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
13th 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 13th 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.
