My Year in Reading 2019

I achieved my resolution and read more books than I had in 2018, though only 3 more — 69 vs. 66. Once I passed my 2018 mark in late November, I slowed my pace by picking up the second half of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun, a book that is both lengthy and slow, and also by trying to finish grabbing all the Power Moons in Super Mario Odyssey — I’ll be lucky to be done with either task before the end of January, if ever.

This was a definite metric effect — once I passed my mark from 2018, I wanted to strategically set myself up for success in 2020 by not getting TOO far ahead in 2019. Shame on me.

In 2018, I ran a bunch of stats. Below are those same stats for 2019:

Charts are fun!

I succeeded in reading more hispanic authors and drastically reduced the amount of sci-fi I read (though I largely replaced it with fantasy). I also read more male authors than female (reversed from last year), and read more broadly from non-North-American authors (though American and English authors still topped the list by a large amount).

Last year my big goal was reading Ulysses, which was awful. This year, I decided to finish the Wheel of Time series, a giant bloated fantasy epic that I dropped somewhere around book 8 or 9 back in college and never returned to. It’s trash power-fantasy that I loved in middle school/high school until it went completely off the rails with a cast of roughly a billion characters and a plot that devolved entirely into pointless side-quests. However, the original author died before completing the series and left the final set of books to Brandon Sanderson, whose Mistborn series I had enjoyed, so still angry about the lack of Game of Thrones books and the incredibly disappointing final two seasons of the HBO show, I picked it back up.

I glanced through some wikipedia summaries to remember which character was which and picked up with the first Brandon Sanderson book. It was okay, though a good reminder of things that things which seem cool when you are 12 rarely hold up well. But he ditched the worst of the original author’s sideplots and cliched character descriptions, so it was at least readable. The second book was dire and fell right back into the hole of “awful Perrin chapters and insanely stupid bad guy plans” that drove me away from the series in the first place. Then the final book redeemed it, wrapping things up in a satisfying and suitably epic way. I could never get over the ridiculous troop numbers (armies of hundreds of thousands marching across desolate wastelands on medieval technology with no logistical support), the spiteful not-paying-off of well-foreshadowed plot points (the original author got mad when the internet correctly figured out his big reveals and so rewrote those reveals to be “surprising” aka they came out of nowhere with no build-up and made it so previous plot points made no sense), or how every single number ever mentioned is a multiple of 10 (people never have 7 guards, or 12, only 10, 20, or 50), but it was still so, so, much better than Ulysses.

I rated every book on my usual scale:
1 = hated
2 = would rather have read something else
3 = glad I read it
4 = strongly recommend to anyone interested in the genre
5 = can’t stop talking about it to everyone

I am nothing if not consistent in my ratings

My full list of 15 “can’t miss” books:

1. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
   (book club pick: I thought I loved this book more than anyone else, but another member of the club loved it so much he made a pilgrimage to New Bedford and came back kitted out in whale socks and with pints of Ishm-ale from the Moby Dick Brewing Company, so he wins.)
2. Grendel, by John Gardner
   (supremely weird and stuck with me like few books do. best portrayal of a dragon I can recall and a real gutpunch of an ending line)
3. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
   (book club pick: I rarely enjoy historical fiction, but this was incredible)
4. Milkman, by Anna Burns
   (literally thought this was a sci-fi book about an alien civilization for a good 50 pages until I was told it was set in 1970s Belfast — hard to get into but well worth the effort)
5. The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
   (Harry Potter but actually good, the whole trilogy is worthwhile)
6. The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
   (I expected this to be very bad and it was flat-out amazing instead)
7. The Best Bad Things, by Katrina Carrasco
   (the most fun book I’ve read since “Sisters Brothers” — western-style noir with a completely outrageous protagonist)
8. Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller
   (rec from my wife: hilarious and awful memoir of growing up in Rhodesia with parents who, uh, don’t always make the best choices)
9. The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
   (men in Chicago going through the AIDS epidemic and in another timeline, one of their friends searching for her lost daughter — a very good companion piece to “And the Band Played On…”)
10. Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham
    (the HBO Chernobyl series was the best thing I watched on TV this year and the book was even better)
11. The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa
    (detailed and engrossing re-telling of the assassination of Rafael Trujillo and the aftermath)
12. A Brightness Long Ago, by Guy Gavriel Kay
    (another fantasy author I hadn’t read in decades — but in this case I’ve actually been missing out!)
13. Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin
    (classic for a reason — b/c it’s heartbreaking)
14. Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Sawaadi
    (book club pick, and a rare book that I loved but my wife hated)
15. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
    (loved this, but when I excitedly picked up another book of his — Bridge of Clay — it ranked down there with Wheel of Time #15 as my two 1-star books of the year)

I read a lot of historical fiction, which is unusual, and liked most of it, which is even more unusual. But it’s helped me distill what turns me off about the genre. I like fiction that’s written like narrative history, like Wolf Hall and Feast of the Goat — the characters were all real people and the authors closely followed actual historical events (or at least seemed to).

I also liked fiction that used the historical setting and just had fun with it, like The Best Bad Things. I was having too much fun reading the protagonist’s wild exploits to care about plausibility. What I’ve realized I need to avoid is historical fiction that does both of these things — weaves in important historical events and people while adding fictional protagonists — that’s the stuff I usually can’t stand.

Anyway, if you’re interested in tracking your own reading this year, feel free to use my spreadsheet template (File > “Make a Copy…” or “Download As…”).

Track whatever you want, and happy reading in 2020!