2020 was not "a very good year" what with the social unrest in our cities, the increasing political and social distrust and polarization among Americans, and, of course, the pandemic and all the suffering it has wrought.
Nevertheless, the year did allow time for the reading of good books. The Roman orator and politician Cicero once said that "if you have a garden and a library you have everything you need." Well, maybe you wouldn't have quite everything, but you'd certainly have two essentials.
The 16th century reformer Erasmus acknowledged his addiction to reading by confessing that, "When I get a little money I buy books. If I have any left over I buy food and clothes."
The contemporary social critic P.J. O'Rourke advised that you should "always read stuff that would make you look good if you died in the middle of it."
My own reading this year past included some excellent books as well as some clunkers. Following the suggestion of C.S. Lewis that before you read a new book you should reread an old one, many of the good works to which I treated myself were rereads of books I'd read years ago.
I've been remiss the last couple of years in posting my annual reading list and didn't want to miss again so here are my favorite reads this year with a sentence or two of comment. Links are to other VP posts about the book:
Novels:
American Dirt (Jeanne Cummings) - Cummings received a lot of criticism for being a white North American woman writing a book about the experience of Hispanic migrants. The criticism is absurd, motivated perhaps by jealousy on the part of critics envious of the book's success, a success which is quite deserved.
Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) - A story about a feral girl growing up in a marsh. Having spent time myself in that habitat I couldn't understand how Owens could tell this story without once mentioning how intolerable the mosquitoes, ticks and biting flies would have made life for anyone trying to live the life Owens describes.
The Plague (Albert Camus, Reread) - I was motivated by the current pandemic to reread this classic story of a doctor who labors heroically but vainly against a deadly plague. There are some similarities to our present circumstance.
Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - A prize-winning but salacious tale that has almost nothing at all to do with cholera but is instead about a man's life-long unrequited love for a woman. R-rated.
The Sun Also Rises (Ernst Hemingway) - A somewhat autobiographical story set in Spain describing the meaninglessness of lives filled with ennui and alcohol of the "lost" post-WWI generation. Mutatis mutandis it could've been written today.
The Eustace Diamonds (Anthony Trollope) - An elegantly written Victorian novel about a very difficult woman and her struggle to keep diamonds she claims to have been bequeathed her by her deceased husband.
The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens) - Not one of Dickens' best, but still pretty good. The curiosity shop has almost nothing to do with the story which is actually about the perils of a precocious young girl named Nell.
Hard Times (Charles Dickens) - Both an expose of the misery of life in industrial England and a parody of the extreme rationality and scientism of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham.
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, Reread) - A rambling account of the descent into despair and mental illness of a faithless wife. Some regard it as the greatest novel ever written.
Animal Farm (George Orwell, Reread) - Orwell's famous allegory of a leftist revolution and its brutal consequences. Thus it ever is with such revolutions.
The Possessed (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Reread) - A novel based on the idea, made more explicit in his Brothers Karamazov, that for men without God there are no moral rules. One criticism of the novel is that Dostoyevsky takes a seeming eternity to finish introducing his characters and get on with the story.
The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor (Reread) - O'Connor's stories are satirical tragicomedies whose theme is often the fall of the proud and haughty. Her use of the language of the South is masterful. My favorite of these stories is The Displaced Person.
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, Reread) - A book whose fame is surely based not at all on the quality of the actual story but rather entirely upon Huxley's prevision of modern man as compliant putty in the hands of a dictatorial state which employs technology and pleasure to manipulate its citizens.
History:
Dominion (Tom Holland) - An account of the development of the Western world and its dependence, whether acknowledged or not, upon Christian moral assumptions with which, even in a secular age, it continues to be saturated.
The French Revolution and Napoleon (Charles Downer Hazen, Reread) - A readable account of the events surrounding 1789 and the subsequent rise and fall of one of the most execrable men in European history, at least prior to the 20th century.
Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers (Brian Kilmeade) - In this book and the next Kilmeade sketches out the details of famous events which most of us never learned in school but maybe should have.
Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans (Brian Kilmeade)
The Last Assassin (Peter Stothard) - A sometimes confusing but otherwise interesting account of the pursuit and execution of the assassins of Julius Caesar.
The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz) - Milosz describes the psychology and coping strategies of people living behind the Iron Curtain of communism in Eastern Europe in the post-WWII era.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Pt.III (Hannah Arendt) - An exhaustive description of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism written in 1951. The breadth of Arendt's scholarship is remarkable.
Biography:
Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love (Tom Tarrants) - Tarrants was a genuine white supremacist (not the ersatz variety sometimes presented to us by our media) who, as a young man in the 1960s, attempted murder, saw his friends killed by police and was himself severely wounded in a gun battle with the police. His whole life was changed through a Christian conversion that he underwent while in prison. It's an amazing story of redemption.
A Severe Mercy (Sheldon Vanauken) - Vanauken recounts his and his wife's conversion to Christian faith, their relationship with Oxford don C.S. Lewis and her subsequent death.
God's Funeral (A.N. Wilson, Reread) - An interesting recounting of biographical vignette's from the lives of a variety of 19th century British atheists and agnostics. Wilson wrote the book while he was himself an agnostic, but he later became a Christian.
Science:
The Miracle of the Cell (Michael Denton) - Readers without a background in biology will find some of this book difficult, but even so, Denton does a marvelous job of illustrating how living cells, all the way down to their constituent atoms, show astonishing evidence of having been intricately designed for the purpose of making life possible.
Signature in the Cell (Stephen Meyer, Reread) - This book deserves to become a classic on the problems inherent in any naturalistic account of the origin of life. It requires some knowledge of cell biology, but given that knowledge, Meyer's book is a powerful critique of naturalistic materialism.
The 5th Miracle (Paul Davies, Reread) - In this book and the next agnostic Paul Davies discusses the origin of life, seeking to avoid the hypothesis of intentional design. Other than to note that science can't permit such an explanation, he fails.
The Demon in the Machine (Paul Davies and also here)
God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse (Hutchings and Wilkinson) - An interesting look at the multiverse and its inadequacies as a scientific hypothesis.
The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook (Barnes and Lewis) - The authors lay out the obstacles that must be overcome by anyone wishing to promote an alternative to Big Bang cosmology and other ancillary consensus theories held by contemporary cosmologists.
Theology/Philosophy:
The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis, Reread) - Lewis' imaginative tale of what heaven and hell are like. According to the story they're not what many people think.
Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis, Reread) - Lewis describes how modernity has dehumanized man, creating "men without chests."
Are We Bodies or Souls (Richard Swinburne) - Oxford philosopher Swinburne offers an improved version of Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul.
Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (Tim Keller) - An excellent resource to help sustain those in the midst of grief and suffering.
The Prodigal God (Tim Keller) - Keller offers an interesting look at the parable of the prodigal son and focusses our attention not only on the grace and love of the father but also on the bitter reaction of the older brother.
The War that Never Was (Kenneth Kemp) - The alleged war between science and religion is an ahistorical myth. Actual conflict between scientific theories and religious belief has been rare throughout Western history.
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Habermas and Licona) - There are four or five historical facts about the resurrection of Jesus upon which all or most scholars agree, even those who reject the historicity of the resurrection. The best explanation of those facts, however, is that Jesus actually did die and return to life.
Cultural Commentary:
Live Not by Lies (Rod Dreher) - Dreher's thesis is that America is entering an era of "soft totalitarianism" in which instances of people being "cancelled" for holding politically or socially unacceptable views will continue to increase to the point where anyone publicly expressing such opinions will suffer severe social and economic penalties. These penalties will be imposed not so much by the state but by private sector employers and social media with state sanction. As Dreher notes, this slide into tyranny is already well underway.