2019 in Books

[mousetrappling]

Last year I read 51 books, 48 of which I started during the year and one of which I didn't finish (and in fact didn't start that one this year either). 12 were non-fiction, and 39 were fiction; 50 dead tree and only 1 electronic; and 22 were new with 29 re-reads. And I spent 256 hours reading (+/- rounding errors in my spreadsheet).

Mildly surprising stats (for me) as I generally don't read non-fiction fast enough to get 12 in a year. I was also expecting to have a higher number of re-reads as I'm still working on my Read All the Fiction project of re-reading all the fiction I/we own. There must've been a higher proportion of books we own but I'd not got round to reading than I expected in this batch.

Non-fiction

I read three sorts of non-fiction this year, with varying speeds. The book I carried into and out of the year unfinished is the first category - I am working my way through some of our Egyptology books in a very thorough fashion taking notes as I go. It's very much a backburner project, so given how much this year exploded into busy-ness it's not surprising I've not got much further with it. The book in question is "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3,000BC to Cleopatra" by Toby Wilkinson.

The next sort of non-fiction is what I think of as proper non-fiction, but I'm finding it hard to define - "not fluff" is the best way I can think of to define it. 5 of these this year, one carried in from last year:

• "The Making of the Middle Sea" Cyprian Broodbank - a look at the history of all the way around the Mediterranean from before there were Homo sapiens through to the beginning of the Classical World. Obviously it's pretty high level overview, but full of information and things I didn't know. Also a reminder that the world has always been interconnected, even if the scale differs.
• "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" Douglas Hofstader - a book about logic and philosophy and music and mathematics and illusions and computers and how we think and how they might think. A formative book of my adolescence, I think I read it every year in my teens.
• "SPQR" Mary Beard - history of Rome from the founding through to the early 2nd Century CE. I particularly liked the way she looked at what the stories they told about themselves tell us about their values etc.
• "Thomas Cromwell" Diarmaid MacCulloch - a very thorough biography of Thomas Cromwell. Although I do enjoy them I tend to find MacCulloch's books a little too detail oriented but in this case I have a good enough grasp of the big picture to keep track of the details.
• "She Has Her Mother's Laugh" Carl Zimmer - a book about inheritance (in the biological sense) and the history of our understanding of the subject. And about how it's all so much more complicated than it looks on the surface. An odd mix, for me, of stuff I know already and stuff that has been discovered since I stopped working in biological sciences. I kinda inhaled this over Christmas at my father's house, very readable.

And lastly there's the fluffy non-fiction which is where I get myself up to 12 books. Most of these came out of the library, or I read them after J had finished them and recommended them.

• "The Curated Closet" Anushcka Rees - I'm not enough of a fashionista to actually work through the programme in the book to cultivate my own signature style, but I did find a lot of useful ideas and got myself out of the rut I felt I was in with how I dressed & did my makeup.
• "Do I Owe You Money?" Georgina Wistow - Ian Mosley's memoir written by Wistow. He's the drummer in Marillion, hence why we had the book, but I think it would be a lot of fun to read even if you've not heard of Marillion. Lots of anecdotes about working in the music industry and living as a rockstar.
• "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying" Marie Kondo - I several times came across people who said don't dismiss this book without reading it, the idea you've picked up through cultural osmosis is likely wrong. And, well, they're not wrong but equally still too full of woo for me.  Mind you, I did refold the contents of my underwear drawer into half the space so at least one useful thing ;)
• "How to Be Right in a World Gone Wrong" James O'Brien - mostly a long form boggle at and attempt to engage with the ideas & people on the other side of many issues to the author. An enjoyable read (presumably only if your politics are congruent with his tho).
• "Deep Work" Cal Newport - one of those books I've seen referenced a lot, so thought I should read it and see what I thought. Some useful ideas about focus, and about how to achieve it.
• "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck" Mark Manson - I've read a few of his blog posts and liked them so thought I'd get the book out of the library. A modern rendition of the bits of Stoic philosophy that are palatable to modern people (at least as far as I understand stoicism ...). So a fairly straight-forward bloke-aimed self-help book (self-help type books for women are full of inner goddesses, self-help type books for men are full of stiff upper lips, I prefer the men's ones). But I find his writing style entertaining so I didn't begrudge the time reading it.

Fiction

39 fiction books, of which 36 were part of the Read All The Fiction project. The other 3 were:

• "The Raven" Ann Leckie - my only e-book of the year. Liked it, tho it felt a little short. It was a thinky book, and writing this post now I'm thinking it might bear a re-read soon in part to see how it reads when I know how it'll come out.
• "Arrival" Ted Chiang - J had watched the film and it's based on a Chiang short story, so I got the compilation that it's in out of the library. My recollection now at the other end of the year is that all the stories were quite clever but some of them suffered from only being clever.
• "Making History" Stephen Fry - I'd read a review of this (the reviewer wasn't fond) but thought it sounded interesting enough to read. I actually rather liked it - the initially unsympathetic protagonist had a good arc over the book and it was an interesting take on the "if you could kill Hitler would you?".

I'm not going to go through the rest of the books in detail, too many of them. But I'll group them by author and mention some standout things.

• Stephen Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen plus 2 novellas in the same world - mainline sequence from Midnight Tides (the others before that were in 2018). Most of these were new to me, I'd not kept up as we were buying them. I still love the beginning of the series, but I felt it fizzled a bit towards the end with a side order of what felt like gratuitous violence in the last couple of books. Decided not to buy any more of the other books that fit around this series, at least for now.
• Raymond E. Feist's The Riftwar Saga - this is the first series in this great sprawling universe, and the only ones we own. Fun reads but I still don't really feel the need for any more of them to keep (I've read more in the past from the library). They feel quite generic, tho there are bits & pieces that make them unique but not enough to make them special.
• a handful of Dick Francis books - I like these, he's got a knack for character that makes each protagonist feel like a unique individual even though there's clearly an underlying formala to the books. As the 5 I own span 30 or more years you can also see that Francis was capable of adapting his plots as technology and society changed etc (like mobile phones show up in the most recent one I own c. 2000 and alter how the story plays out).  Candyfloss for the brain, but sometimes that's just what one needs.
• a whole collection of Neil Gaiman books - I've always found Gaiman a bit hit & miss, but I was pleased to see the ones we own are more hit than miss. I particularly appreciated the Egyptian references in American Gods this time round, and Neverwhere was also more compelling than I remembered.
• a selection of Alan Garner books - The Owl Service is the one I partly remember from childhood, embedded somewhere slightly beneath my conscious mind (a deeply creepy story of Welsh mythology embedded in a modern (for the time) setting). More famous are The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, and we recently bought the last of the trilogy (which was only published in the last few years and is Not A Children's Book). I like Garner's stuff, he's unsettling and creepy but compelling as well, and it holds up well for an adult reader.
• "Legend" David Gemmell - the only Gemmell I own, not quite sure why I never got more, except I re-read this and liked it but still didn't really fancy picking up more. Perhaps a tad generic? But then again it was definitely critiquing the genre so not really that generic.
• a selection of books by Mary Gentle - this is the author I'm in the middle of. I was really looking forward to re-reading "Ash: A Secret History" because it's only of my favourite books, and having re-read it it still is. I like what she does with the framing device, I like how she merges several genres, I like the big two fingers up at "you can't have women in medievaloid military fantasy it's not realistic" nonsense. It's got themes about how to be a woman, about nature vs. nurture, about free will. It's also an epic story. So far I've also read Ilario (which is set in the same world and has a lot about gender and gender roles in its themes as well), and 1610 (which isn't the same world, and has a lot about free will (but also a relationship I found a bit unsettling)). They are all good stories too, it's just they're also the sort of books that make me think about things, and I like fiction that does that.

So that's my year in books. More than either 2017 or 2018 (both were 41), which are the only other years in the spreadsheet. I guess reading more "fluffy" non-fiction helped that total.