Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

My Year in Books: 2017

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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

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books Read in 2017

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It’s that time of year again—time to join Top Ten Tuesday and list my ten favorite books read this year!

This year’s list is in many ways similar to past ones (e.g. almost absurdly eclectic of genre; showing a marked absence of living authors). It also sees a resurgence of a favorite genre that has been absent from my last few top-ten lists, and for the second year in a row features multiple appearances by a single author. The books are listed in the order I read them, not in order of favorites:


Five Windows by D.E. Stevenson

Every once in a while it’s nice to read a book about fundamentally decent, likeable people, whose problems aren’t earth-shattering and are solved by an application of sound common sense. Five Windows is just that sort of warm, comfortable book. Set in the post-WWII era, it follows the fortunes of a boy from Scotland who heads to London as a young man to earn his living. Through trial and error he learns to distinguish doubtful company from worthwhile friends, develops his talent for writing, and eventually finds true love in a very sweet and natural way. Just a very pleasant, satisfying read.

Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I think the highest praise I can give is that this book was a tremendous help to me at a difficult period in my life. Freeing, comforting, and challenging. I wish more people would read it, because it breaks my heart to see so many, Christians especially, talk about depression as if it was something inevitable that you just have to get used to living with. I’m so glad I had guidance to treat depression primarily as a spiritual struggle, along with better understanding of how physical health and nutrition play into it; and this book was one of my biggest helps. Recommended.


The Rhodes Reader: Stories of Virgins, Villains, and Varmints by Eugene Manlove Rhodes (ed. W.H. Hutchinson)

A collection of some of the very best short fiction and essays by one of my favorite Western writers. I reviewed this on the blog after reading it.


The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay

This is something of a surprise entry on my list, both because the book turned out to be something entirely different than I thought it would be, and because it’s a bit darker and bloodier than my usual reading matter. It tells the story of a Texas family who are a target for danger from both hostile Indians and their pioneer neighbors, because their teenage daughter—unbeknownst to herself, adopted as a baby—may be part Kiowa. But rather than the one-note tirade about racism that I was expecting, The Unforgiven is much more complex—the heart of the story deals with a close, protective family relationship, the effect of secrecy and grudges, and the realities of life on the Texas frontier. (As a sidenote, after finishing the book I read the synopsis of the 1960 film adaptation and was amazed and indignant at the wholesale plot changes that totally skew the essence of the story. Now I’m curious to read LeMay’s most famous novel The Searchers and see what might have been lost in its translation to the screen.)


Letters to Julia by Meredith Allady

This is a sequel, and it’s definitely necessary to have read Friendship and Folly by the same author to have a knowledge of the characters; but this one found its way even deeper into my heart than the first book in the series. It’s a hefty epistolary novel set in Regency/Napoleonic-era England, told through four years’ worth of letters from a large and affectionate family and some of their friends to a married daughter living at a distance, dealing with both happy and difficult times in the lives of senders and recipients. I can understand how the style might not be for everyone, but it definitely was for me. It might possibly be my No. 1 favorite of the year. Review here.


Beau Geste by P.C. Wren

This checks all the boxes for a rollicking adventure novel: exotic foreign settings, battles, danger, suspense—plus an attention-grabbing opening section that sets up not one but two ingenious mystery puzzles. First, the theft of a famous jewel, the disappearance of which causes three English brothers to flee the country to join the French Foreign Legion; and secondly, the mysterious fate of a company in the Legion, which somehow also ties back to the theft of the jewel. It takes the whole rest of the novel, narrated in flashback by one of the brothers, to gradually unfold the answers (and kept me up till a quarter of midnight finishing it).


Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

I would describe this as something more than a typical whodunit—a solid novel with mystery undercurrents. Orphan Brat Farrar is persuaded to impersonate a boy who went missing several years ago, believed to be dead, as part of a scheme to inherit the property that would have come to him. The suspense comes not only from the impersonation plot itself, but the complications that develop as Brat forms a bond with his new family…and also begins to wonder what really happened to the missing boy. While I made a correct guess about that early on, there were still plenty of questions about the how and why left to unfold, plus the overshadowing question of what the protagonist’s ultimate choices would be. It’s not often that I become so invested in a book that I find myself mentally saying “No, no! Don’t do it!” when I begin to see which way a character’s actions are tending, or read a scene of building suspense with my teeth literally chattering. It was also actually one of two books on this list (Letters to Julia was the other) that I read twice during the year. One day I’d like to write a proper full review.


The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope

I recently read a quote from none other than P.G. Wodehouse about Anthony Trollope that wonderfully describes the charm of Trollope’s books: “It is rather like listening to somebody who is long-winded telling you a story about real people.  The characters live in the most extraordinary way and you feel that the whole thing is true.” Really, I haven’t read a Trollope novel that I disliked yet. In The Small House at Allington we get complex family relationships, engagements made and broken, some appealing heroines, some young men who need a good shaking, some unexpectedly kind benefactors, and a character whose ambition gets them what they want and what they deserve in the most thorough and comprehensive way—all told with a blend of poignancy and pleasantly satirical humor. My review (of a sort) here.


The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

This book is truly one-of-a-kind. Tey’s detective Inspector Grant, flat on his back in the hospital and seeking a relief from boredom, becomes fascinated by a different type of murder mystery than usual, a cold case from centuries ago: was Richard III of England really responsible for the murder of the Princes in the Tower? It’s amazing how Tey crafts such a page-turning, frankly thrilling read almost entirely out of dialogue and gradual revelation—of historical events from hundreds of years ago, at that—as Grant, aided by a young American researcher, sifts through the historical record in search of evidence. Highly recommended both as a mystery, and as a thought-provoking perspective on the study of history.


Under Fire by Charles King

Having always enjoyed cavalry movies, such as John Ford’s well-known “trilogy,” I’ve long wished I could find a good older Western novel dealing with the U.S. Cavalry—I wondered if the subgenre even existed in Western fiction, as it does after a fashion in film. Well, this year I finally found one that fits the bill. I initially didn’t expect much from this 1894 novel, but it turned out be a surprisingly engrossing and even exciting read. Read my full review here on the blog.

Honorable Mention

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith 1939-1981 by Iain H. Murray

I’m bending the rules a little and including an eleventh title, because I’m still in progress of reading this one, and if I had finished it before the Top Ten Tuesday date it would surely have bumped one of the other ten off my list. It’s the second volume of Murray’s authorized biography (I read the first volume earlier in the year), and I’ve relished every page—an excellent biography of a remarkable Christian man, as well as an informative window on church history of the 20th century.

Five Windows and The Daughter of Time were library borrows; Spiritual Depression and the Lloyd-Jones biography were already-owned titles and The Rhodes Reader a Christmas gift last year (out of print, I believe); all the rest were Kindle purchases (The Small House at Allington and Under Fire were public-domain and free) except for Brat Farrar and Beau Geste, which I (*cough*) downloaded from Project Gutenberg Australia.

(For my complete roundup of reading highlights from 2017, click here.)

Previous years’ lists: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Old West Memoirs

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No, I haven’t abandoned my series on the Western genre. Life has just kept getting in the way of my sitting down and writing the next post. It’s coming, though—in Part III I’ll be taking a look at the movies Four Faces West (1946), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and how even an “accurate” film adaptation can convey a very different mood and message than the story it was based on.

Meanwhile…in my earlier posts I’ve frequently mentioned reading firsthand accounts that have shaped my knowledge of the Old West. Since today’s Top Ten Tuesday is a fill-in-the-blank theme of ten recommendations in a genre (or of a certain type of book, or for a certain reader’s tastes), I thought I’d do up a list of my favorite Western memoirs for anybody who’s interested in following the sources I’ve quoted or getting into the subject.

No Life For a Lady by Agnes Morley Cleaveland

Possibly my personal favorite on the list—Agnes Morley Cleaveland grew up helping her widowed mother and two younger siblings run a New Mexico ranch from the time she was a young girl in the 1880s, and her memoir paints a lively and entertaining picture of the time, the place, and the people.

Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers by Ralph Moody

This was a read-aloud that my whole family loved years ago. Moody’s New England family moved to Colorado in the early 1900s, and their adventures with weather, horses, cowboys, haying, land disputes and more make for engrossing reading. Moody went on to write a whole series based on his growing-up years, most of which are set in the West—the third book, The Home Ranch, is particularly good too.

Land of the Burnt Thigh by Edith Eudora Kohl

Not counting Little Britches, this was the first book off this list that I read, and it absolutely captivated me. This one recounts the experiences of two sisters homesteading by themselves in South Dakota in 1907, surviving everything from prairie fires to blizzards, eventually running a newspaper and trading post, and witnessing one of the last great land rushes. See my review here.

A Bride Goes West by Nannie Tiffany Alderson

I never got around to reviewing this one, but it’s well worth a read—the story of a Southern-bred woman who moved to Montana as a new bride in the early 1880s, to live in a two-room shack—with little to no idea of how to keep house! Her stories of life on the prairie, the sometimes friendly but often touchy relationships with neighboring Indians, and especially of the loyal cowboys who took her under their wing and taught her about Western life, make for a fascinating read.

Stirrup High by Walt Coburn

This lightly-fictionalized memoir comes at the other end of ranching days in Montana—Coburn, the youngest son of a wealthy rancher, narrates the story of his participation in one of the last big open-range roundups in the early 1900s. If you loved Little Britches you’ll probably like this one too.

No Time on My Hands by Grace Snyder

Grace Snyder’s family moved to western Nebraska when she was a small child—her autobiography is full of details about settlers’ everyday lives, her experiences teaching a frontier school, her eventual marriage to a cowboy-turned-rancher in 1903, and their experiences with ranch life in the sandhills all the way up into the 1950s.

High, Wide and Lonesome by Hal Borland

A bit similar to Little Britches, in that it’s a story of Colorado homesteading in the early 20th century told from a young boy’s perspective—but it has its own style and its own set of characters, and its own set of challenges and hardships for them to face.

A Tenderfoot Bride by Clarice E. Richards

Another story of an Eastern-bred bride moving West, this time to a ranch in Colorado in 1900—every bit as entertaining as the others on this list.

…and two I haven’t read yet

The Log of a Cowboy by Andy Adams
We Pointed Them North by E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott

Of the wide variety of cowboy memoirs that I haven’t gotten around to yet, these two seem to be among the best-known and most frequently referenced. I’ve had Log of a Cowboy (which is in the public-domain and free) on my Kindle for a long time, and one of these days I am going to get to it!

For literally dozens more memoirs, journals and diaries, and collections of letters from the Old West, check out this Goodreads list that I’ve compiled. There are so many titles on there that look fascinating, by ranchers, cowboys, ranchers’ wives, frontier soldiers’ wives and daughters, homesteaders, and more.

Have you read any of these? What’s your favorite firsthand account of the Old West?