Books I Read (or Started to Read) in 2019

In 2019, I completed reading twenty-two books. This feels inadequate. The feeling is akin to improperly packing for a trip. I can make due when it gets colder than I thought or when I discover that I didn’t pack enough pairs of socks. It’s not quite that feeling either. Its as though I thought I’d be on a road trip with a friend for seven days, but it turned out to be five days and throughout those days we spent significant chunks of time staring at our smartphones.

I previously wrote about reading challenges, and this year I didn’t have an explicit one.

Below I list the books that I read (completed or not). I don’t count reading of role-playing game systems nor sourcebooks. So my complete read of “Eberron: Rising from the Last War” is not listed below.

Books Completed in 2019

• The Crimson Talisman by Adrian Cole
• Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Phillip Pullman
• The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
• Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk ^🔍 (See my review)
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Faust: A Tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Martin Greenberg (See my response)
• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien ^🔍
• The Hobbit: Annotated and Expanded by J.R.R. Tolkien, annotated by Douglas A. Anderson
• How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Colvino
• The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch
• The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull
• The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time by David L. Ulin (See my review)
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Cros
• Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk
• The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Stoic Challenge by William Irvine
• Swords against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ^🔍
• Swords in the Mist by Fritz Leiber
• This Land is Our Land by Jedediah Purdy
• Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us by Simon Critchley
• The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Walking: One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge

Books Started but not Finished in 2019

These two books sit in a halted state. Something else has gathered my attention.

• The Arabian Nights
• The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
• The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Books That I Read Bit by Bit in 2019

These are books that I reference or read as the mood strikes. Books of poetry, essays, or compilations.

• The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Heroism and Magic in Another Britains by Rowan Williams and Gwyneth Lewis
• Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer
• Figuring by Maria Popovic
• The Origins of Dislike by Amit Chaudhuri
• Poems and Prophecies by William Blake
• Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth by Catherine McIlwaine

Books Abandoned in 2019

For some reason, or other, I abandoned these books. I wrote about my visceral response to interstitial cut sceens. Both “The Killing Moon” and “A Darker Shade of Magic” triggered that response. I plan to revisit “The Killing Moon” now that I’ve had time to reflect and have begun to internalize Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s “The Dark Fantastic”

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
• The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
• A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
• Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Hobbit by Cory Olsen
• The Killing Moon by N.K. Jamisin
• Packing My Library by Alberto Manguel

And for 2020

For 2020, I’m committing to reading at least 10 fantasy/sci-fi books written by persons of color. Octavia Butler leaps to mind.

I’ll continue reading Jorge Luis Borges short stories. I may dive back into Gaiman’s Sandman series.