-->
Jill Lepore, author of These Truths, my favorite book of 2018
When I looked at the list of books I read in 2018, I realized that the books fell into groups of three:
· Three books by the historian of
The Holocaust, Eastern Europe and Fascism, Timothy Snyder.
· Three detective novels by the
delightful mystery writer Alison Joseph.
· I re-read three books by C.S.
Lewis.
· In addition to threes by
author, there were threes by type: I
read three science books, three books with French text, and, including books I
am currently reading, three books with Russian text and three with Hebrew text,
just one with Ancient Greek text.
· I read three philosophy books:
two by Hannah Arendt, one by Mark Belaguer.
· Among the seven history books I
read were three about Israel: one about the Yom Kippur War, one about the
Battle for Jerusalem in 1948, and one chronicling the history of the Hebrew
language.
· Another three history books
were about America. I finally read Anti-Intellectualism in America by Richard
Hofstadter, at the same time I was reading and annotated Constitution of the
US, and my favorite book of the year These Truths by Jill Lepore—a one-volume, nearly-one-thousand-page
history of the United States.
· The dozen fiction books I read
include the three by Alison Joseph; three authors I have read for the first
time: Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, and Albert Camus; three books by authors of
whom I have read nearly everything the have written: Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark
Helprin and George Orwell; and I finally read Dune by Frank Herbert.
· Since everything can’t go in
threes, I read one art book, a biography of U.S. Grant, Four Quartets by T.S.
Eliot, two self-help books and a dull memoir.
· This year there were no books I
loathed, as happened last year, but I did have the experience for the first
time of not really liking a book by Kazuo Ishiguro. This year I read
Unconsoled. I had read all of his other books and stories and was enthralled.
But Unconsoled left me flat. I read it to the end, hoping the magic would be
there, but it was not. On the other hand, the book I read by Mark Helprin
“Paris in the Present Tense” is now my favorite among all of his books and
stories.
In
future blog posts, I will write in more detail about my groups of three.
Since
I am getting more and more history and analysis from podcasts, I am also going
to write a post about this method of information delivery along with books.
