Old Year, New Year

And always books

I have a blurred snapshot memory of learning to read: small me sitting up in my parents’ big bed with the Calvert School version of the Dick-and-Jane books. But mostly I can’t remember not being able to read. When I think about my relationship to reading, I think of the line from Annie Dillard’s The Living:

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”

I’ve never kept track of my reading, though. Sometimes I wish I had, because it would be fun to have a life list. But it’s always felt like it would add pressure and stress to something I do for pleasure.

Last year at Christmas, though, a friend gave us an 11x17 inch decorative reading log, and I’ve been sticking my books up there as I finish them when I can remember. It’s an imperfect record, but for the first time I have a more-or-less complete list of what I’ve read this year. And from the vantage point of mid-December—about two weeks into a new year on the Christian calendar and about two weeks from the end of the old year on the Gregorian calendar—I’m in the mood to think back over the year in books.

Excluding re-reads (I started the year by binge-reading Margery Allingham’s Mr. Campion mysteries for the umpteenth time), and read-alouds (we finished War and Peace this year!!) and audio books and picture books with my family, here are some of my favorites from the ~60 books I read this year. (Links are for those I interacted with publicly in some form.) If you’re looking for something to round out your reading year or start off the next one, maybe you’ll find something that catches your fancy. I took something worthwhile from every one.

Fiction

• The Dean’s Watch, Elizabeth Goudge

• Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

• The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke

• Greenmantle, John Buchan

• Mr. Standfast, John Buchan

• The Three Hostages, John Buchan

• The Island of Sheep, John Buchan

• The Last Bus to Woodstock, Colin Dexter

• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

• The Hopkins Manuscript, R. C. Sherriff

• The Domesday Book, Connie Willis

Non-fiction

• Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers, Emma Smith

• Unruly Saint, D. L. Mayfield

• Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, John Curran

• God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time, Stephen Prothero

• The Life of Thomas More, Peter Ackroyd

• C. S. Lewis in America, Mark Noll

• A Prairie Faith: The Religious Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, John Fry

• The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, James Atlas

• My Life in Seventeen Books: A Literary Memoir, Jon Sweeney

• The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, Paul Elle

• Flannery O’Connor: Images of Grace, Douglas R. Gilbert and Harold Fickett

• In the House of Tom Bombadil, C. R. Wiley

• Cultural Christians in the Early Church, Nadya Williams

• Jesus Through Medieval Eyes, Grace Hamman

• Cry Out and Write: A Feminine Poetics of Revelation, Peter Edward Nolan

• Medieval Women, Dierdre Jackson

• Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales, Valerie Paradiz

• On the Christian Life, John Calvin, translated by Raymond Blacketer

• On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, Alan Noble

• Recovering From Purity Culture, Camden Morgante

• The Will to Change, bell hooks

Poetry

• Devotions: The Selected Poems, Mary Oliver