Best Non-Fiction Reads of 2018

My previous posting listed my best fiction reads of 2018.  Here are the best non-fiction books.  (A few were re-reads.)

1.  Peggy Pond Church.  The House at Otowi Bridge--The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos. Here is the tale of a woman who lived on the Rio Grande as a neighbor of the Indians of San Ildefonso Pueblo and friend to the atomic scientists just then gathering at Los Alamos.  Nicely done.

2.  Jennet Conant.  109 East Palace--Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos.  Comprehensive, readable.  An excellent telling about many of the scientists and how they took over a former boys' school on a New Mexican plateau and secretly turned it into the birthplace of the atomic bomb.

3.  Isak Dinesen.  Out of Africa.  Elegant.  For me, this book is a long pastoral prose-poem describing Kenya in the 1910s and '20s, the Kikuyu and Masai, the animals both domestic and wild, the British and Europeans, and the tribulation and joy of running a coffee farm.

4.  Ivan Doig. This House of Sky.  A beautifully written, evocative account of the author's childhood in the Montana sheep-herding country with his father and grandmother.  They led a tough life but he is always generous in his outlook of the small-town ranchers and herders.  Appropriately subtitled, Landscapes of a Western Mind.

5.  Timothy Egan.  The Worst Hard Time--The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.  Here is disaster in Biblical proportions by first tearing the grass out of millions of acres covering parts of six states, then suffering years of drought and many, many subsequent dust storms (so that when it did rain, it rained mud), followed by millions of grasshoppers eating everything but the knobs on doors.  Of those who caused this, many stayed behind, suffering through it if they were lucky, otherwise dying of dust pneumonia along with their animals.  Horrific.

6.  Jack Kornfield.  No Time Like the Present--Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy Right Where You Are.  Good compilation.  Wise words by one of the most respected meditation teachers around.

7.  Margareta Magnussen.  The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning--How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.  In other words, tossing it out yourself while you're still alive so someone else doesn't have to do it later.

8.  Sigrid Nunez.  Mitz--The Marmoset of Bloomsbury.  This is the story of a marmoset who joined Leonard and Virginia Woolf's household, accompanying them everywhere by sitting on Leonard's shoulder or inside his waistcoat.  Using Bloomsbury letters, diaries, and memoirs, the author uncovers Mitz's life and describes it in a charming fashion.

9.  Lynne Olson.  Last Hope Island--Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War.  How Britain was the port in the storm for six European nations and how each built its own liberation network.  As it turned out, Poland and Czechoslovakia were tossed aside by the West and "given" to Stalin.  Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg were not.  Also how three Poles and a Frenchman were the first to crack the Enigma code, then not asked to help Bletchley Park after they reached England.  Lots of built-in prejudice, hubris, and down-right stupidity.  But also a lot of heroism.  Excellent. Good telling, too, about the Polish RAF airmen who helped win the Battle of Britain and who, in fact, had more experience flying than the British at that time.

10.  Emily Kaiser Thelin.  Unforgettable--The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert's Renegade Life.  This is a very readable description of Paula's gastronomic explorations around the Mediterranean jotting down recipes for authentic dishes cooked by the locals from Morocco to Turkey.  It's also a combination of recipes and biography of this mid/late-20th-century food authority, complete with excellent photos.

11.  Lucy Worsley.  Jane Austen at  Home.  Engrossing biography 1775-1817.  Very readable, well researched, and well written with a broad sweep of information, domestic and literary, encompassing Austen's entire life, all her family members, all her homes, even every man who might have been interested in her.  In her lifetime, she earned just over £600 from her writing.  Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were published during her lifetime, anonymously (or "By a Lady").  Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published after her death, were finally published under her name with the notice that the earlier four had been by her as well.

Best Fiction Reads of 2018

This year I read 43 books, 22 of which were fiction.  And half were repeats, something I've been doing more these years.  I still have a fine library of books most of which I've read, many of which I once thoroughly enjoyed.  So, why not re-read them, I asked myself, especially since years have gone by and many have sunk into the depths of memory-past.   (I'll post the non-fiction next time.)

Here is this year's list of the fiction I most enjoyed.  (Repeat reads are marked with an asterisk.)

1.  Anita Brookner.  Dolly*.  A girl's aunt, come to England from Vienna and Paris, though very selfish, greedy, and self-absorbed, nonetheless fascinates her young niece.  Very little action, barely any plot, mostly character description.  As the author herself, the young niece lives alone, establishes a career in writing, and makes the most of a rather lonely life--one that she realizes needs some adjustment but one that she finds satisfying in its way.

2.  Rudyard Kipling.  Kim*.  This is, of course, Kipling's classic published in 1901--he who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.  It was my third reading, read this time because my book club selected it.  (And I enjoyed it as much this time as my previous two readings.)  Set in India, it tells the tale of orphaned Kimball O'Hara as he and a Tibetan lama go on a quest that turns into a great adventure--from Lahore to Benares and up into the hills of the Himalayas, all in the time of what is known as The Great Game, the political and diplomatic confrontation between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for control over Afghanistan plus Central and South Asia. Filled with wonderful descriptions of the people and the region.

3.  William Maxwell.  The Chateau*.  Maxwell is one of my favorite authors, once fiction editor of The New Yorker.  (See my April 22, 2018 posting, "Willa, Wallace, and William".) This book is set in 1948 and 1953 during the two trips to France that the American couple protagonists made right after the war.  This is both their story and the story of the French whom they meet along the way including the very human vagaries that occur between them all.  Beautifully written as is everything he writes.  Published 1961.

4.  William Maxwell.  Time Will Darken It*.  Set around 1912.  In terms of its writing, this is a real "show, don't tell" book.  It centers on how a family is affected by the visiting of foster relatives, all doing their best to be truthful, kind, understanding, helpful--but some of whom could use some tough love instead.

5.  Bill McKibben.  Radio Free Vermont, A Fable of Resistance.  Delightful. About keeping Vermont small, local, organic, while considering the wisdom of voting to secede from the union.  Most amusing, laugh-out-loud funny, and just the right flavor for a good Vermont read.

6.  Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society*.  Written in an epistolary format.  A basic story line but filled with description about the German occupation of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands.  Engaging.

7.  Muriel Spark.  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  This was a first reading during which I could not get the image of Maggie Smith (who played the role in the 1969 movie) out of my head.  But since she fit the part to a T, why try! About a young Edinburgh teacher who gathers a few girls around her to teach them what real education is about.  A wonderfully witty comedy-drama.

8.  Oswald Wynd.  The Ginger Tree*.  Wonderful.  Set in China and Japan from 1903-1942.  A young Scottish woman goes out to the East to marry her fiancé, staying on for many years after she falls in love with a Japanese aristocrat and learns to embrace a new life, surviving despite being in a culture that "barely tolerates women."  Also written in an epistolary format.  Substantive.  Characters the reader learns to care about.  This was made into a BBC mini-series in 1989 with Samantha Bond in the lead role.  (She who plays Maggie Smith's daughter, Rosamund, in Downton Abbey.)



I also want to give special mention to the works of Alexander McCall Smith who writes something like 5 new books a year.  How he does it, I don't know because he is always amusing, graceful, and endearing.  I keep track of his new book listing each year and make a point of getting them from the library.  Here are the ones I read this year:

1.  A Distant View of Everything (in the Isabel Dalhousie series)
2.  The House of Unexpected Sisters (in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series)
3.  A Time of Love and Tartan (in the 44 Scotland Street series)
4.  The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse (not part of a series)
5.  The Quiet Side of Passion (in the Isabel Dalhousie series)