My booklist for 2018 finished this afternoon at 115 but that includes everything, including quickly-read mysteries and adventure novels. But along with the list itself I always keep a record of my responses. Those rating 4 stars are terrific books (many of them old friends) that I enthusiastically recommend to others. Those winning 3 stars are books of enjoyment and value that I would recommend in some circumstances and which might well merit a re-read at some time. The 2 star books are ones that I managed to finish but will probably never pick up again. And the 1 star books — well, actually, there are no 1 star books because if they’re that dull or offensive or annoying, I don’t bother to finish them and, therefore, they don't make the list.
With all that said, though, 2018 was a splendid year and I list below (by genre) all of my 4 star picks. (By the way, the ones with an asterisk are books that I had already enjoyed…at least once before. And, as you'll plainly see, with my advanced age and particular literary standards, I do a lot of re-reading!)
Novels:
* Ivanhoe (Walter Scott)
* The Hunt for Red October (Tom Clancy)
Before We Were Yours (Lisa Wingate)
* The Book of the Dun Cow (Walter Wangerin)
The Cruel Sea (Nicholas Monsarrat)
* Huntingtower (John Buchan)
* Killer Angels (Michael Shaara)
Fire Over England (A.E.W. Mason)
* The Man Who Was Thursday (G. K. Chesterton)
* The Magnificent Ambersons (Booth Tarkington)
Seventeen (Booth Tarkington)
* Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens)
* The Haunted Man (Charles Dickens)
* A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
Emma (Jane Austen)
* The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
* The Christmas Room (Denny Hartford)
4 novels from Jan Karon’s delightfully engaging Mitford series, Out to Canaan, A New Song, In This Mountain, and Shepherds Abiding (Jan Karon)
Plays:
* Our Town (Thornton Wilder),
* Dr. Faustus (Christopher Marlowe)
* Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmund Rostand)
* The Love Girl & the Innocent (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
Collections of Short Stories:
* King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Antonia Fraser)
* The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
* The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
* The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
* His Last Bow (Arthur Conan Doyle)
* The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
* Grimm’s Fairy Stories (The Brothers Grimm)
History:
* The two volumes of Memoirs (Ulysses S. Grant)
Deadly Times: The 1910 Bombing of the Los Angeles Times and America's Forgotten Decade of Terror (Lew Irwin)
* Seabiscuit (Laura Hillenbrand)
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 (Joseph Ellis)
Christian Life/Culture:
* The Holy Bible (both a read-through AND a listen-through with Alexander Scourby’s narration)
* No Little People (Francis Schaeffer)
Happiness (Randy Alcorn)
* The Adventure of Living (Paul Tournier)
Creed or Chaos (Dorothy Sayers)
The Treasure Principle (Randy Alcorn)
The Best Is Yet to Come (Tony Evans)
* Heaven, Your Real Home (Joni Eareckson Tada)
The Crisis in the Arts (Andrew Klavan)
