2019: The Year in Books
Once again, as I have done for several years running, I will devote my last post of the year to the books I have read in the previous 365 days.
It is interesting to lay out all the books I have read in a year, to see the mix of garbage and the sublime. But that’s what reading is about. It is hit or miss; there are surprises, and there are disappointments. And a few where I say, What was I thinking?
These books are in the order that I read them, not ranked. Some are a second or third reading, which I note with an asterisk.
1. The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity, Matthew Kelly
2. College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What it Means for Students, Jeffrery Selingo
3. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan Peterson
4. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis*
5. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole*
6. How to Think, Alan Jacob
7. The Hours, Michael Cunningham
8. The Coddling of America, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff
9. Arguing Religion, Robert Barron
10. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
11. Educated, Tara Westover
12. The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
13. The Bullet Journal Method, Ryan Carroll
14. Our Only World, Wendell Berry
15. Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, The Great Courses, multiple authors
16. The Road to Character, David Brooks
17. Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, Reinhold Niebuhr
18. Purgatory, Danta Alighieri
19. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
20. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
21. Dopesick, Beth Macy
22. The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace Wells
23. The Bible, New American Standard Edition (NASD)*
24. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
25. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon
26. Antigone, Sophocles
27. I Hear You, Michael Sorenson
28. Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr
29. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
30. The Foundations of Western Civilization, the Great Courses, Thomas F.X. Noble
31. Paradise, Dante Alighieri
32. Dante’s Devine Comedy, The Great Courses, Ronald Herzman and Willam Cook
33. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
34. Middlemarch, George Eliot
35. Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
36. A Thousand Small Sanities, Adam Gopnik
37. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
38. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
39. The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare
40. Stoner, John Williams
Notes
The Bible (#23) is yes, that Bible. This was a four year project in which I read a chapter a day, cover to cover, starting with Matthew and going through Revelations and then back to Genesis through to Malachi. Reading the Bible is an adventure. I recommend it, but it isn't all moral edification and parables. There are a lot of perplexing and even shocking things in there.
Leaves (#17) was easy reading and so I plunged into a second Reinhold Niebuhr book, Moral Man (#28). This second book was much, much harder reading. I was perplexed by it at first, but Niebuhr’s thesis, that people behave morally in their own local communities but become increasingly immoral when part of larger groups, such as nations, has stuck with me. He explains Trump fairly well.
Another who explained Trump well was A Thousand Small Sanities (#36). Gopnik's ending is weak, when he gets to his prescriptions for improving society, but his classification of the various types of conservativism was incisive, and clarified Trumpism for me. My reaction to Gopnik's ideas gave rise to the post I wrote earilier this month about impeachment and authoritarianism.
I know that Dante’s Divine Comed is one book. I have counted it as three because I read it as three separate books, each with 200 pages of scholarly notes to explain the text. The Divine Comed was a very challenging text, requiring a lot of extra effort, but it was worth it. The unity and symmetry of Dante’s thinking is a wonder to behold, but it does not fully emerge until Paradise. Unfortunately, most readers quit after The Inferno.
I just realized that all last year I read no true history books! That will have to be remedied.
Book of the Year
Many good candidates but I will go with two: Crime and Punishment and The House of Mirth. I am a longtime Dostoyevsky fan, and Crime and Punishment was the forth book of his that I have read. He is the finest psychological novelist ever.
The House of Mirth was a stunner. I expected it to be good, but was amazed by it. I liked it even more than the widely idolized Middlemarch, which I also read this year. Edith Wharton is now one of my very favorite writers. (Confession: I was assigned Mirth in college and never read it. Reading it this year was a way of completing my college education. And by the way, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (#40) is another work I missed in college.)
Most Disappointing Book
Stoner (#40). It wasn’t bad, but I have read so many glowing recommendations of this book. It is a long, slow tragedy, and you could just see the miserable ending coming from a mile away. William Stoner is a college professor who lives the life of a country music song — everything goes sadly wrong, with a slow beat. The last 20 pages or so redeem it, and the ending is moving. It’s a long trip to get to those fine pages, though.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (#37) was a favorite of a few of my pals in college. It sucked. I have fought battles with drug-addicted patients and the demons they carry for my entire 20-year medical career. I don’t find drug abuse funny. Sorry.
Long Books
This year I made it a point to finish some very long books. Specifically the massive Middlemarch and Crime and Punishment. Both were worth it. Middlemarch takes awhile to get used to. Hundreds of pages go by before anything happens. But George Eliot (who in real life was a woman named Mary Ann Evans) is a brilliant observer of human behavior. You can’t read Eliot without learning a thing or two about how the human mind works.
And I Recommend…
Many enjoyable books this year, but in particular I recommend Dante, who is very different from anything you can find in a modern writer. He takes time to get to know, but there is something about his cosmic philosophy that is deeply impressive. The symmetry of The Divine Comedy is as stunning as a gothic cathedral.
The Hours is a prize-winning book and an Oscar-winning movie. It is good, but you really need to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway first, or you won’t understand it.
A Confederacy of Dunces was a re-read for me, but it is one of the funniest books of all time.
And finally, Antigone. This is an Ancient Greek play and is the conclusion of the Oedipus Rex trilogy. Antigone is a woman — heroines are uncommon in ancient literature — and her courage and determination to do the right thing despite the law and the threat of death from an angry king rings through the ages. It is a short read, and worth it.
