2009 Mid-Year Book Round-Up

It’s mid-year 2009 and time for the now traditional overview of the more interesting books I’ve read so far this year. (All these have been reviewed on my GoodReads page.)

Top Five Fiction:

1. Modern Love (poems), George Meredith. I’m not one for poetry usually but I was intrigued by Michael Dirda’s write up of this 50-sonnet cycle of poems about the author’s disintegrating marriage in his Classics for Pleasure.

2. The Great Stink, Clare Clark. A marvelous novel about the building of London’s sewers and the love between a man and his dog.

3. Three Bags Full, Leonie Swann. From my review on GoodReads: “Three Bags Full is, without a doubt, the best sheep detective novel ever written.”

4. King Jesus, Robert Graves. Graves’ iconoclastic look at Christianity’s savior. It’s a brilliant book.

5. The Judging Eye, R. Scott Bakker. Bakker’s fourth book set in the world of the Three Seas. It’s not as strong a beginning of this new sequence as The Darkness That Comes Before but it’s quite good.

If I were listing the top seven, I’d have to include Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (a bit of a surprise because I loathed My Antonia when I had to read it in high school) and James Cabell’s Figures of Earth.

Top Five Nonfiction:

1. An Army at Dawn, Rick Atkinson. Atkinson’s first book in his trilogy on the Allied invasions of Africa and Europe. I started in the middle with the author’s account of the Italian campaign; this is just as good, and I’m looking forward to his concluding volume about D-Day.

2. The Punic Wars, Adrian Goldsworthy. Very readable account of the wars that birthed the Roman empire.

3. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter. A short, well written look at some of the quirkier aspects of English.

4. The Limits of Power, Andrew Bacevich. A follow-up to Bacevich’s extraordinary The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. This one’s just as good.

5. Comanche Empire, Pekka Hamalainen. The academic jargon can be a bit of a slog, especially in the first few chapters, but well worth the effort as this author reveals a fascinating chapter of Southwest American history.

Best Reread of the Year to Date: A tie: The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison and Still I Persist in Wondering, Edgar Pangborn

Worst Reread of the Year to Date: The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis

Best Reading of New Material from a Favorite Author: Kull: Exile of Atlantis, Robert E. Howard

Most Disappointing Reading of New Material from a Favorite Author: Regenesis, C.J. Cherryh