2019 in Review– in Books!

Happy New Year, everyone! 2019 was a crazy year, wasn’t it? Just in my house my husband and I both switched jobs, throwing a huge surprise in our year. Out in the wider society, even more governments went crazy, the U.S. president was impeached, migrants are still being put in cages and, on the plus side, people seemed to finally realize there was something to this whole climate change thing. All of which added up to a lot more vigils and marches for me. But the new jobs came with more travel. Inconvenient for my family and bad if I want to stay on top of laundry and cleaning, but I got a lot of reading done in airports. Below, my 2019 in books.

 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami. Murakami is an author who I always enjoy reading, but I’m fairly certain I only understand around 10-20% of what I’m reading about. This short story collection is no exception, full of odd tales and bizarre stories but in such a way that the banal and magical seems expected and straightforward. This collection includes the story of someone constantly looking for a ‘door’, with no other explanation given, a woman who has her name stolen by a monkey, and a surprisingly normal story of a couple who go to the zoo to see baby kangaroos.

Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan. Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad is one of my favorite books of all time, but I wasn’t as blown away by this. It’s a much more traditional historic novel of a young woman in World War II whose family had fallen on hard times in the depression, and whose father, a former mob courier, has disappeared. The young woman ends up tangled in her father’s past while carving out her own life as a one of the first ever woman divers. It was a well executed and well written book, and I did like it for what it was. I guess I just had too high of expectations.

The Green Brain, Frank Herbert. From the deserts of Arrakis to the rainforests of Brazil. I’m all for a book on how we need nature and all that, so it could have been good. Unfortunately, between books Herbert completely forgot how to write coherent characters and that women can be people.

The Tangled Tree, David Quammen. I usually love Quammen’s science writing, and his explanations are fantastic, but the thesis here about how much inter-species genetic transfer is part of evolution, didn’t really hold through. There are couple really fantastic examples (mitochondria and chlorophyll) and we have junk DNA, but I felt like he never got into the exploration of some of the more interesting parts of all this.

Melmoth, Sarah Perry. An interesting and creepy gothic novel about the story of Melmoth, doomed to wander the earth forever in shame and looking for others to share her journey. It definitely gave me chills.

You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker. I loved this collection of short stories and essays by Alice Walker. It was a really fantastic exploration of race and gender in the 1970s, good in its own right and a ton of insight into the movements of the time. I’m not sure how much someone who didn’t have a background interest would like it—there were a couple essays I really appreciated as helping me think about second wave feminism but that read so differently than a feminist essay would today—but if someone does want to really dig into the beginnings of intersectionality or the history of our current social battles, this is a great place to do it.

Death’s End, Cixin Liu. I loved Three-Body Problem, one of my favorite books. Death’s End still had some incredibly creative pieces and really imaginative new technology and a future, but the story was so unsatisfying. It seemed to undo everything from the other two books.

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, Andrea Wulf. Alexander von Humboldt was a hero throughout the European influenced world in the 1800s, as both a naturalist and explorer and at the forefront of the new social revolutions. This was a very interesting tale of his life and the world he lived in.

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Mike Duncan. For anyone who is a fan of Mike Duncan’s podcast (History of Rome, Revolutions) reading this is a fun experience. I could basically hear Duncan’s voice the whole time, as the dry humor and informative style is exactly the same. This is a great book for our current political times, as it explorers not the final collapse of Rome, but the steps and falls that happened before Caesar and saw the Republic part of Rome start to crumble. Good lessons for today.

Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm, Leonardo Boff. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian Franciscan, has long been one of the foremost thinkers on Catholic ecology. It shows in this book, written in 1995, a good twenty years before Laudato Si’. Ecology and Liberation teases out the model of hearing the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, but much of this has been spread throughout other writings at this point. Interesting, but in 2019 not the massive shift it was in 1995.  More a historical interest now.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells. Oy. This was one of the best and most terrifying books I read last year. David Wallace-Wells writes about what happens if all of the scientists have been wrong about global warming. The already apocalyptic IPCC reports cover what scientists expect with 95% certainty. What if the worst-case scenarios are actually right? That’s what this book explores.

The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, Dalai Lama XIV. As with other reviews here, sometimes I suffer with how much I read on any given topic. I read plenty of books on religion, plenty of books on science, and plenty of books on the two together. Given that, this mostly covered ground I’d read before. But reading from new cultures is always interesting to me, and just the list of Indian philosophers the Dalai Lama discusses reminds me of the vast gaps in my knowledge and a new reading list—if I can find them in English, that is.

Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett. Death might be my favorite Discworld character. When he becomes too much of his own character he is, well, not exactly fired, but lets say instructed to take early retirement by whoever is in charge of such things, and becomes human-ish. Shenanigans ensue.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandell. St. John Mandell isn’t interested exactly in the apocalypse. She doesn’t cover the battles or cannibalism or the fantasies of preppers. Instead, she envisions what happens right before, and what happens 20 years on as humanity rebuilds from a devastating pandemic. It’s written from the perspective of a theater troupe looking towards civilization, not just survival, and was really a beautiful novel.

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Milorad Pavić. I love, love, love this post-modern masterpiece. The Khazars were a real tribe in the Central Asia/Caucuses region but this book is entirely it’s own imaginative tale of their possible conversion to either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, with a tale told through a dictionary—more of an encyclopedia—and tales told through different definitions in the similar yet so different dictionaries compiled for the three major faiths.

Flood of Fire, Amitov Ghosh. The final installment of the Ibis Trilogy, a story of several individuals whose lives are interwoven during the opium wars in China. A very interesting tale in a period I don’t know nearly enough about, but it can’t help but be tragic. This piece also turned some of the characters on their heads in a way I’m not sure entirely how to feel about, but it was interesting throughout.

Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett.  The Witches! Fairytale narratives are being used nefariously in Discworld, taking over people’s lives, and the witches, particularly Granny Weatherwax, certainly aren’t going to stand for such a thing.

The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough. A little longer than I’d want, but McCullough delivers an incredibly in-depth tale of the creation of the Panama Canal. It really is amazing that such a thing was possible.

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens. A beautifully written book and murder mystery about a woman forced by circumstance to raise herself in the swamps on the North Carolina coast. I adore a book with a sense of place, and this was full of the sound and smell of mudflats, mangrove swamps, and low tide.

Early Riser, Jasper Fforde. Fforde continues his interest in dystopias either in the future or just to the side of our world with a world where strangely long, cold, and dark winters mean many people pass away and many others hibernate, and a government entity controls breeding, sleeping, and food. It’s not the lit-nerd fan service of The Eyre Affair, but it’s still clever and well-written.

Girl Waits with Gun, Amy Stewart. This was a very fun tale about one of the first woman deputies in the United States, when Constance Kopp, the oldest of three sisters living on their own and fairly isolated, takes on a gangster who rammed them in a roadside accident. Even more fun as its based on a true tale—the title comes from a newspaper account at the time.

Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi. Oyeyemi is one of the best authors today, taking the seed of a fairytale and growing it into something entirely unique and in a world that seems to exist on top of or alongside our own. This story is one of a family of women and their homeland, Druhastrana, which may or may not exist, talking dolls, changelings, and a ginger bread that is irresistible.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James. Nope. One of the books I hated most, it was page after page of unrelenting cruelty and graphic violence with no pause for even a second. I should have put it down after a few chapters, but it received such accolades I assumed there would be some sort of pay off. Friends, there was not.

The Obelisk Gate, N. K. Jemisin. The second in Jemisin’s the Stone Sky trilogy, we learn a bit more about the plan that led to the Fifth Season that started this all, follow Essun in making her new life, and follow her daughter’s story on the other end of the world. Jemisin’s trilogy is absolutely fascinating and creative and I couldn’t put this down.

Good Omens, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. The fun game with this, as with the Amazon special, is to try to figure out which lines are from Pratchett and which are from Gaiman. Either way, the novel shares the wit of both and their shared philosophy that no one, not even Gods, should just use people as a means to their own end.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman.  The Gods and myths of old countries have not found the United States they’ve been brought to a fertile ground, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still here with some power and eager for more, or that the new idols of our society aren’t fighting just as hard for our belief. I fell down a pretty good Wikipedia rabbit hole after this trying to identify all the characters.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz. I was really not as enamored of this book as the rest of the world seemed to be. It was fine, parts were really interesting, but mostly I was pretty meh on the whole thing.

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law, Peter Woit. I love reading about physics and, as a person with absolutely no training whatsoever, have some serious questions about string theory. So I was interested in this book which posits not only that string theory isn’t right, but that it can’t be proven and can be endlessly tweaked to try to fit our parameters and so isn’t a science and can’t even be called wrong. Sadly for me, this book was far heavier on the advanced math than I myself could follow and I only got about 20% of it.

The Pearl that Broke Its Shell, Nadia Hashimi. I may be taking a break from reading about women in Central Asia for a while. I get it; life has been unrelenting misery for generations. This book was well written and absorbing but just so, so sad.

The Stone Sky, N. K. Jemisin. The conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy, wherein we learn why Father Earth hates the humans, and the origin of all that is currently part of the Stillness. The story was so very original and fascinating and I love this trilogy so, so very much. Among the best things I’ve read and if you haven’t read it yet you should honestly just go get The Fifth Season right now and not do anything else until you finish the whole thing. I do hope I’m not overselling it…

Leviathan Wakes, James E. A. Corey. This book was exciting and suspenseful and I bet the series on Amazon is really fun since this definitely has a sci-fi show drama type of feel. I don’t feel compelled to read the others, but this one was a fun way to pass the time.

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East, Gerard Russell.  I was deeply interested in this book talking about some of the oldest current religions that have held on in the Middle East and are facing extermination now, including Yazidis, Druze, Samaritans (yes, they’re still around!), Zoroastrians, and Kalasha, an indigenous religion hanging on in the mountains in Pakistan. What’s most fascinating is how little we know about these religions, and how many of them can only be practiced in their own communities. The idea of making sure everyone in the community knew the religious laws, and of conversion, were pretty revolutionary when they happened.

Mistress Masham’s Repose, T. H. White. This was one of my favorite books growing up, and it’s still a lot of fun. Some Lilliputians were brought back to Britain by Gulliver, put on display, and eventually disappeared and set up their own hidden town. Oh, and since it’s a children’s story from Britain there’s also a run down family estate that has seen better days and an evil governess to contend with.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness, Sy Montgomery. Exploring octopus intelligence is, as Montgomery points out, probably the closest we’ll come to interacting with a fully alien intelligence. They’re super smart, but have a completely different nervous system, way of understanding and exploring the world, communication method, etc. I so want to go touch a pacific octopus now.

Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood. Atwood isn’t all dystopian future or post-apocalyptic tales. She also just explores the reality of life as a woman or a girl. Moral Disorder is a series of stories written from the perspective or about a woman throughout her life and with her family in the 70s.

My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie. This is Eliza’s story, pieced together from her letters and letters about her and lasting well past Hamilton’s death into the tumultuous days of the republic. She was an incredibly fascinating person in her own right, and this was a very interesting exploration that paints a slightly different perspective on the events covered in Hamilton.

This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein. I finally got around to reading this, and Klein released another climate change book a month later. I have to say, though, I was a bit disappointed. Klein is usually a radical thinker, but I didn’t think that this book actually captured how much does need to change.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, William Easterly. Easterly wants to challenge current development theory, which is fine, and speak up for individualism and free market capitalism and against planning, but his thesis doesn’t seem to hold up and he cherry picks examples and then dismisses those that don’t support his ideas because of reasons *waves hands.*

The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, E. O. Wilson. I like Wilson, but this book is about the same as most of his others and for something written as an appeal to partner science and religion he sure didn’t bother learning anything about religious thinking on this or put any thought into why a person of faith who didn’t care about science would care about this instead of any of his other essays.

Stories of Nighttime and Some for the Day, Ben Loory. What a strange collection of tales. I think I didn’t really like it? But maybe I sort of did?

Our Kind of Traitor, John le Carré. Le Carre seems to have found his footing after having to experiment with new villains after the end of the cold war, and this was a strong novel from him. You just have to go in to le Carre without getting your hopes up about anything or getting too attached to anyone.

Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird, Katie Fallon. This incredibly informative book goes into the taxonomy, myth, and reality of vultures, primarily the turkey vulture here in the United States but also discussing condors and buzzards around the world. I was surprised to learn how endangered vultures are in most places, given how prevalent the turkey and black vultures have always been wherever I’ve lived. It was interesting, and Fallon has evident love for the birds, but I’m a bit ashamed to say I’m still not that in to vultures.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers. I wanted to like this book, I really did. Unfortunately, though, Chambers created a cool world and a bunch of super people she really wants to hang out with, and then completely forgot to make any sort of story or plot or conflict to put them in.

Small Gods, Terry Pratchett. To the extent Pratchett has an underlying thesis, this book probably spells it out as directly as any of them will, with a direct order to just do the next right thing and not try to force everyone else into the story you’ve woven for yourself/tribe/religion/etc. And it has many things to say about belief vs. ritual and the importance of either but in a very witty, Pratchett-y, Discworld-y way.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Jeffrey D. Sachs. The ideological opposite of Esterly, Sachs probably relies on the tyranny of numbers a bit too much. I think I like Sachs goals, but I’m uncomfortable with his way forward and the way too much planning limits different innovation and different cultures.  Plus, just in a realistic way, any book concerned with population that focuses exclusively on birth control and doesn’t grapple with the very real fact that growth is from infants and people living much longer even as people have less babies, and the changes we’ll see from an aging population, isn’t really facing things head on.

Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes things are unpublished for a reason. I love Vonnegut, and this is a great book for a completionist, but more than one of these seemed only 75% baked and that they could have used a bit more thinking on, although one or two really stood out.

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind, Richard Fortey. I wanted to like this more than I did. It was fine, and I’m never going to complain about reading about stromatolites, which are just crazy cool, but it got a bit draggy in some places.

Uprooted, Naomi Novik. This was such a pleasurable read and I loved everything about it! Novik’s fantasy novel isn’t exactly a retelling of any particular fairytale, but it does take the building blocks of any story about the woods, powerful beings demanding sacrifice, and the myths of Baba Yaga, and make something new out of them.

The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Fox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, Stephen Jay Gould.  Another book that was probably written for an audience that isn’t me. It was too insidery in its critique of how science and the humanities have drifted apart, with a whole section on the way conferences work in each field that had the cadence of a joke, but I didn’t get at all.

Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer. Don’t let the movie put you off of this, the first book in Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. It was enthralling, probably the best of the three although the whole trilogy was amazing. And oh how I love a good unreliable narrator.

The Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007, ed. Philip Zaleski. Meh. I don’t want to criticize a book for being a different book than the one I wanted, but I guess I expect spiritual writing to be a bit more focused internally, not just anything that has to do with religion or society.

Florida, Lauren Groff. A wonderful collection of short stories about people in or from Florida, mostly exploring alienation, loneliness and connection, and the anxieties of raising children while the world is falling apart and all the places you love are going to be underwater, something I can particularly identify with right now.

Danubia: A Personal History of Hapsburg Europe, Simon Winder. Mostly pretty good, but I think it presumes more background knowledge of the locations of and leaders of Europe than I have at my fingertips. Winder wasn’t writing for us ignorant Americans.

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton. This was a really inventive tale. It’s sort of a weird mix of Agatha Christie and Doctor Who and just really well written.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll. I love this book, even if the movie simultaneously fascinated and terrified me when I was a kid. (I blame it for my lifelong dislike of pansies). It’s a great introduction to the completely absurd, and should be read by everyone as a child and as an adult.

Authority, Jeff Vandermeer. The second installment of the Southern Reach trilogy it shares so much and still doesn’t answer anything and leads to so many more questions. I spent most of this book gasping and then demanding my husband drop everything to read it so we could talk about it.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman. A grown up fairytale that captures the weird rules we live in as children and tells a story of the world’s hidden in ours. It was a short and affecting read, and reminded me how much history England has. Having grown up in a world where our 1960s house was practically original to the town, it’s always amazing me to contemplate how much history and memory some places have.

Acceptance, Jeff Vandermeer. This whole trilogy was so unique and intriguing, and the ending was just as strange as the rest of the book. Vandermeer manages to make a world that does truly seem wholly apart from us and impossible to understand, but still somehow real and knowable even if we don’t know anything about it.

Diversity of Vocations, Marie Dennis. A short book on how we can live out our calls to help others and live out the sacraments and beatitudes. Marie Dennis is a really interesting person (and super nice in person, full disclosure), but I did think this book didn’t entirely speak to how to live this out in the realities most of us live in.

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami. The English translation of Murakami’s children’s novella has the same dreamlike quality of all of his stories, where nothing makes sense to explain but all seems proper in the story. The English translation is arranged in such a way to be a visual tale as well, with strange pictures and a unique layout.

And that wraps it up for 2019! I plan on diving into books in 2020 to tamp down the existential terror I feel and the dread that increases with every minute that we get closer to November in the United States. At least, I’ll do a lot of reading until phone banking and GOTV takes over my life; make your plans for volunteering July through November today!