Books of a Decade

Timothy Snyder and his little book On Tyranny became my touchstone 

for life after November 2016. He has been sadly correct in his terse predictions.

At the end of this decade, I consolidated ten years of annual book list spreadsheets into one long list of 376 books.  The list divides almost in half between the 177 books by 46 authors—the authors of whom I read between two to eighteen of their books—and the other 199 books.

The others I was obsessed with in the decade just ending:

C.S. Lewis—I re-read 18 of his books and read two books about him. I have read all 39 of the books he wrote during his lifetime and several posthumous collections. I have read something by him pretty much every year since I first read him in 1977. 

Patrick O’Brian—Beginning in June of this year I read the first twelve books in the Master and Commander series. I am reading the 13^th now.  There are seven more to go in the series and a few other books he wrote about sailing.

Hannah Arendt—I first read her a few months after I returned from deployment to Iraq. Sara Rouhi told me I should read her. I have read eleven of her books, an average of a book a year beginning with The Origins of Totalitarianism. Reading Arendt also makes me trendy, because sales of Arendt’s books spiked in November of 2016.

Kazuo Ishiguro—I first read Ishiguro in 2014 and fell in love with his book The Remains of the Day. By last year I had read all the rest of his books and re-read Remains of the Day for a total of ten.

Mark Helprin—next on the list with seven. I have been reading Helprin since 1983 when I read a short story in the New Yorker that was an excerpt from his first novel A Winters Tale.  I read everything he writes as it is published. His latest novel Paris in the Present Tense is my favorite.

George Orwell—I read six of his books this decade, most recently Animal Farm after the last election.

There are four authors of whom I read five books each:

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Timothy Snyder who both write about the dangers of Totalitarianism one from inside Russia during the Soviet era, the other looking back at how the Soviets and Nazis took power and what that history can tell us about current authoritarians.

Alexander Dumas and Joseph Brodsky, I read and re-read for their clarity and beauty.

Milan Kundera and Vasily Grossman are next on my obsession list with four books each.  I had not read Kundera before this decade. Grossman wrote a pair of novels Stalingrad and Life and Fate that together are 1,900+ pages about the battle that turned the tide of World War II against the Nazis.  The second volume Life and Fate is by far the better of the two, but Stalingrad has some brilliant scenes.

I read three books each by ten authors: Aristotle, Herodotus, Machiavelli and Russell Kirk from the past. I read and re-read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hariri, a simply incredible history of our species and his less luminous Homo Deus.  I read three mysteries by Alison Joseph who I met at a lovely reception in London.  Agatha Christie is a character in some of her lovely stories. I read three books by Elmore Leonard after seeing the FX series “Justified” based on Leonard’s novels. 

The list of authors of whom I read two books include novels by Hermann Hesse, Vladimir Nabokov, Sergei Dovlatov, Philip Roth, Boris Pasternak, Victor Pelevin, Tim O’Brien, Tom Robbins, David E. Fischer, Nick Montemarano and Vladimir Sorokin.  I want to read more by all of these writers.  Sorokin is living proof that there is still some freedom in Russian, otherwise his book Day of the Oprichnik would have gotten him killed by Putin.  Robbins is just crazy. Pasternak brings beauty to the smallest scene. Dovlatov is wickedly funny and makes me wish I could read Russian fluently.  Homer, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Dante, Primo Levi, Charles Pierce and Bernard-Henri Levy are also on my two-book list.

Amos Oz is also on the two-book list.  One of the categories I track is whether an author is living or not.  I have been reading more living authors in the past decade than previously. But Oz is on both lists. I read his book How to Cure a Fanatic before he died and his memoir after his passing.

On the one-book list are many authors I hope to read more of, particularly Jill Lepore, Haruki Murakami, James Wood, Svetlana Alexievich, Kurt Vonnegut and many others. 

Also, I re-read The Forgotten Soldier which I first read when I was serving as a tank commander in West Germany in the 1970s.  This book follows a teenager who enlists at 17 and serves in the German Army on the Eastern Front for the entire war with Russia. 

At the end of the year I got interested in the Enneagram and read The Sacred Enneagram. I plan to read The Wisdom of the Enneagram in 2020.

By category, Fiction is one-third of the all the books I read at 120. Most of the other categories fall somewhere in the twenty to thirty books on the topic range: Faith, Memoir and Biography, Politics, Philosophy, Science, Self-Help, History, Poetry and Language. 

The authors I will not read again: Eric Metaxas and Rod Dreher.  Metaxas for me is the worst of sell-out-to-idolatry Trumpvangelicals. Metaxas wrote a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian leader martyred by the Nazis, and now he supports Trump.  He is hideous.  My problem with Dreher is here in my 2017book report.

The first book I will read in 2020 is my quadrennial re-read of The Prince by Machiavelli along with re-reading Black Earth by Timothy Snyder, the 13^th volume of the Master and Commander series, the book listed above on the Enneagram, a volume of poetry by Leonard Cohen and a book called Silence.