2018 Year in Review

In 2018 I read 60 books totaling 20,308 pages. This is a decrease from last year when I read 67 books. WHAT HAPPENED? That's pretty easy actually. In the midst of training for my spring marathon, I developed a rather wicked case of plantar fasciitis. So from February until early December I was unable to run. I gained a lot of weight and I was pretty pissed about the whole development. No more two hour training runs spent with my best good book pals. So this was a major blow to my reading goals. My 2017 breakup with Facebook has lasted all of 2018, but 2018 was also the year that Reading While the Ship Goes Down got it's very own Insta page. If you haven't given "us" a follow go check it out. It's mostly pictures of my books. And me with my books. And my books in airports or near lakes. It's peaceful. Bookstagram is the best kind of Instagram.

My average rating was 3.8 this year, up just a tad from 3.7 last year. I don't recall reading that many duds this year, but I also don't recall absolutely dying of love for a book like I did for The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which I'm still not really over. You can read the review here. So without further ado, here's the rundown for 2018.

Longest Book: A Column of Fire by Ken Follett. While I'm not surprised, given that these Kingsbridge books of Follett's tend to be large, I don't really recall spending that much time with this book. A 927 pages, I think I should remember wondering why it was going on so long, but I don't. I remember mostly being annoyed at the replay of political and historical events and the attempts at making those suspenseful (oh no, will Guy Fawkes blow up Parliament?! - said no one ever after the actual events). Anyway, the fact that I loved both of the earlier books in the series make this book also win in a second category.

Biggest Disappointment: See above. What a sad turn for such a good series. Anyway, you can read that review here.

Best Book: A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman. I can always tell if I've really loved a book if I can't let it go after reading it. Sometimes that takes a few days, sometimes a few weeks. And it typically involves a Wikipedia rabbit hole and possible fan fiction or movie versions. And such was the case with A Man Called Ove. I googled. I watched the Swedish language film. I loved all of it, as I loved Ove, a crotchety old man who was served some of the worst turns life has to offer and still managed to be decent and love again.

You can read the review here.

Shortest Book: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. I've rarely read a novel length work quite like this one. It's more of a collection of stories placed together to detail the plight of a certain demographic into a cohesive sort of collective experience. It was odd and I liked and didn't like it in turns. But it ended up with a 4 star rating because it really managed to tell a story without any actual characters. A testament I think to the strength of the writing, and the topic itself.

You can read the review here.

Best Character: Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky from The Undoing Project. This is a bit of a cheat since these guys are REAL PEOPLE, but they are so fascinating, and they changed the way we look at economics and psychology FOREVER! Two psychologists who thought that somethings that people claimed were true, were just not. And they were right. I loved The Undoing Project so much, I ended up reading Misbehaving by Richard Thaler, and then I realized I needed to go back to school and so in a couple weeks I astrt a certificate program in Data Analytics. Danny and Amos made me realize my brain still works.

You can read the review here.

Worst Book: Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane. To be fair, I also really disliked The Last Mrs. Parrish, but Dennis Lehane is supposed to know what he's doing and has written some really good books. This was not one of them. A meandering boring plot with too much exposition and then a completely unbelievable (not in a good way) ending. Boo.

You can read the review here.

Worst Character: Obviously this has to be someone from The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine. You know, the book that basically says domestic abuse and serial rape are just punishments for horrible people, I just couldn't hang with that. Even if Amber Patterson was a terrible person. She was also a terrible character. She was all bad. There really wasn't a redeeming quality about her, which  made her painfully unreal and damaged the book further.

You can read the review here.

Honorable Mentions:  Oh man, I read some books this year that as a book didn't merit five star ratings, but as concepts or thoughts were really moving and helped develop me as a person. Including Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (review here) and Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (review https://readingwhiletheshipgoesdown.blogspot.com/2018/07/mans-search-for-meaning-viktor-frankl.htmlhere).

Goals for 2019: I've set my goal of 62 books for this year. It's above my 2018 level but not quite at 2017. I honestly don't know how this foot is going to hold up and if I'm not able to run... well I may be crying my eyes out somewhere because running is the thing I do for me. The way I make sure I've gotten enough exercise. So this could be a problem. I'm hoping not though and that I'm going to be back in 1/2 marathon shape in no time.

Will George RR Martin get around to publishing Winds of Winter (signs are pointing to yes!- check out this update), I'm not counting on it (I was similarly disappointed last year and even wrote that EXACT SAME SENTENCE in last year's review - AND the year before that, and the year before that) or I would have set the goal at 52. But if it ruins my reading goal for the year, I'd be okay with that. Having this as the final paragraph of my year in review is becoming kind of a comedy piece of its own. Anyway thanks for reading with me this year!

Into the Water - Paula Hawkins

For a final book of the year, Into the Water by Paula Hawkins did not disappoint. I had read and liked, for the most part, Girl on the Train a couple of years ago  (you can read that review here). Despite not liking the main character in that book, Hawkins writing was strong and the plot was well laid out. 

The same can be said for Into the Water. While it may suffer from a few too many narrative voices, Into the Water is a double murder mystery. 

Nell Abbott has died in the drowning pool, a bend of a river where witches were once sentenced to death and drowned. Nell has a bit of a fascination with the spot and the women who have died there, Lizzy Seaton, a young 16th Century girl condemned for withcrafter, Anne Reed, a murderous wife, Lauren Townsend, a distraught and spurned mother, and finally Katie Whittaker, a young classmate of Nell's daughter, Leena. (I listened to the audio of this one, I never know quite how to spell names).

Nell's sister, Jules has arrived in town to take charge of her 15 year old niece, Leena. Jules and Nell were estranged and the circumstances were not good. But that's nothing compared to all the baggage people in this town are carrying. 

Illicit affairs, old grudges, twisted senses of protection - it's all there in this small town and it all works to first mask and then unravel the mystery of Katie and then Nell's death. Hawkins piece-meal deals out her facts and hints like a miser and then in a rush develops the secrets into plot twists. I was entertained even after I had figured it all out, until I hadn't. So that was fun. 

I'm glad to have made my reading goal. Especially because a bad case of plantar fasciitis kept me off the running kick that has fueled the last two years of my audiobook consumption.

4/5 Stars. 

Ploughshares Fall 2018 - Edited by Ladette Randolph

Somewhere in the middle of the second story of this Edition, I thought, "man these are really long stories this time around." Flipping to the front - "Longform Essays and Stories." Yes folks, I am super observant sometime.

Though long, I thought the Fall 2018 Edition of Ploughshares was a strong entry.

The edition kicks off with The Blue River Hotel by Stephen Henighan of a Canadian-Guatemalan man who spends time in Guatemala teaching students about the country and living sort of a split life between who he is in Guatemala and who he is back home with a completely uninterested and un-invested fiance. This starts to all slip when he meets a young enthusiastic grad student. I really liked the portrayal of living two lives in two completely separate places.

Endlings by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum follows Dr. Katya Vidovic, a physician treating women (girls) with eating disorders at an inpatient treatment facility. The back and forth from Katya's past in war torn Zagreb. Unlike the main character in The Blue River Hotel, Katya does not go back and seems to have written off that part of her life entirely.

Up next was the devastating A Death in the Family by Billy O'Callaghan told through the eyes of a young girl as her family watches her older brother slowly die. This was a heart ripper.

I also enjoyed Andrew Bienen's Fort Wilderness about a Disney themed breakup. This George guy cannot get his affairs in order and commit already. 

The Man on the Beach by Josie Sigler Sibara imagines what would happen if a young boy encounters Hitler on the beach in Argentina. I really liked the contrast set up by Sibara between what a young boy sees and what he understands as an older man. 

Lastly for fiction, I enjoyed Positive Comments by Owen King. Two dysfunctional siblings perform one kind act together. 

For non-fiction, I also really enjoyed Allen Gee's tribute to James Alan McPherson in Old School . I've never read any of McPherson's work, but that didn't matter. Gee's rendering of McPherson is so full that I felt comfortable with the characters. I've added some of McPherson's work to my TBR pile.

In a world where Jamal Khashoggi was intentionally targeted and killed by a ruling Prince, the translations of Georgi Markov, Prostitution and Wastewater are timely. Markov was also assassinated by his government for his own criticism of the communist regime in Bulgaria. It makes you wonder how much if any things have changed.

4/5 Stars.

Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

This book came out quite a while ago and honestly I only picked it because it's narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris and after finishing Every Note Played, I wasn't quite ready to leave his voice. I knew nothing about the book, the plot, or even the true life events which inspired them. I'm not above reading novels about countries in which the author has no experience (I have read all these German detective Bernie Gunther novels by Phillip Kerr, who is British and liked them) but I do take them with a grain of salt because it is immensely different when you read a novel by a native of that country.

That being said, I read Child 44 with a quiet sort of fascination as it details not only the actions of a methodical and sadistic serial killer but also the casual cruelties of Stalin-era police abuses and political paranoia. And honestly the parts about the Soviet apparatus and why it made it so difficult to hunt for a serial killer were more interesting than the crime facts itself because honestly, the brutal killing of children is not really something I like to read about. 

The book starts with a cat and a woman in Ukraine in the 1930s, during the famine sparked by forcing everyone onto collective farms. People are starving and dying. And a woman, somehow, still owns a cat. The cat is let go when the woman lets go on her desire to live. But a boy living nearby sees the cat and makes a plan with his brother to trap and eat it. During their trip into the woods, the braver older brother is struck by a man and taken away. 

We then jump to twenty years later. The "Great Patriotic War" is over and Leo Demidov is a ranking MGB officer who is tasked with finding an alleged spy. In tracking down the spy he is forced to confront the banality of evil existing in his duties as well as the shaky foundations upon which his investigations and executions have been based. He also must convince a grieving family that they cannot speak about the murder of their five year old son, because murder does not exist in Soviet Russia. It cannot. People have no reason to murder, being housed and fed, so any suggestion of murder is the spreading of anti-soviet sentiment.

Trapped within this circular reasoning, unable to name and investigate the murder, Leo goes so far as to threaten the family into silence. He is then asked to denounce his own wife, which he refuses to do, and is demoted and sent to a remote outpost. Upon arriving at the outpost he comes upon two children similarly murdered. He must then decide to what length he is willing to go to investigate the murders and to catch the killer. 

The events of the book are loosely based on the most notorious Russian serial killer of all time, Andrei Chikatilo, who evaded capture for decades as he killed as many as 56 women and children. He was convicted and sentenced to death for 52 of these murders in October 1992 and executed in February 1994. He was arrested several times over the course of his killing spree, but bungled investigations and shoddy police work led to his release and continued destruction until he was finally arrested in November 1990. 

Chikatilo's mug shot.

Everyone you care about in this novel has a sad and complicated back story that informs their decisions, and I really liked how the author teased out each of these issues in time. I may have to read the next book in the series to find out what happens to Leo later on.

4/5 Stars.

Sword Song (The Saxon Stories #4) - Bernard Cornwell

This series continues to be a delight for me and I'm surprised it's been so long since I finished book 3, Lords of the North. You see, I listened to the first three books on audio and although I've never seen the man, I have a complete voice crush on the narrator of the first three books. So when Sword Song was not available in audio I thought I'd wait and see if my library got it in. It didn't. So then I finally got around to requesting the kindle version of the book, and it popped into my queue so here we are.

I had forgotten a lot of the plot from Lords of the North, but thankfully my review of that book (read it here) was uncharacteristically detailed regarding the plot. 

Sword Song picks up with Uhtred manning his burh at Coccham. It's part of a series of defensive cities designed by Alfred to protect Wessex. And Uhtred is doing a good job because when it's military related, everyone knows that Uhtred knows his stuff. He's living happily with his wife Gisela, the daughter of the Viking king of Northumberland. They have two children and all is well. Which means that things for Uhtred are about to get a little bit worse. 

A report arrives that the Thurgilson brothers have taken the city of Lundene (London) and along with Haesten (a thoroughly unthankful a-hole who Uhtred would have been better off to let die) they intend to make a play for all of Mercia and Wessex. 

Alfred is smart but he's also kind of an a-hole so he marries his sweet daughter, Aethelflaed, off to Uhtred's butt kissing insecure cousin Aethelred, who somehow accepts that being less than the King of Mercia is an okay trade for being Alfred's man in Mercia. Alfred is trying to strengthen his position, but in order to do so, he extracts a promise from Uhtred that Uhtred will deliver Lundene as a wedding present to his cousin and Alfred's daughter. Oh Uhtred, he's always making these crazy promises.

In the meantime, the brothers, Sigefrid and Erik, along with Haesten, conspire to convince Uhtred that HE could be King in Mercia, if he only joins forces with them and convinces Ragnar to come down from Northumbria to join them. Uhtred considers because honestly he gets not respect, but ultimately Uhtred is more loyal than Alfred or anyone else give him credit.

So Uhtred comes up with a plan to take Lundene and in the meantime Aethelred takes out his insecurities on his incredibly young wife by beating her for perceived indiscretions with other men. Uhtred is NOT having that. He may be very violent and understand pillage and rape in the context of war, but hitting your wife is not acceptable behavior to Uhtred. 

So it's no surprise that Aethelred's insecurities lead to Aetheflaed being in the wrong place at the wrong time and being kidnapped by Sigefrid. Uhtred has to come up with a plan to rescue her or all of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, etc it's all royally F'd. And I'll just stop there.

The thing about these stories is that it's basically non-stop action and I really like the writing. And Uhtred is just a great character, but so is Father Pyrlig. So there's so much to like about these books. I even read it to myself in the narrators voice. So all was not lost. And now I can get the 5th book (also not in audio format from my library :()

4/5 Stars