 4 books per year.
A larger problem is that many of the books I read just weren't that great. This is probably because I was limited to the books I had on hand, which were mostly books from my slush pile (aka, books I haven't been interested enough to read until now) or from M's collection, which were very hit or miss for me. As I found in years past, when every book I read is something I picked from my lists, a much higher percentage were great.
You'll note I didn't make it through any Shakespeare this year, which is the first time that's happened since I started reading through the complete works in 2009. I did read a bunch of sonnets, but without the ability to read while donating platelets, I just didn't make the time. And the sonnets vary in quality enough that I lost interest right around when I lost the ability to focus.
In any event, here's the list for the year.
* = Graphic Novels
Italics - Highlights
Margaret Atwood - The Testaments - Su 1/26
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces - T 2/11
Tom Clancy w/Carl Stiner - Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces - R 2/13
Michael Chabon - The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - T 2/18
John McPhee - Uncommon Carriers - S 2/29
Jim Bouton - Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark - W 3/04
*Kelly Sue Deconnick & Valentine De Landro - Bitch Planet v.1: Extraordinary Machine - S 3/07
*Kelly Sue Deconnick & Valentine De Landro - Bitch Planet v.2: President Bitch - S 3/07
J.A. Baker - The Peregrine - S 3/14
John Ellis - Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War - W 3/18
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker - Su 3/22
James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales - Live From New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live - Su 3/29
Tim Wise - White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son - W 4/08
Leon Werth (translated by Austin Denis Johnston) - 33 Days - R 4/09
Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country - R 4/09
John Nichols - The Milagro Beanfield War - T 4/14
Berkeley Breathed - Flawed Dogs - W 4/15
Jon Meacham - The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels - F 4/17
Graham Greene - The End of the Affair - Su 4/26
Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn - A Path Appears - M 5/04
Uzodinma Iweala - Beasts of No Nation - T 5/05
Daniel Yergin - The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power - W 5/20
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Su 5/24
Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking - M 5/25
Stephen E. Ambrose - Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West - Su 5/31
Joe De Sena w/Jeff Csatari - The Spartan Way - Su 6/21
Rick Case - Our Customers, Our Friends - R 7/02
Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye - W 7/22
Richard Kahlenberg - Tough Liberal: Albert Shankar and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy - M 8/03
Ferrett Steinmetz - Automatic Reload - Su 8/09
Jeff Vandermeer - Annihilation - S 8/22
Richard Adams - Watership Down - R 9/10
Jennifer L. Eberhardt - Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do - W 9/16
Harry Browne - Spain's Civil War, 2nd Edition - W 10/07
Jean-Marie Simon - Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny - M 10/19
Charley Harper - Charles Harper's Birds and Words - F 11/20
David Lee Roth - Crazy From the Heat - R 12/03
*Dave Kellett - Drive, v.2 - Su 12/13
*Dave Kellett - Sheldon: Pop Culture! - Su 12/13
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.0: On the Origin of the PCs - Su 12/20
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.1: Dungeon Crawling Fools - M 12/21
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.2: No Cure for the Paladin Blues - T 12/22
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.3: War and XPs - T 12/22
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.4: Don't Split the Party - R 12/24
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.5: Blood Runs in the Family - F 12/25
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.6: Utterly Dwarfed - S 12/26
Let's talk about the highlights.
I learned about John McPhee last year when I read The Control of Nature in my ongoing reading on water rights management. That led me to Uncommon Carriers, which features chapters on all sorts of ways of traveling across America. Whether cross-country by semi or up the river by canoe or barge, McPhee makes it all both interesting and edifying.
There's a bridge I bike across when I commute home where I routinely see an older couple with camera scopes. Last year I stopped and asked what they were looking at, and they pointed me to a mated pair of peregrine falcons. That ultimately led me to J.A. Baker, a British naturalist who wrote The Peregrine, a very poetic account of following a peregrine falcon around for a year. I happened to be reading this the one and only time I biked to work this year, pre-pandemic, and I happened to see that couple that day, and they said it both enjoyed the book greatly, even if some of its statements have been shown to be inaccurate many years on.
M owned a copy of The Prize, which is an exhaustive history of the oil industry through 1990. It was finished shortly before Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq, and the epilogue ties that invasion into the larger themes. This book runs 900+ pages, and most of it is enthralling. Since the story of oil is really one of the dominant themes of the 20th century, it ties over and over again into history you already know, illuminating it and giving a new view into those histories. I strongly recommend this book.
My friend theferrett published another novel. This one, Automatic Reload, endeavors to tell the tale of a world where almost everything about combat relies on having better software programs than the other guy, and so preparing for combat becomes a software task, where those who can optimize their automated weapons to be a fraction of a second faster win. The novel tells about one such person, and the job he goes on that goes wrong when it runs into someone who has learned to hack biology. Of his six novels thus far, it's about his third or fourth best in my estimation, although I say that as a lapsed programmer. I'd be curious what a non-programmer thought of it.
So technically, I read Watership Down when I was a little kid, or possibly had it read to me. I counted it again when I read it this year. It's still quite good.
M had a very academic book about the Spanish Civil War. For all that I have some basic knowledge about that conflict, I'd never read deeply on it so Spain's Civil War, 2nd Edition, was very interesting to me.
M bought me Crazy From the Heat for my birthday. David Lee Roth's autobiography is fantastic, so much more than just the patchwork of rock stars behaving badly that I initially expected. I recommend it to rock & rollers everywhere. In particular, his brief chapter on growing up Jewish in America matches perfectly with my experience.
That's all the highlights. Let's talk about some lowlights, all of which came from M's collection although I'm not sure how many of them she's read.
To me, A Confederacy of Dunces was an utterly terrible book. I don't understand why this is beloved by anyone. I hated the main character, and worse I wasn't interested by him. Blech.
I thought The Soul of America was an overly simplistic view of American history, with almost nothing that I hadn't learned before more interestingly in other books. If you've gotten to my age and haven't learned about the various sordid episodes in American history that this covers, you probably haven't been trying very hard. Since, alas, that appears to be more the norm, I can understand why people loved this.
Albert Shankar sounds like a fascinating person whose view of Liberalism has been tossed aside, which is a shame because as I read through the biography Tough Liberal I kept nodding in agreement. It's a good thing he was fascinating, because this particular biography had very dry prose. I read it because even the dry prose couldn't turn me off the topic, but I'd be happy to read a better written biography of Shankar one day.
Did you read something great this year? Let me know about it.
Questions about any of the books above? Let me know that too.
With that said, 46 books is still more than most people read in a year, which based on extensive research (aka, I did five minutes of searching) appears to be an average of about 12 books per year based on one study a few years ago. All the articles I found said that number was unduly raised by people who love reading, and the median appears to be closer to 4 books per year.
A larger problem is that many of the books I read just weren't that great. This is probably because I was limited to the books I had on hand, which were mostly books from my slush pile (aka, books I haven't been interested enough to read until now) or from M's collection, which were very hit or miss for me. As I found in years past, when every book I read is something I picked from my lists, a much higher percentage were great.
You'll note I didn't make it through any Shakespeare this year, which is the first time that's happened since I started reading through the complete works in 2009. I did read a bunch of sonnets, but without the ability to read while donating platelets, I just didn't make the time. And the sonnets vary in quality enough that I lost interest right around when I lost the ability to focus.
In any event, here's the list for the year.
* = Graphic Novels
Italics - Highlights
Margaret Atwood - The Testaments - Su 1/26
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces - T 2/11
Tom Clancy w/Carl Stiner - Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces - R 2/13
Michael Chabon - The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - T 2/18
John McPhee - Uncommon Carriers - S 2/29
Jim Bouton - Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark - W 3/04
*Kelly Sue Deconnick & Valentine De Landro - Bitch Planet v.1: Extraordinary Machine - S 3/07
*Kelly Sue Deconnick & Valentine De Landro - Bitch Planet v.2: President Bitch - S 3/07
J.A. Baker - The Peregrine - S 3/14
John Ellis - Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War - W 3/18
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker - Su 3/22
James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales - Live From New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live - Su 3/29
Tim Wise - White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son - W 4/08
Leon Werth (translated by Austin Denis Johnston) - 33 Days - R 4/09
Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country - R 4/09
John Nichols - The Milagro Beanfield War - T 4/14
Berkeley Breathed - Flawed Dogs - W 4/15
Jon Meacham - The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels - F 4/17
Graham Greene - The End of the Affair - Su 4/26
Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn - A Path Appears - M 5/04
Uzodinma Iweala - Beasts of No Nation - T 5/05
Daniel Yergin - The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power - W 5/20
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Su 5/24
Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking - M 5/25
Stephen E. Ambrose - Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West - Su 5/31
Joe De Sena w/Jeff Csatari - The Spartan Way - Su 6/21
Rick Case - Our Customers, Our Friends - R 7/02
Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye - W 7/22
Richard Kahlenberg - Tough Liberal: Albert Shankar and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy - M 8/03
Ferrett Steinmetz - Automatic Reload - Su 8/09
Jeff Vandermeer - Annihilation - S 8/22
Richard Adams - Watership Down - R 9/10
Jennifer L. Eberhardt - Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do - W 9/16
Harry Browne - Spain's Civil War, 2nd Edition - W 10/07
Jean-Marie Simon - Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny - M 10/19
Charley Harper - Charles Harper's Birds and Words - F 11/20
David Lee Roth - Crazy From the Heat - R 12/03
*Dave Kellett - Drive, v.2 - Su 12/13
*Dave Kellett - Sheldon: Pop Culture! - Su 12/13
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.0: On the Origin of the PCs - Su 12/20
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.1: Dungeon Crawling Fools - M 12/21
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.2: No Cure for the Paladin Blues - T 12/22
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.3: War and XPs - T 12/22
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.4: Don't Split the Party - R 12/24
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.5: Blood Runs in the Family - F 12/25
*Rich Burlew - The Order of the Stick, v.6: Utterly Dwarfed - S 12/26
Let's talk about the highlights.
I learned about John McPhee last year when I read The Control of Nature in my ongoing reading on water rights management. That led me to Uncommon Carriers, which features chapters on all sorts of ways of traveling across America. Whether cross-country by semi or up the river by canoe or barge, McPhee makes it all both interesting and edifying.
There's a bridge I bike across when I commute home where I routinely see an older couple with camera scopes. Last year I stopped and asked what they were looking at, and they pointed me to a mated pair of peregrine falcons. That ultimately led me to J.A. Baker, a British naturalist who wrote The Peregrine, a very poetic account of following a peregrine falcon around for a year. I happened to be reading this the one and only time I biked to work this year, pre-pandemic, and I happened to see that couple that day, and they said it both enjoyed the book greatly, even if some of its statements have been shown to be inaccurate many years on.
M owned a copy of The Prize, which is an exhaustive history of the oil industry through 1990. It was finished shortly before Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq, and the epilogue ties that invasion into the larger themes. This book runs 900+ pages, and most of it is enthralling. Since the story of oil is really one of the dominant themes of the 20th century, it ties over and over again into history you already know, illuminating it and giving a new view into those histories. I strongly recommend this book.
My friend theferrett published another novel. This one, Automatic Reload, endeavors to tell the tale of a world where almost everything about combat relies on having better software programs than the other guy, and so preparing for combat becomes a software task, where those who can optimize their automated weapons to be a fraction of a second faster win. The novel tells about one such person, and the job he goes on that goes wrong when it runs into someone who has learned to hack biology. Of his six novels thus far, it's about his third or fourth best in my estimation, although I say that as a lapsed programmer. I'd be curious what a non-programmer thought of it.
So technically, I read Watership Down when I was a little kid, or possibly had it read to me. I counted it again when I read it this year. It's still quite good.
M had a very academic book about the Spanish Civil War. For all that I have some basic knowledge about that conflict, I'd never read deeply on it so Spain's Civil War, 2nd Edition, was very interesting to me.
M bought me Crazy From the Heat for my birthday. David Lee Roth's autobiography is fantastic, so much more than just the patchwork of rock stars behaving badly that I initially expected. I recommend it to rock & rollers everywhere. In particular, his brief chapter on growing up Jewish in America matches perfectly with my experience.
That's all the highlights. Let's talk about some lowlights, all of which came from M's collection although I'm not sure how many of them she's read.
To me, A Confederacy of Dunces was an utterly terrible book. I don't understand why this is beloved by anyone. I hated the main character, and worse I wasn't interested by him. Blech.
I thought The Soul of America was an overly simplistic view of American history, with almost nothing that I hadn't learned before more interestingly in other books. If you've gotten to my age and haven't learned about the various sordid episodes in American history that this covers, you probably haven't been trying very hard. Since, alas, that appears to be more the norm, I can understand why people loved this.
Albert Shankar sounds like a fascinating person whose view of Liberalism has been tossed aside, which is a shame because as I read through the biography Tough Liberal I kept nodding in agreement. It's a good thing he was fascinating, because this particular biography had very dry prose. I read it because even the dry prose couldn't turn me off the topic, but I'd be happy to read a better written biography of Shankar one day.
Did you read something great this year? Let me know about it.
Questions about any of the books above? Let me know that too.