I am a slow reader, but I stay at it. Once I’ve committed to a book I feel some sort of weird moral obligation to finish it even if it turns out not to be enjoyable. Given those two conditions — I’m both plodding and dogged — I get through many fewer books than you’d expect from a guy who reads a lot.
The tally is usually around two dozen books a year, though in my defense some of those are 600-page doorstops and I read every damn word.
I’m sharing this year’s list in the hopes that it might give you an idea or two about what you’d like to read next, but what I really hope is that you’ll add your own lists in the comments section below. Not all of these books were published in 2019; in fact, most weren’t. These are just the books I most enjoyed over the last 12 months.
In no particular order, here goes.
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser. If you grew up reading the Little House series and you don’t like to have your heroines crushed, you might want to skip this one. Wilder turns out to be an America Firster, a staunch opponent of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and an isolationist who downplayed the threat of Adolf Hitler. But she was a lovely writer and this is a rare book, which is in part about the behind-the-scenes intrigues and struggles in the publishing business. The Little House books didn’t just happen. They were pushed and shoved into existence mostly by Wilder’s daughter, Rose, who was a successful writer and editor in her own right and whose politics were even more conservative than Wilder’s. It’s not all happy reading, but it’s interesting throughout. And, taken as a whole, Fraser paints a positive image of Wilder despite her politics.
The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight by Winston Groom. I ran into the Middleton Library to grab an audio book for a five-hour drive ahead of me. I snatched up the first title that seemed like it would keep me awake and aviators starts with “A.” It turned out to be nearly my favorite book of the year. This is a page-turner (or in my case and audio book that I couldn’t turn off) that will leave you wondering how each of these guys ended up dying old.
Endurance: Shackelton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. Like The Aviators, this book has long passages where the author puts you in the middle of the misery and danger to the extent that you wonder how much more you can take. This is the story of Ernest Shackelton and his 28 fellow explorers whose ship, the Endurance, became trapped and then crushed in the Antarctic ice in1915. They were forced to set out on foot and life boat to save their lives. You’ll race through this book to find out how they did.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker. This book could change your outlook on life. Everything is getting better, not worse. Abject poverty, disease, wars, crime, illiteracy — all those things are decreasing rapidly. And Pinker, a Harvard professor, has the charts to prove it. More importantly, he makes a strong case for classic liberal Enlightenment values that are now under attack by populism.
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town by John Grisham. Grisham’s only non-fiction work, it’s a story so good he couldn’t make it up. It’s a portrait of a sad, mean Oklahoma town and a high school sports hero who finds himself in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America by Thurston Clarke. On a long drive back from the Rockies I listened to this book that I’d already read twice about RFK’s too brief 1968 presidential campaign. “Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘it might have been.’“
Hunter’s Moon by Phil Caputo. There’s virtually no literature these days about middle-aged men, my people. And, with Jim Harrison now gone, there’s really no literature about men in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a subgenre of a subgenre if there ever was one. In a popular culture that too often sees men as one-dimensional oppressors or bumbling fools, Caputo’s short stories, all beautifully written and loosely connected, treat men of a certain age with the compassion and complexity they deserve.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London. We got a new puppy this year, which inspired me to read this classic. I read some of it while Maple snuggled with me in my chair. Hard to imagine our spoiled little dog being that tough, resourceful and noble. But there have been times I’ve forgotten the treats when we’re out on our walks. So, there’s that. She’s so brave. You may see a resurgence of this classic story as it has been made into a new movie with Harrison Ford (he doesn’t play the dog).
American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley. Many books were written for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing this year. What was new for me in Moonshot was the realization of just how audacious an idea this really was and how close it came to being defunded. Like much of JFK’s ambitious agenda for the nation, it took Lyndon Johnson to get it done.
Working by Robert Caro. A little too self-congratulatory, Caro’s main message is that he just can’t help how hard-working and painstaking he is. Still, this short book is filled with fascinating stories of how he has been able to pull off his masterful biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.
The Day that Went Missing by Richard Beard. A 2019 release that went mostly unnoticed, this is the true story of the complex relationship of a man to his very proper British family. Part real life mystery, Beard tries to trace exactly what happened to his brother who drowned on a family holiday. His own memories are sketchy and his parents won’t talk much. They just decided to carry on. Stay calm and ignore the pain.
The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore. You wouldn’t think that a debate between alternating and direct electric current would make for a riveting historical novel. But Moore makes it work. His book is based on the long-forgotten struggle between Thomas Edison (the champion of direct current who lost) and George Westinghouse (who argued for alternating current and won). Moore breathes life into these real characters while using the story to explain why it all mattered so much.
So there you go. A bunch of books I enjoyed in 2019. What should I read next year?
