Best Books Read 2019

Instead of focusing on the best books published in 2019, my tradition has been to revisit the books I read in 2019 and ruminate about them to see if any theme emerges, no matter if it’s a stretch. A complete list of what has been read is on the sidebar of the homepage. I know its not that many books numbers wise, (barely over 20), but in my defense a couple of them were challenging reads such as A Savage of Peace: The Algerian War 1954-1962 (1977, 1996) by Alastair Horne which I wrote a longer essay about.

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001)

An interesting phenomenon about reading is how some authors must reach a critical mass in your mind before you pick up one of his or her books. My older daughter Cynthia mentioned Sebald in a paper of hers, and then he was mentioned in Jose Carrión’s Bookhops (from last year’s best books list) before I picked up a copy of Austerlitz (2001) at  Powell’s City of Books in Portland.

Born in Germany, Sebald spent much of his life in England teaching German literature. He has a most unusual writing style described as “elliptical a combination of “memoir, fiction, travelogue, history and biography.” I read two of what Sebald himself described as documentary fictions .  The first was Austerlitz, which tells the tale of man who tries to reconstruct his childhood when he discovers that he was sent by his Jewish parents from Czechoslovakia to England on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the country. In his other book The Rings of Saturn, (1995) the narrator roams throughout the Norwich area of England discovering the connections between his walks and the world at large. Each book is characterized by long passages with very few paragraphs but interspersed with grainy black and white photographs to illustrate his descriptions (kind of like a blog on paper).

Totalitarianism, Democracy

There seems to be a common theme in this year’s Best Books and that has been trying to understand 2019 better through the lens of 20th century history. It began with reading Eric Villiard’s The Order of the Day (2017) a short nonfiction book which looks how Nazi Germany annexed Austria months ahead of World War II and how Adolf Hitler was aided and supported by the German industrial giants of  Bayer, IG Farben, and Thyssen-Krupp (and others) who profited and whose fortunes were relatively unscathed by the war. 

Memorial to the Victim of Communism - Prague

Going to the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany this fall, I did do some “reading ahead” of the history of these countries. Two books by Czech expat Josef Skvorecky captures the dismal society under Soviet control in then Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. Another book Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945, (2002) which I had written about previously introduces to the ghastly bloody end of World War II and how it set in motion the Cold War. My takeaway: Don’t take the threats from the Soviets/Russians lightly, they are tough, long suffering people who historically know how inflict major suffering on others.

As some sort of counterbalance to totalitarianism fanfare, I read the new edition of Charles Black Jr. and Philip Bobbitt’s The Impeachment Handbook (2018) which without mentioning Donald Trump discusses the history of impeachment, entails impeachable crimes and a discussion of the seven fallacies surrounding impeachment.

It’s a tidy short book and on a lark, I sent one via Amazon to our Georgia U.S. Senator David Perdue. I hope someone will take the lead and send a copy to the newly appointed Kelly Loeffler who is temporarily replacing our other senator. But perhaps she should consider buying her own since she’s contributing $20 million of her personal forture to her  campaign in 2020. 

I’ve also been reading Astra Taylor, Democracy Doesn’t Exist, But We’re Going to Miss it When It’s Gone (2018) just to put an historical perspective on what democracy really means and how it is distinguished from equality and freedom. You can see how obsessive I’ve become in 2019 even though I have been trying to limit watching the news on television.

One final note to ponder about democracy, in the aforementioned A Savage War of Peace one of the tipping points in that lead to the outbreak of eight years of terrorism and bloodshed was the French denying voting rights to the Algerian Muslim population through intimidation. Something to ponder in the age of gerrymandering and making it more challenging for people to vote whether it’s making it more difficult for college students to vote in New Hampshire or purging voting registrations in Georgia.

Luke Skywalker Can’t Read

I feel I must finish on somewhat a lighter note. I thoroughly enjoyed the cleverness of Ryan Britt's Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths (2015). Britt’ is  a great fan of science fiction – looks at some of the oddities of this world: Sherlock Holmes as a sci-fi institution, “looking at Star Trek as a half assed religion” and the of course thinking about Luke Skywalker’s favorite books. Britt writes:

Sadly, Luke Skywalker doesn’t have a favorite book. And even though he’s the ultimate dreamer, a craver of adventure, a wide-eyed Joseph Campbell archetype hero, he’s initially presented to us as a kind of philistine. This supposed pop descendent of Odysseus and Perseus lives in the zip code of a galaxy far, far away, meaning he’s got not no Shakespeare, Homer, Robert Louis Stevenson, J.M. Barrie, or even J.K. Rowling to get him excited about packing up and seeking adventure…As depicted in the first “real” Star Wars film, in 1977, Luke Skywalker—when you consider a substantial amount of evidence—is a functionally illiterate person and his fellow citizens might not be much better off. Not once in any of the existing Star Wars movies does a person, droid, or creature pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or a chapbook of Wookie poetry.

Fear not, blog visitor, because just being here you prove you are a discriminating reader (Our marketing team reports that functional illiterates avoid the blog.) Thanks for visiting and I hope you newcomers will become subscribers in 2020. I will take an oath not to bore you in 2020 and unlike many, I take oaths very seriously.

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If you’d like to purchase online any of the books that you’ve read about here, please begin your shopping at the Destination Books Alibris store at destination.alibrisstore.com. Any Alibris purchase that originates from Destination Books link benefits the blog as a small percentage of the price goes back into  supporting this “obsession.”  

Comments

[Ian Joyce]

I saw Astra Taylor introduce her film What is Democracy? at Greensboro Bound Literary Festival last May, and am curious if her book is similar in its approach to the subject. The documentary is impressionistic, and there isn't a central thesis of democracy other than we seem to know it when we see it.

I'm slowly making my way through A Savage War of Peace. I keep returning to earlier sections to reread.

[Murray Browne]

I first heard about Astra Taylor when she was interviewed in Sun Magazine's November issue. I am about 2/3 of the way thru Democracy May Not Exist. It is a little bit all over the place, but chunks are insightful and thought-provoking. Savage War is DENSE so I get the rereading part. I really like Horne and was most impressed the decades of work he put into writing and updating the book. I liked his books about Verdun and key globe-shaping battles of the 20th Centuries including the Battle of Moscow, which featured as much Russia-German carnage at Stalingrad. Good hearing from you, traveler.