A Quick End-of-Year Review (In Reading)

It turned out that 2019 was a pretty good year in my reading. I hit 100 books just at the close but, even more important, my booklist included quite a lot of 5-Star reads. Yes, there were several books that had value and were pleasures to read (the Horatio Hornblower series, a couple of James Thurber, Evil Obsession by Nellie Snyder Yost, a couple of "lesser" Chesterton works, a few adventure novels, etc.), but it is only those that reached the 5-Star level that I pass along here.

In the history category:

* Wright Brothers (David McCulloch)
* Lonely Vigil (Walter Lord)
* August 1914 and  November 1916 (Alexander Solzhenitsyn). Yes, these are both novels but the material is so well researched and presented in such context that I'll go ahead and list them in this category.
* Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory (Newt Gingrich, William R. Forstchen, Albert S. Hanser). This too could be described in the same way as the two just above; namely, a historical novel that qualifies for this category.
* The Lion’s Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War (Steven Pressfield)
* Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then & Now (Mark Steyn)
* Mission to Moscow (Malcolm Muggeridge)

In the fiction category:

* The Mysterious Island (Jules Verne)
* You Can’t Take It With You (George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart)
* That Printer of Udell’s (Harold Bell Wright)
* The Good Shepherd (C.S. Forester)
* Between Shades of Gray (Ruta Sepetys)
* Gone for Soldiers (Jeff Shaara)
* The Chronicles or Narnia -- the whole series (C.S. Lewis)
* The Little Minister (J.M. Barrie)
* Light from Heaven (Jan Karon)
* At Home in Mitford (Jan Karon)
* The Rim of the Prairie (Bess Streeter Aldrich)
* Mr. Beasley's Christmas Party (Booth Tarkington)
* Seventeen (Booth Tarkington)
* Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
* Hard Times (Charles Dickens)
* Christmas Stories (Charles Dickens)
* A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
* The Haunted Man (Charles Dickens)

In the theology/culture category:

* Death in the City (Francis Schaeffer)
* L’Abri (Edith Schaeffer)
* Ship of Fools (Tucker Carlson)
* Mere Churchianity (John Hampton)
* The Seasons of Life (Paul Tournier)
* Pollution & the Death of Man (Francis Schaeffer)
* Heaven: Your Real Home (Joni Eareckson Tada)
* The Great Good Thing (Andrew Klavan)
* The Life of Elijah (A.W. Pink)