Book Report 2020: Fiction

The year 2020 brought a plague on the world, but was a bonanza for my life in books. I am part of a half dozen book groups, so I read books I might never have read or known about otherwise. 

I group the books I read in broad categories: Faith, Fiction, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology and Science. The biggest category is fiction so I will start there. 

Nine of the 50 books I read in 2020 are volumes 13-21 of the Master and Commander Series by Patrick O’Brian. I read the first 12 in 2019. It is a wonderful series with many reflections on friendship and leadership and life. Here is a passage on leadership.

Here is last year's list which begins with my delight reading this series. Of course, men crowded on a wooden ship made me think about men crammed into a tank.

The movie is worth watching. The friendship at the center of books is portrayed very well in the movie and some of the good scenes in the book make it into the movie. 

The next two books on the fiction list are the first two of five, 1,000-page volumes in the Game of Thrones series.  This fantasy series was among the best and most popular series on HBO: 8 seasons of sex and slaughter and first-rate acting and political intrigue.  But the books are better. Even eight seasons comprising 80 hours of drama omits some of the depth and character development that can happen in 5,000 pages.  And there are still two volumes yet to be published.  The author is more than three score and ten years old and does not have a healthy lifestyle.  I hope he finishes the final volumes!!!

The next two fiction books I read with the book group that began as four friends who were ESL volunteers sharing books and then became a book club.  This year, two of the seven books of the ESL Friends and Others Book Club were plague books:  Love in the Time of Cholera and The Decameron.  

The best part of the discussion of Cholera was Sarah Reisert on a ten-minute rant about how the book is a beautifully written account of misogyny, child abuse, child molestation, pedophilia, and other misanthropies.  It is all of that and a wonderful story and since it is fiction, no actual humans were harmed and the discussion continued about the parts we liked and did not like.  

The Decameron was better than I remembered. We skipped some of the worst stories of anti-semitism although we did have a long discussion of the last tale which is a tale of terrible abuse of a spouse. Chelsea Pomponio guided us through the two discussions we had of Bocaccio's masterpiece. He PhD thesis is on Bocaccio along with his Florentine contemporaries Dante and Petrarch.  I keep returning to these stories. I am fascinated by the hundred-tale poetic form that I love so much in the cantos of the Divine Comedy.  

The Decameron is paired with The Divine Comedy as the "human comedy."  The New Yorker's Joan Acocella wrote a lovely article about a new translation of Decameron in 2013.

In the spring, I re-read Memoir from and Antproof Case by Mark Helprin.  I have loved his work since I first read one of his stories in the New Yorker almost forty years ago. This is a crazy tale of a coffee-obsessed American pilot living in Brazil who seems like an old crank--and that's all--but has a wonderful story that unfolds over 500 pages.  Winters Tale  and Paris in the Present Tense are my favorites by Helprin, but this one is good. Along with Kazuo Ishiguro, Helprin is my favorite living writer, but I hate is politics as much as I love the politics of Ishiguro. 

The only Russian novel I read this year was The Head of Professor Dowel a creepy tale of three people kept alive as disembodied heads.  I meant to read it for year's and finally got around to it.  It is clearly an antecedent of C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength in which the "head" of a conspiracy is a disembodied head.  

At the prompting of my friend and former co-worker and talented writer Michal Meyer, I finally read both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and I read them both by reading Good Omens. It's a very funny book on the near end of the world averted at the last moment by an angel and a demon who each "love the world" too much to be good at their respective jobs.  

The last book on my fiction list for 2020 is The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I first read this almost forty years ago. This tale of looking for the meaning of the universe--and finding out that it's meaningless seemed just right for a year of pandemic made worse by incompetent, pathetic leadership. "Don't Panic" is a great motto for 2020.  

A couple of months ago, I wrote about book groups as a diversion for the pandemic year. Some things don't work so well on Zoom, but book discussions among small groups of interested participants work very well.