2019 Best Reads (Maybe?)

On the subject of reading, I cannot brag. I only read 34 books this year. I don’t know that the number is above average, below average, or average. I don’t keep track of average. One of my friends made it to 52 novels this year.

There were some first-time authors that didn’t make the cut for 2019 Moore’s Best Reads and some oldies that did and other that didn’t make the cut. I like to peruse the new-book shelf at the Johnson City Public Library before going to my waiting list. And some of my more favorites were choices for the book groups at the library.

Something of a proviso: I stop reading anything that doesn’t interest me, without regard to recommendations or stars or likes. There is no telling the number of false starts in a year.

In no particular order in the fiction category: “Ordinary Grace” by William Kent Krueger (very good), “The Spaceship Next Door” by Gene Doucette (inventive), “Paradise Sky” by Joe Lansdale (rivals McCarthy?), “1984” by George Orwell (spooky scary), “The Fighter” by Michael Farris Smith (out-of-the-blue good!), “Slaughterhouse 5” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (strangely entertaining), “The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter” by Malcolm Mackay (top notch noir).

I read non-fiction partly to steer away from the sometimes overwhelming crush of crummy beach-read fiction. For non-fiction, these stood out: “Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick” by Les Standiford, “Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft…” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Both excellent works and so very much appropriate in the current discourse. I was certainly influenced to read Goodwin after her visit to Johnson City as I imagine were the other one-thousand people at her presentation.

Just making it in under the year-end deadline was the very good non-fiction, “I Heard You Paint Houses…” by Charles Brandt. If you enjoyed “The Irishman” you might like this but it helps to be as old as I am to remember some of this stuff. Brandt uses the Irishman’s taped interviews to provide the bulk of the book.

Got to plug JCPL, still the best place to start your reading for 2020.
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