Dave's best reads of 2020

When the world is closed, there’s more time for reading. How’s that for finding a silver lining in a pandemic cloud? 

With more time on my hands, I ended up reading a dozen more books this year than usual. Turns out I wasn’t alone. This year was great for book publishers as people read more, but not so much for bookstores as readers ordered most of those books online. 

When I bought a book this year I tried to use my neighborhood bookstore, Mystery to Me. But these days I get most of my reading ideas from just browsing what’s available online on Libby, the public library app. Because most popular recent releases have long waiting lists, that forces me into the dusty, forgotten virtual shelves. 

Here’s my annual list of favorites. As usual it includes some new releases but more older books. And, as always, I encourage you to share your recommendations in the comment section below. Here’s to less time for reading — for all the right reasons — in 2021. 

It’s in those dusty digital corners of Libby that I found The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson. It’s a historical novel set in 1914 Britain. Simonson does a nice job of combining real events with fictional accounts of Brits facing the growing certainty of war. It’s especially poignant since nobody understood at the time just how horrible it would all become.

I suppose The Summer Before the War put summer on my mind and led me to Bill Bryson’s One Summer America 1927. Bryson’s most famous book is A Walk in the Woods, a comic account of his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail. One Summer is a serious work of history, detailing the events of the summer of 1927 when Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs and, Bryson argues, America came into its own as a world power. 

Speaking of world domination, the one new release bestseller I read this year was The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. You wouldn’t think that there’s much left to learn about Winston Churchill, but I’ve loved everything else I’ve read by Larson (The Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts), so I gave it a try. Not only does Larson provide lots of interesting details on how Churchill lived his daily life during the war, but he makes an even stronger case that he was the indispensable man to stand up to Hitler. It was a revelation to me that the appeasement movement in Britain remained intact even after Neville Chamberlain was disgraced by Hitler’s treachery and that the French resistance was so small and weak. It was Churchill’s iron will that kept the lights on until America entered the war. 

In the vein of stories of great men, over the Fourth of July holiday I reread Joseph Ellis’ thin but important volume The Quartet. Ellis describes how George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay literally conspired to create America. The Revolutionary War was about independence for the 13 colonies, not about creating a new nation. But these four men understood how important it was to forge a real country and, against long odds and popular opposition, they maneuvered to make it happen. Read together, the Larson and Ellis books make a strong case that history isn’t just about faceless, unstoppable currents, but about individuals who can shape events all on their own. 

For whatever reason, I didn’t read Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (who also wrote the wonderful Seabiscuit) when it was all the rage back in 2010. But this spring, looking for something to listen to on long walks to make up for the loss of other exercise options shut down by the pandemic, I borrowed the audio book from Libby. The amazing life of Louis Zamperini turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. If this guy could survive 47 days in a raft on the Pacific followed by brutal treatment in a series of Japanese prison camps, I could deal with my favorite restaurants being shuttered. 

Also in audio format I enjoyed Rocket Men by Robert Kurson. It was another book I found on Libby just because it was available and it turned out to be one of my favorites. It follows the flight of Apollo 8, the first manned trip to the moon (the three astronauts circled it without landing). What would have been a dangerous adventure in any event was made incredibly so because NASA moved up the rendezvous with the moon by two flights, trying to beat the Russians to the prize. The giant Saturn V rocket they rode had only been tested twice and the second test had ended in disaster. On the crew was Jim Lovell, who grew up in Milwaukee and attended UW-Madison. Of course, Lovell became really famous because of the near disaster that occured when he commanded Apollo 13. 

If you like space and aviation history other good books in that category include Space Race by Deborah Cadbury, American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley, The Aviators by Winston Groom and, of course, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. 

I liked Kurson’s writing so much that I followed Rocket Men with an earlier work, Shadow Divers, about deep sea wreck divers who discover a lost German World War II U-boat at the bottom of the Atlantic off the coast of New Jersey and spend years trying to figure out just which boat it is and who the crewmen were. 

I tend not to read much fiction, but two books I enjoyed very much in addition to The Summer Before the War were The Cactus League by Emily Nemens and The Devil Takes One by Blue Mounds writer Dennis Chandler (the cover photo is taken by his friend, Madison restaurateur and man about town Christopher Berge). I came across Chandler’s short story collection because it was reviewed in Isthmus and Nemens' book came highly recommended by my old friend and voracious reader Denny Burke, a semi-retired defense lawyer. 

This year I eschewed the New York Times Book Review because they review only new releases and because I find myself more and more disenchanted with their picks. The Cactus League was well reviewed by both the Times and Denny Burke, but I read it because Denny liked it. And The Devil Takes One, a self-published short story collection about middle aged men in the Midwest, will never find its way into the Times Book Review. It’s another reminder of why we need local journalism in general and Isthmus in particular. 

My final recommendation is Furious Hours by Casey Cep. It’s three biographies woven together around a murder trial in a small Southern town. The subjects are the accused man who is a charismatic preacher, his lawyer who is a liberal in the conservative South, and a writer who shows up to write a book about the trial and who turns out to be Harper Lee. The whole book is good but what I liked most was the description of the lifelong relationship between Lee and Truman Capote. Lee served as a research assistant on Capote’s masterpiece In Cold Blood just as her own career exploded with To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee was a stickler for accuracy while Capote wasn’t going to let the facts get in the way of a good story. 

That’s my A list for the year. Don’t let anything get in the way of your reading a good story in 2021 — but let’s hope there are a lot more distractions. 

So, what was your favorite book of 2020?