The time has come around again for my yearly roundup of books I read this past year! I always enjoy putting this post together. This year I’ve decided to do one small thing differently: I’m going to include the titles already mentioned on my top-ten list for the year in the roundup as well.
According to Goodreads and my record book, I read 90 books in 2017. By my own count, 16 of those titles were re-reads. I began the year by re-reading several Jane Austen novels that I hadn’t read in quite some time—Emma, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey—and finished it off with a re-read of Sense and Sensibility. I also enjoyed revisiting Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped for the first time in years, and I think I liked it better this time than on my initial reading of it! I had a similar reaction to my second reading of Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic. I also re-read a couple of favorites from “lighter-read” authors, Frederica by Georgette Heyer and August Folly by Angela Thirkell; and revisited Eugene Rhodes’s Paso Por Aqi in preparation for writing one of the posts in my blog series on the Western genre.
I read significantly more Westerns this year than I did last, and three of them made my top-ten list: The Rhodes Reader: Stories of Virgins, Varmints, and Villains, a (rather hyperbolically-subtitled) volume of short fiction and essays by the same Eugene Rhodes, The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay, and Under Fire by Charles King. Indian Country by Dorothy M. Johnson was a slightly mixed bag of short stories, but did contain some good ones; and Rhodes’ West is West, a sort-of novel composed of his previously-published short stories stitched together, was enjoyable too in spite of its episodic nature. I also ate up two volumes of Frank H. Spearman’s stories of railroading adventures in the West: The Nerve of Foley and Other Railroad Stories and Held For Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life. Such fun! Late in the year, I worked my way through the sizeable anthology A Century of Great Western Stories, edited by John Jakes, which certainly represented the good, the middling, and the “what the heck?” of the genre in the 20th century. And I should also include The Girl From Kilpatrick’s and Other Stories by B.M. Bower—a collection which I edited myself—since I most definitely read the stories for the first time this year while unearthing and compiling them!
Just a moderate amount of mysteries read this year in comparison to past ones, but a pair of them shot straight to my top-ten list: Brat Farrar and The Daughter of Time, both by Josephine Tey. The Crime at the Noah’s Ark by Molly Thynne was a pleasant, fairly light Golden Age whodunit set in a snowbound English country inn at Christmastime, so that was fun reading for the holiday season. The Warrielaw Jewel by Winifred Peck, a historical mystery set in Victorian-era Edinburgh, I found well-crafted but rather bleak; but I quite liked The Case is Closed by Patricia Wentworth. Less satisfying was Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart (more of a whodunit than her other books, but unfortunately not one of her best); and the spy thriller The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes, which was…I don’t know, interesting enough; but just lacking in some way for me.
I read a lot of theology this year, and relished it as I’d never done before. Some standouts included Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer, Knowing God by J.I. Packer, Stop Trying to Fix Yourself and The Spirit-Filled Life by Eddie Snipes, and G. Campbell Morgan’s commentaries on the gospels of John and Matthew. I should also mention Our God by Octavius Winslow even though I’m not quite finished with it yet.
On a related note, the highlight of my other nonfiction reading was Iain Murray’s two-volume biography of Lloyd-Jones (both volumes were excellent but somehow I enjoyed the second one best). History-wise, I logged just a few titles for WWII research—Good Night Officially: The Pacific War Letters of a Destroyer Sailor was interesting, though the editorial footnotes irritated me considerably, and I had to skim somewhat owing to a pressing library due date! While it wasn’t for research, I was excited about Under a Blood Red Sun by John J. Domagalski, a new book on the exploits of John Bulkely’s PT boat squadron in the Philippines—definitely an interesting story, though I felt the presentation of it left something to be desired. Under the heading of “miscellaneous nonfiction,” I had mixed reactions to Real Artists Don’t Starve by Jeff Goins; and gleaned a few practical tips from The Art of Discarding by Nagisa Tatsumi, a modest primer in the minimalist/decluttering vein.
In previous years, I’ve set various goals to read more classics in a year. I didn’t do that this year, but I did read Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope, both of which I enjoyed so well that I can only wish his Chronicles of Barsetshire series was twice as long (I’ve only one left!). That, along with the four Austen re-reads, makes a pretty good showing in the classics department, I think. And while I didn’t read any volumes of poetry cover-to-cover, I did find some new favorites while browsing through the collection of Christina Rossetti’s poems that I have on my Kindle.
I haven’t been accustomed to treat humor as a genre in these roundups, but in a year where I published a comedy myself, why not? Rumbin Galleries by Booth Tarkington, Tish by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Ruggles of Red Gap by Harry Leon Wilson, in that order, all made me laugh heartily. And My Friend the Chauffeur by A.M. and C.N. Williamson, a light tale of a motoring tour in pre-WWI Europe, was definitely fluffy but fun for a bit of evening relaxation.
There were a few misfires. Notably, The Dean’s Watch by Elizabeth Goudge, gorgeously written but theologically flawed; and A Poor Wise Man by Mary Roberts Rinehart, a sort of alternate-history novel about an attempted Bolshevik revolution in post-WWI America (?) which began promisingly but disintegrated into what was frankly an ideological mess.
The rest of the novels that I particularly enjoyed were mostly—no surprise!—historical in one fashion or another. The Lark by E. Nesbit was charming, Five Windows by D.E. Stevenson even more so. Beau Geste by P.C. Wren (a smashing old-fashioned adventure novel that also doubles as a pretty fine locked-room mystery), Yankee Stranger by Elswyth Thane, The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer, Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil G. Brinton (the only piece of Jane Austen fanfiction I will, in all likelihood, ever read), Aunt Jane’s Hero by Elizabeth Prentiss. I could also put The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk in this category, though I’ll be finishing and reviewing it in 2018. And last but not least, Friendship and Folly and Letters to Julia by Meredith Allady—the latter probably my favorite book of 2017.
If you’re interested in the full list, you can see all titles that I read in 2017 here on Goodreads.
Previous years’ reading roundups: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.
photo by me
That summing up of A Poor Wise Man is, sadly, pretty accurate.
If you’ve started Tey with Brat Farrar and The Daughter of Time, save The Franchise Affair for last. Consensus is that those are the three best ones. Some people would add Miss Pym, and I might try to sneak in The Singing Sands.
Actually Miss Pym and The Singing Sands are the only ones I’ve got left, I think! I’d definitely agree about Brat Farrar and The Daughter of Time being the best—and I still have a soft spot for The Man in the Queue, though The Franchise Affair was definitely good too.