Books of 2019

This morning, AA said to me by text, "Aren't you going to blog about your Books of 2019?" And so here I am doing it, while he's on an airplane heading back home so we can celebrate New Year's Eve just in time with a glass of prosecco. Normally I write this post soon after the annual 100 Notable Books from The New York Times comes out, but we were away at that time and . . . well, that thing called daily life just kept delaying things. Over the last few years, though, I've discovered that not all of the books on the list are among my favorites once I actually read them. Case in point: last year, Tana French's The Witch Elm and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry were on their list, and I was eager to read them, but to be frank I didn't find either book to be "best" reads. In my opinion, French's book was too dense with excessive details for that type of book (mystery/thriller), so by the time you started getting into the actual mystery, the suspense wasn't there for me. Halliday's book, in turn, was creative as a writing experiment (two novellas that seem to have nothing to do with one another, then somehow become linked in a coda-story), so it wasn't as if I didn't like the book, but it just wasn't what I would consider to be a favorite. All that said, I had commented last year about looking forward to reading Michelle Obama's autobiography, and that was great--inspiring even! I guess I'm biased, but what made it such an enjoyable read was that it felt like she was talking to you the entire time, telling you not just about her life but the lessons she learned from her experiences.

The image you see above is undoubtedly my favorite novel that I read this year. Colson Whitehead's new book was published in 2019 and I bought and read it immediately. I loved The Underground Railroad, as painful as that book was to read, so while The Nickel Boys wasn't "magically realistic" as components of his previous book was, the pain and anguish, and the lessons we have to learn still about America's history of racism and abuse of power, were remarkably strong with completely different types of stories. Whitehead has this uncanny ability in these two books to create a narrative voice that allows you to feel the pain of his characters, but still keep yourself at a distance so you can process it objectively. I see him as an heir to Toni Morrison in some ways. I have no doubt that these two books will be models of a new American literature for generations to come, much the same way Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird has been. That was a book I also finally read earlier this year for the first time. I discovered the Icelandic author Sjón this year with his fairy-tale-with-a-twist The Blue Fox, and I thoroughly enjoyed, both as a mystery and a meta-novel, Anthony Horowitz's clever The Word Is Murder. I should add that a year ago when I did my last books post, I was worried that Persuasion wasn't going to end well, but I'm pleased to say that it was in fact probably my favorite Jane Austen novel of them all. I read somewhere that if you loved Pride and Prejudice as a young person, Persuasion is the book you read as a mature adult to find satisfaction in her writing. It is so true.

In the world of non-fiction, I enjoyed and learned a lot from Richard Holmes's group biography The Age of Wonder, on the history of science and Romanticism around the years 1800. I read the collection of essays Beyond the Face, providing new interpretations on portraiture in the history of art of the United States and beyond, and published a book review of it which you can read here as well as my blog post here where I add more about the artist Carrie Mae Weems. I also read Anthea Callen's new art history/anatomy book Looking at Men, and published an extended book review essay in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, which you can read here. Right now, my bedtime read is Robert K. Massie's biography of Catherine the Great, and my subway reading is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which I read back in college (almost 30 years ago!), but decided to revisit all these years later.

It seemed like a good idea to actually share the full list of the 30 books I've read this year. This is the order in which I finished them, and I've included the publication year in brackets, and my star rankings (5-stars is highest!) to help anyone along if they decide they want to read these. Here's to 2020 and more books to read!

• Persuasion by Jane Austen [1818] (*****)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee [1960] (*****)
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes [2008] (*****)
• Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture by Wendy Wick Reaves, ed. [2018] (****)
• Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason, trans. B. Scudder & V. Cribb [2005] (****)
• The Blue Fox by Sjón, trans. V. Cribb [2004] (*****)
• Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art by Philip Hook [2017] (***)
• The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories by Hilary Mantel [2014] (***)
• The Body in Three Dimensions by Tom Flynn [1998] (***)
• Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein [1999] (****)
• Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body [2018] (***)
• Becoming by Michelle Obama [2018] (*****)
• The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware [2018] (***)
• The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity by Linda Nochlin [1994] (****)
• Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes by Martin Edwards, ed. [2016] (****)
• Model and Supermodel: The Artist's Model in British Art and Culture by J. Desmarais, M. Postle & W. Vaughan, eds. [2006] (****)
• Bloomsbury at Home by Pamela Todd [1999] (****)
• Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday [2018] (****)
• Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group by Douglas Blair Turnbaugh [1987] (***)
• The Child’s Child by Barbara Vine [2012] (***)
• The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead [2019] (*****)
• The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst [2017] (****)
• Harm Done by Ruth Rendell [1999] (****)
• Bacchante and Infant Faun: Tradition, Controversy, and Legacy by Thayer Tolles [2019] (****)
• 30 Favorites Celebrating 30 Years by Stacia Lewandowski & Zaplin Lampert Gallery [2017] (***)
• The Stonewall Reader by Jason Baumann, ed. [2019] (***)
• Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rika Burnham & Elliott Kai-Kee [2011] (****)
• Losing Helen: An Essay by Carol Becker [2016] (*****)
• The Witch Elm by Tana French [2018] (***)
• The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz [2018] (*****)