2019

Here are all the books I read in 2019:

January 2019

• The Great Courses: Dante's Divine Comedy, by Ronald B. Herzman and William R. Cook
• Zero G, by Dan Wells
• Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, by Alex Hutchinson

February 2019

• Deep Work, by Cal Newport
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
• Baking With Kafka, by Tom Gauld
• The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, by Maryrose Wood
• Sidequest: In Realms Ungoogled, by Frank J. Fleming

April 2019

• Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture, by Ken Jennings
• Aspects of Forgiveness: The Basis for Justification and its Modern Denial, by Philip Hale
• A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
• Tetris: The Games People Play, by Box Brown

May 2019

• Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

June 2019

• The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (abridged)

July 2019

• Among Others, by Jo Walton
• Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny
• Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

August 2019

• Lawn Boy, by Gary Paulsen
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
• The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1: The Path to Power, by Robert Caro
• Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court, by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino

October 2019

• The Keepers: The Box and the Dragonfly, by Ted Sanders
• Redshirts, by John Scalzi
• The Body, by Stephen King
• Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, by Ben Reiter
• The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris
• Studies in Words, by C. S. Lewis

November 2019

• 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea, by Jonathan Franklin
• A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons, by Ben Folds

Summary:

31 total books: 15 audio, 16 print; 16 fiction, 15 non-fiction. In several cases, I switched between print and audio, but I have counted all of those as audio here.

These are books that I chose not to finish:

• The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King, by Jerome Charyn
• Roughing It, by Mark Twain
• Startide Rising, by David Brin
• Arguably: Essays, by Christopher Hitchens (I only read certain essays that looked interesting)
• Liturgy and Society, by A. G. Hebert (I didn't write an entry for this one. I got it for $1 at Brattle Books in Boston. It's by an Anglican and started out interesting but seemed to be going off the rails about the time I started losing interest...)

Startide Rising, although I only read about 50 pages, was one of the more important books I read this year, because it prompted me to rethink what kind of books I like to read. I expect to read a lot more non-fiction, history, and biography in 2020 as a result.

The LBJ and Teddy Roosevelt bios were highlights of the year. I finished 2019 about 2/3 of the way through Storyteller (a biography of Roald Dahl), which is good but kind of slow; I wasn’t able to finish it before the end of the year.