• Happy Weed Appreciation Day! 🌱🌿🌻

Best Books of 2019

G

Guest

Guest
I love this time of year; the Best Books of 2019 recommendations are starting to come out, and I have inter-library loan requested another bedside tableful from the Washington Post and NYT’s selections. All non-fiction.

I have not yet begun to exhaust the on-line “Best-of” lists. And I know that some older, now out-of-print or un-library-loan-able stuff will be waiting under the Christmas tree as used copies.

I am excited to have a new stack of books, towering nearby on the bedside table, awaiting my reading pleasure. It’s the simple things in life.

I love this quote from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, and use it as a wedding toast:

“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing”

He leaves out “enough to read”.
 
Not a list type person, so I just read what comes my way. One such book was the pass around book that Mike sent to me last summer WHEN THE CHESTNUT WAS IN FLOWER. I enjoyed that book, one I might never have ran across on my own. I sent it on to Warren Manitoba, where I am sure that Iskweo enjoyed it even more than I did.
Books are great Christmas gifts or a gift card from a book store, just to make sure the reader on your Christmas list gets the book they really want.
 
Not a list type person, so I just read what comes my way.
Books are great Christmas gifts or a gift card from a book store, just to make sure the reader on your Christmas list gets the book they really want.

I am very much a list type person, and would be lost with my list(s). A today (or next couple days) “to-do” list. A longer term, bigger project, when I get to it “to-do” list. Hardware store list. Grocery needs written on the kitchen white board and transcribed to an in-order-of-aisle list to take with me to the store.

And, always, book wish lists. The only way I am going to be cognizant of newly published non-fiction is by reading the “Best of” lists. If I score a couple or three off each best-of list that are inter-library loanable I can be a happy reader ‘til April.

If one of those is especially enjoyable and interesting I’ll buy a used copy to have and hold in our library, or to pass along.

By Saturday I will have three new best-of 2019 non-fictions waiting at the library, including a couple political tomes (let’s not go there) and

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

https://www.amazon.com/Underland-Deep-Journey-Robert-Macfarlane/dp/0393242145

If I like Underland I’ll request Landmarks and The Old Ways; Macfarlane is a new author to me.

Christmas gifts hereabout were lots of socks, and giftee requested books. I’m saving my Christmas gift books until the bedside table is nearly bare; that will be a while with “Best of 2019” lists still coming out, and the Pulitzer finalists/reviews still to be published.

Or, since I own those gifted books, taking them on trips.
 
Back
Top