2019 in books

2019 ended for me pretty much as it began: reading airport thrillers on a Greyhound. I started the year with a Jack Reacher novel between Sudbury and Ottawa. I (almost) ended it on the way back reading The Institute by Stephen King. In between (and shortly after), I read 33 other books in 2019. While this falls short of my intended annual goal of 50 books, I managed to read a lot more titles than in previous years since I started tracking my reading. Usually I manage somewhere in the mid-20s.

(I think, in fact, The Institute is the only thing I read this past year that was actually published in 2019, which is kind of ironic for a post titled "2019 in Books.")

Here are some of the highlights of my reading pursuits.

Best book read: Probably, this was The Outsider, also by Stephen King. This is a sequel of sorts to King's Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch), in which Bill's neurotic assistant, Holly Gibney, is a principal character. Unlike the other Hodges books, which are (more or less) hardboiled detective novels, The Outsider only begins as a detective procedural, but eventually enters more traditional King territory when it takes a turn into supernatural horror.

I have been working on a long-term reading plan since around 2010 to read through all of King's books in order of publication, starting, of course, with Carrie. The last book I read this year was Lisey's Story. If it seems I've got a very broad-minded view of what "chronological order" means, keep in mind that I have a close friend who likes to give me recent King novels as gifts. He started this little tradition with Under the Dome in 2011 - which, if I kept to a strict chronological order, I would finally get to in 2020. While he knows my reading plan, at the same time I'm obviously not going to deliberately hold on to a gift  book for ten years before reading it just to satisfy some personal goal. As a result, I have a list of King's books from which I cross off titles as I finish them, and it looks somewhat like I'm working my way through both ends and will ultimately meet in the middle. And that's fine.

Most disappointing read: Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner. My other main reading plan is to read through all the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction novels, again in order. Years ago, one of my English professors, who had taught the second-year course in science fiction in the past, highly recommended Brunner's novel The Sheep Look Up. Unfortunately, this book was next to impossible to find, even 25 years ago. So when I began this reading plan, I was looking forward to reading this other Brunner classic. I didn't enjoy it at all. It was disjointed, had too many characters and too many plot lines, yet not enough plot. The story's main premise is an overpopulation crisis in 2010. (Much like climate change is for the 2010s, overpopulation was the fashionable doomsday crisis of the late 1960s, thanks to screeds like The Population Bomb by wolf-crier Paul Ehrlich.) While in 1968, Brunner correctly predicted the global population in 2010 (seven billion), the overpopulation crisis that drives the story never came to pass: in fact, today we have double the population and less malnutrition. The Malthusian doomsayers have been getting this one wrong for over 200 years.

Best new discovery: I can't say I broke much new ground this year, so this was probably The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, by Sax Rohmer. As a mild Sinophile, it was fun reading a crime thriller from 1913 at the height of the Yellow Peril. (The typical cinematic depiction of Fu Manchu also inspired my default Minecraft skin, for what it's worth.)

Finally!: After several years, I finished Andrew Roberts' history of World War II, The Storm of War. I heartily recommend this book if you want an engaging, one-volume history of the war. I also completed Stephen King's Dark Tower series. King considers this his magnum opus. I thought it was okay. It got weird (mainly, needlessly meta) at the end. As much as I'd like to say I finished A Song of Ice and Fire as well, the reality is that I've only caught up. The rest depends on Goege Martin getting the final two volumes on bookstore shelves.

What's in store for 2020? My various ongoing plans will continue, of course. It might still be unrealistic to read 50 books over the year, but in 2019, 40 was within reach, and I'll see if I can at least pull that off. I have adopted a reading challenge suggested by Kim Shay, as well. With categories such as books by non-Western, female, or little-known authors, or genres such as biography where I rarely tread, it has the potential to stretch my boundaries a bit. I'd encourage you to try it out yourself.