It’s Christmas season, which means it’s time for my annual list of books I’m not recommending for Christmas. Chalk the title up to my sensitivity about giving and receiving books. It likely goes back to some childhood trauma when I received a book I was totally uninterested in. I would have been polite and said thank you, I was raised in the South, after all, but I would have been traumatized nonetheless.
An alternative title might be “The Best Books I’ve Read This Year.” I read a lot of books, and I read a lot of good books, so I have to say up front I’m omitting some to keep the list (relatively) short. Some are books published this year; a few were published decades ago.
It was a good year for poetry. It was the year I discovered good graphic novels. I found some new authors and revisited some old ones. Note: Links are to my reviews.
Poetry
Spending the Winter: Poems by Joseph Bottum.
The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden.
Herman Melville: Battle Pieces & Aspects of the War.
Last Things, First Things, and Other Lost Causes: Poems by Joshua Hren.
The Grief Committee Minutes: Poems by Sarah Carey.
The Unfolding: Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.
Empty Me Full: Poems by Catherine Abbey Hodges.
Under the Pearl Moon: Poems by Rick Maxson.
House of 49 Doors: Poems by Laurie Klein.
Graphic Novels
The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft and Sara Barkat.
The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix.
Mysteries
Sting of the Honey Bee by Roger Longrigg.
The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves.
The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny.
A Saxon Shadow and A Stolen Shadow by H L Marsay.
In That Sleep of Death by Jonathan Dunsky.
In the Key of Death by Scott Hunter.
Death, Adjourned by Simon Michael.
Faith
The Storied Life by Jared Wilson.
In This Way We Came to Rome: With Paul on the Appian Way by Gene Thompson and Mark Wilson.
Art
Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death by Laura Cummings.
Fiction
Hold Fast by Spencer K.M. Brown.
Works of Mercy and The Blackbird & Other Stories by Sally Thomas.
Clear by Carys Davies.
A World Lost and A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.
Children’s Literature
The Sin Eater by Gary Schmidt.
Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt.
History
The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913 by John Hopkins.
The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman.
Literary Criticism
Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens’s London by Lee Jackson.
The History of the Hobbit by John Rateliff.
C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin.
Top photograph by Olena Bohovyk via Unsplash. Used with permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment