Annual Top Ten List

 Top Ten Books I Read In 2020

These are my favorite ten of the books I have read since January 1, 2020.  The listing  includes classics, fiction, non-fiction, and critical essays.  It was a very rich year for reading and there were others that could have made my list if I were to expand it.  Of those good books that I read these are the ten that I felt will stay with me over the years; in fact a couple of them were rereads.  There is no particular order to the list and  I highly recommend all of the following:

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: 

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What kind of a book is The Gulag Archipelago? While it is encyclopedic in its breadth it also demonstrates the characteristics of autobiography, history, and the epic while using a novelistic literary style – and what else? A personal report on Twentieth Century Russia.

History of the Peloponnesian War

by Thucydides

The first history in the modern sense (apologies to Herodotus who invented the genre). Thucydides, and Athenian general, wrote this history of the Peloponnesian Wars; admirable in its objectivity in discussing contemporary events, in its direct and descriptive style, and the author's grasp of cause and effect.

Wise Blood

by Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is a story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Lily Sabbath.

Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

What is a “true” Russian? Why is “the real truth” always implausible. Is belief only ironic or is it real or both? These are just a few of the questions dealt with by Dostoevsky in Demons, his great novel that is predecessor to The Brothers Karamazov.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans.

The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans

by Plutarch

Plutarch's Parallel Lives is a series of biographies, arranged in pairs illuminating virtues & vices. Surviving Lives contain 23 pairs, each with a Greek & a Roman Life, & 4 unpaired Lives. As explained in the opening of his Life of Alexander, he wasn't concerned with history so much as the influence of character on life & destiny. 

Blood Meridian 

or The Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's prose has the character of the landscape it describes: Harsh and pure, as if it had been sculpted by wind and sand, like a naturally occurring phenomenon. In Blood Meridian McCarthy uses it to spin a yarn of gothic violence.

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

by Carl Jung

What kind of a book is this? I considered several categories from spiritual to supernatural, but decided that it was a sort of mythology of human archetypes and the psyche. It includes essays which state the fundamentals of Jung's psychological system: On the Psychology of the Unconscious and The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.

Tinkers

by Paul Harding

George Washington Crosby died. That, in summary, is the plot of this short novel, but within that death there is told a story of a life, a family, and a world made interesting through the beautiful prose of Paul Harding. The book could have been called As I Lay Dying, but that title has already been used; it could have been called Clocks, or Timepieces, for that is one motif that recurs again and again in the story of George and his family, especially his father.

Washington Black

by Esi Edugyan

The story of George Washington Black is one of the odyssey of a young boy through his growth to manhood. In this case the young boy is a slave on a plantation in Barbados. Born on that plantation and raised by his mother Big Kitt, young Wash, as he is called, is presented with a unique opportunity when Christopher Wilde, the brother of the Master of the Plantation, chooses Wash to be his assistant in his ventures exploring the natural world.

Other books from the past year that almost made the list included: Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor, Lakota America by Pekka Hämäläinen, The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, The History by Herodotus, and Degrees of Difficulty by Julie E. Justicz.