Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson
A relatively rare appearance by a children’s book on my top-ten list, and actually the first book I finished in 2023, this is a post-WWII story of a family moving out to the countryside where their mother grew up in hopes of benefiting their father, who is dealing with wartime PTSD. Sometime after finishing it I realized that this is a perfect adult-child companion book with Hal Borland’s This Hill, This Valley, published within a year of Sorenson’s novel and an entry on my last year’s list: This Hill is a nonfiction chronicle of observing the beauties of nature over a year spent on a New England farm, and Miracles on Maple Hill is the child’s viewpoint on the same thing, told in story form. It’s also similar to Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake in being a story of average city kids discovering the joys of living in the country, and the history and heritage connected with it, but where the former is a carefree summer vacation, Maple Hill strikes some deeper notes of dealing with real-life challenges.
A Tale of a Lonely Parish by Francis Marion Crawford
This is the third Crawford book I’ve read, and three times he has succeeded in astonishing me. The title basically encompasses the essence of the book—a handful of people living in a quiet out-of-the-way English village—but as their interactions and relationships with each other slowly develop and their secrets are revealed, it morphs into a page-turning drama. It’s hard to describe it any better than that. Well worth reading.
Simple Money, Rich Life by Bob Lotich
I took a lot from this book on managing finances from a Biblical perspective. It’s not so much a flat how-to manual (though it does have a lot of sound practical advice on how to deal with financial problems like debt and over-spending); the core of the book is its insights on the right attitudes towards money: on viewing the management of it as stewardship, and how faithful, sincere giving brings blessings in many ways—all laid out in a very encouraging, energizing tone.
The American Senator by Anthony Trollope
Surprise, surprise, Trollope shows himself able to gently satirize both English customs and American character a thousand times more agreeably than Dickens ever managed to do in that regrettable mid-section of Martin Chuzzlewit. Just kidding; not a surprise, really. The American Senator himself is not even the protagonist, more like a connecting thread running through the usual quiet, engaging drama of several families trying to sort out who is to marry whom and inherit what. When Trollope gets into a good stride with this kind of thing there are few classic novelists I enjoy better.
Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell
I am not really one for gardening how-to books, but I do like books showcasing gardening beauty from which you can glean inspiration for your own garden. This one is just that: a book on the various gardens that Beatrix Potter visited, worked in, and incorporated into her art throughout her life. It’s a wonderful blend of gardening, art, literary background, and bits of history—it’s particularly intriguing to see examples of Beatrix’s painting and sketching in different styles than appear in her children’s books, and also how specific locations from the Lake District hills, farms, and gardens made their way into her stories, sometimes featuring in other artwork first along the way.
The Provincial Lady in America by E.M. Delafield
This might actually be the funniest in the Provincial Lady series. It’s amusing on multiple levels to read a humorous take on America through English eyes, and interesting to note which ordinary things about American life strike the narrator as most odd or foreign. (Having the Provincial Lady abroad actually minimizes the series’ weakest point, her occasional tendency to seem emotionally disconnected from her family by her complaints and snarkiness at their expense. When separated by an ocean, she can only think of them affectionately!) At its most basic, the witty, shorthand-diary style in which events are described is just hilarious.
The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey
As brilliantly unique a plot concept as Tey’s novels always display, a story that delves deeper into Grant’s inner life and emotions than any of the others, and a sensitive and moving novel in its own right in its exploration of healing from struggles with anxiety—a bittersweet yet satisfying conclusion to the Inspector Grant series, and to Tey’s all-too-short body of work. Favorite fiction read of the year. Read my full review here.
Open Range by Lauran Paine
This book pleasantly surprised me in a low-key way. It takes a situation that has been turned into a cliché by decades of movies and paperbacks, but elevates it above the average by working it out in what feels like a much more historically authentic way, and by the immersive descriptions of the land, weather, and the nitty-gritty of a cowboy’s work and the beats of honest emotion it hits at key points in the story. Read my full review here.
Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies by Lawrence Goldstone
This one hit multiple sweet spots for me: old-time aviation and turn-of-the-century popular history. It’s a colorful tapestry of daredevil air exploits and the tangles of patent law (both sometimes equally jaw-dropping in their own way), populated with characters like a sometime inventor but more effective swindler named Augustus Herring, and one John Moisant, who built his own airplane and turned to aviation after multiple failed attempts to lead a revolution in a South American country where the new government was inconveniencing his family’s business interests! (I’m not sure whether my favorite anecdote was the King of Spain sulking because his wife didn’t want him to risk going aloft in an airplane, or the Wright brothers trying to sell an aircraft sight-unseen to the U.S. government with only affidavits from witnesses assuring them that it could actually fly.) A fascinating, roaring good read.
An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden
Godden is one of those authors who generate unsettlingly vivid emotion from a combination of understatement and a wealth of carefully noticed detail: the sights, sounds, textures, and little practicalities of her characters’ worlds. In this case that world is a genteel square and a neighboring working-class street in postwar London with a complicated and uncomfortable relationship between them, the story a simple one of street children trying to secretly build a garden among the rubble of bombed buildings. It’s not a perfect novel; there are a few things about it that irked me or I quibbled with, but its beauty and ability to get under your skin are undeniable.
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Six of this year’s top ten were Kindle reads. Open Range was a Kindle Unlimited borrow; A Tale of a Lonely Parish and The American Senator are public-domain and available free. (The Singing Sands and The Provincial Lady in America are—ahem—public-domain in other countries.) The rest were library borrows.
When I paused recently to take stock of what I’d written this year, I was surprised—as I often am when I look back over a few months’ work instead of focusing on how much I am accomplishing (or not accomplishing) in the day-to-day of the present. I admit, the first three-quarters of the year were tough going, but I did make inches of progress here and there; and October was a good month indeed. Once again I’ve racked up more words on short story projects than on any of my novels-in-progress, but I don’t really mind. I’m very happy with several of these stories, and I’m now looking at releasing another Western collection sooner rather than later. And hopefully the bit of momentum I’ve been gaining will spill over onto one of those “big” projects at the right time.
