Best Books of 2008

A very belated list, since we're two weeks into the new year already. But I've been running almost nonstop since January 1. We had a family wedding on the 3rd, flew back to Seattle late on the 4th, and had to plunge straight into work on the 5th. I've had two very busy weeks at work, but now I have a four-day weekend in front of me (I'm taking the 20th as a vacation day), so I finally have time to sit down to reflect on 2008 and plan for 2009.

Anyway, here are the books read in 2008 that made the strongest impression on me, in no particular order. Heavy on the nonfiction, and heavy on the Wellington:

Wellington: the Years of the Sword, by Elizabeth Longford. My favorite Wellington biography, and one of my favorite biographies, period. Longford doesn't adopt the reserved, critical distance of a more modern biographer, but her obvious affection for her subject doesn't blind her to his faults.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Epistolary novel set in the immediate aftermath of WWII--well-written, and a fun read.

Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fisher. Gave me a new perspective on British and American history and culture.

Peter Wicked, by Broos Campbell. Another entry in my favorite Age of Sail series that no one has heard of.

No-Man's Lands, by Scott Huler. An adventurous traveler tries to follow in the footsteps of Odysseus.

Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz. Explores the living memory of the Civil War.

Rapture Ready, by Daniel Radosh. One of the best outsider views of evangelical culture I've read.

The Sharing Knife: Passage, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I love this world and this series, and I can't wait for the next installment.

A Soldier's Wife: Wellington's Marriage, by Joan Wilson. The sad story of two basically good people who were very bad together...with lots of wonderful detail on turn-of-the-nineteenth-century British aristocratic life for the researcher.

Napoleon and Wellington, by Andrew Roberts. Fascinating joint biography.

Last books of 2008

I spent the last week at my mom's house outside Birmingham where my internet access was limited to my iPhone, so I didn't blog my reading. Here are my last two books of 2008. First three books of 2009 to follow in a day or so.

Dancing Into Battle: A Social History of the Battle of Waterloo (Nick Foulkes, 2006) isn’t your usual account of the battle that closed the Napoleonic Wars. If you want to know what happened on the field, you should read Alessandro Barbero’s The Battle, the Wellington chapter of John Keegan’s The Mask of Command, Jac Weller’s Wellington at Waterloo, or even Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Waterloo. But if you’re me and can do rough dioramas of Quatre Bras and Waterloo from memory using tableware (I’m such an exciting dinner companion, I really am!), or if you couldn’t care less about military history but love juicy 200-year-old gossip, Foulkes’ approach gives the conflict a context missing from the more conventional approaches.

Foulkes only spends a few pages on what happened on the battlefield, focusing instead on the social whirl in Brussels leading up to the battle, what the common soldiers thought of the countryside, Wellington’s behavior before and after the battle, how little the waiting civilians in Brussels knew of what was going on just a few miles away, etc. I recommend it to my fellow history geeks to round out your picture of the events of June 1815.

My last book of 2008 was Scandalizing the Ton (Diane Gaston, 2008). In 1818, a widow who’s already the subject of gossip because of the revelation that her late husband was a murderer causes further scandal by getting pregnant, with the timing such that the baby might be her husband’s, but it might not. The reader is in on the mystery--the book opens with the heroine engaging in comfort sex with a gentleman who aids her when she gets hurt fleeing the Regency equivalent of the paparazzi. Eventually she ends up with the father, but it’s a bumpy ride.

It’s a well-written and well-researched book, and I especially enjoyed the secondary romance between the heroine’s maid and a reporter who develops qualms of conscience about engaging in gossip rather than true journalism. But in the interests of full disclosure, I did have a problem with the heroine’s willingness to pass the baby off as her late husband’s. While that late and unlamented gentleman didn’t leave any property to speak of, he did have a title, and if the heroine’s baby had been born on time, he would’ve disinherited the cousin who was the rightful heir to the earldom. I guess it really doesn’t matter THAT much, but it DID nag at me throughout the story.

I think I’ve just over-internalized a character who’ll eventually show up in my WIP series (unless I change my mind before I get that far). She gets pregnant under similar circumstances and immediately decides her only choices are to marry the baby’s father if he offers or to have the child in secret and adopt it out, because she’d feel too guilty if the kid turned out to be a boy, thereby disinheriting her first husband’s brother. Of course, my Rebecca is A) painfully perfectionist and B) the product of generations of Puritans. Plus, if I didn’t make her so uncompromising on this particular issue, she’d cross an ocean to get away from the man with whom I intend her to have a somewhat tempestuous, mostly happy, and always interesting marriage, and I couldn’t have that, could I? But I digress. I should go work on the WIP instead of babbling about it.

Take the Cannoli

Take the Cannoli (Sarah Vowell, 2000) is a collection of essays, most of which appeared in one form or another on NPR, Salon.com, etc. I liked some essays better than others--basically, my overlap points with Sarah Vowell are American history and fundamentalist childhoods, not Frank Sinatra and the Godfather movies. But it's a good book for reading over the holidays when you have ten minutes here and half an hour there, and Vowell has a way with words.

The Circle of Seasons

I finished the first book of my holiday reading on the plane last night: The Circle of Seasons (Kimberlee Conway Ireton, 2008). A book on the Christian liturgical year seemed appropriate as Advent is about to slide into Christmastide.

Kimberlee goes to my church, so I recognized at least half of the names in her stories and remember hearing a good number of the sermons she references. The book is all about bringing theology into everyday life through the means of the church year, and I enjoyed reading it because I've been looking for ways to make my beliefs experiential as opposed to purely cerebral and ethical. However, it did remind me of a mild grudge I have against my church at this time of year: the careful and near-absolute exclusion of Christmas themes and music from the Advent season. IOW, "O Come, O Come Immanuel" or "Of the Father's Love Begotten" is kosher for Advent, "Joy to the World" not so much. I can't argue with the leadership's liturgical logic, but the unintended consequence for me is that I never get to sing Christmas carols anymore, at least not in a full-bodied, four-part-harmony with fellow choir members sort of way. (Which is much more fun than singing in the shower or along with a CD in the car, y'know?) You see, neither my husband nor I is a Seattle native, so we're always out of town by Christmas Eve and are rarely back in church before Epiphany ends liturgical Christmas. So I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever get to sing "Joy to the World" or "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" with a choir again, much less the more obscure Christmas carols like "Gentle Mary Laid Her Child" or "Once in Royal David's City."

But other than that gripe? Liturgy is a good thing.

Rachel LeMoyne

Rachel LeMoyne (Eileen Charbonneau, 1999) was inspired by a historical footnote--the fact that the Choctaw Nation, less than twenty years after their forcible removal from Mississippi to Oklahoma, took up a collection for victims of the Great Famine in Ireland. Charbonneau elaborates on that incident, having a Choctaw schoolteacher, Rachel LeMoyne, travel to Ireland with a pair of missionaries to help distribute the aid. She gets involved in the Irish people's struggles, marries an Irishman wanted by the English for assorted acts of what they consider sedition, and brings him back to America with her, where they end up on the Oregon Trail.

I never expected to read a book that featured the Trail of Tears AND the Great Famine AND the Oregon Trail, but it makes sense and gives the book an old-fashioned saga-like appeal. Rachel, her husband, and her brother occasionally seem too super-capable in the course of their travels, giving them a bit of an Ayla & Jondalar feel as they overcome prejudices by assorted medical, mechanical, educational, and equestrian skills, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable read that kept me turning pages.

Once Upon a Christmas

I like reading a Christmas romance or two at this time of year. They're a great way to relax amid the frantic holiday scramble. (A scramble which, incidentally, has been made exponentially worse this year by the weather. We're basically snowed in here, with more on the way tomorrow afternoon, but I've got to find a way to get to the office either tomorrow morning or Monday before I go out of town for two weeks on Tuesday, or else assorted Bad Things will happen. I happen to work atop one of the steepest hills in the city. Fun fun fun.)

Anyway, Diane Farr's Once Upon a Christmas (2000) really hit the spot. A dying duchess in 1817 or thereabouts wants to see her only son suitably married and doesn't trust him to make a wise choice himself, so she takes in an orphaned distant relative to groom to be the perfect duchess. When the son comes home for Christmas, wacky yet poignant hijinks ensue.

This book was re-released this year, so if you're passing through a bookstore on the way to the airport and want a relaxing, seasonal read, this is a good choice. Or, you could always buy it now while it's around and stash it on your to-be-read shelf for next Christmas.

The Anglo Files

The Anglo Files (Sarah Lyall, 2008) is an amusing and snarky, if not especially profound, look at British life through the eyes of a long-term expatriate American. (She moved there in the early 90's and is raising two British daughters with her British husband.) I lived in England myself in 1997-98, and while I experienced culture shock, it was on a lesser scale--probably partly because I was only there for a year and had friends and coworkers explicitly trying to be nice to the guest, and partly because by the time I got there the economic boom of the 90's was already well in motion. Other than the houses and cars running a bit smaller, England seemed just as wealthy and consumer-oriented (for better or worse) as America. The food was fine, though I did get homesick for good Italian and Chinese, and you should NEVER express a liking for broccoli to people who might someday invite you for dinner in England, not if you only like the vegetable in question raw, stir-fried, or VERY lightly steamed. But my local Tesco had as good a selection as any suburban American grocery store of the time, and I had plenty of decent pub grub, not to mention the best Thai and Indian food I'd ever had. And I honestly can't remember anyone being rude to me, unless you count the kind of questions you get from people who expect you to be the spokesperson and apologist for your entire home country of 300 million people.

That said, I wish I'd read the chapter on the WWII generation before moving in with the older woman who was my hostess for the year. It would've saved a lot of culture clashing, and at least I would've understood WHY she kept the heat turned down so low I'd regularly sit around the house wearing a turtleneck, a sweatshirt, and a fleece while wrapped in a blanket. I knew about the Blitz and children being sent out of London, of course, but I'd already returned to America before I really knew how much harder the British had it in the years immediately following the war.

Simply Christian

My pastor recommended that I read Simply Christian (NT Wright, 2006). I won't go into a lot of detail about why I read it and what I thought here, because this blog is a reading diary and a place to talk about my writing life, not where I go into detail about my religious or political views.

The book is pitched as sort of an updated Mere Christianity, and while there are some similarities to CS Lewis's work, Wright doesn't try as hard to prove Christianity through logic, and he has an idea I've never seen anywhere else that's neither pantheism (God in everything) or deism (a distant God who maybe, occasionally, communicates with his creation) but a God whose world and life overlaps with and intersects with our own.

Wellington: The Years of the Sword

Wellington: The Years of the Sword (Elizabeth Longford, 1969) is the best Wellington biography I've read. I found myself deliberately slowing down when I got to the Waterloo section because I didn't want it to end, and I don't think I've ever felt that way about a biography before.

I didn't have high expectations of it going in. It's an older biography, for starters. I have this prejudice, one that I can't quite explain, for either primary sources or the most recent treatment out there. Also, Longford was Lady Longford, a countess and a relative by marriage of Wellington's family, which I thought might render her too close to her subject, in a way.

She does take a more intimate approach than the other Wellington biographers I've read, but it works, IMHO. At least for me, though maybe the fact he plays a large role in my alternative history, which means I spend a lot of time trying to get into his head myself, influences my reaction. Anyway, this isn't a work of hagiography--Longford doesn't turn a blind eye to her subject's flaws. But it's clear she likes him in spite of his faults and admires his honor, integrity, and military acumen, which again works for me because I feel the same way.

I even want to read her second volume, Wellington: Pillar of State, now, despite my distinct preference for Wellington the general over Wellington the politician.

Fall of a Kingdom

Fall of a Kingdom (Hilari Bell, 2006) is the first volume of a YA fantasy trilogy set in Farsala, a Persia analogue awaiting an invasion from the Hrum (Rome). It's told through the eyes of three Farsalan teenagers--Soraya, the proud daughter of the high commander, her bastard half-brother Jiaan, who's inherited his father's military acumen but isn't fully accepted among the warrior elite because of his peasant mother, and Kavi, a peddler and con artist. The shared POV works, though I liked Jiaan best of the lot. He reminded me a bit of Jack in my own WIP, actually--I have a soft spot for bright, earnest young warriors.

I like how Bell contrasts the warring cultures. I've always enjoyed fantasies like this with recognizable real-world analogues (think Guy Gavriel Kay or Jacqueline Carey) where the magic is light to nonexistent, and this is a great example of the type. She also did a great job with the battle tactics, IMHO, and I'm getting pickier about that sort of thing.

I'm looking forward to reading the second book.

Heaven and Earth

Heaven and Earth (1990) is one of the Harlequin Historicals Kathleen Eagle wrote early in her career. I wish she'd written more of them, because historicals are just so much more my thing than contemporary romances, and this is a good one. Set in the 1840's, it's about a woman widowed on the Oregon Trail when her husband, a minister with dreams of serving in Marcus and Narcissa Whitman's mission, dies on the trail. When she is left behind by the rest of her wagon train, she's rescued by a Metis trapper of French, English, and Cree descent. They're attracted almost from the beginning, but they have to come to terms with the differences in their backgrounds and worldviews amid the strife that arose when Americans were first beginning to settle the West in large numbers. It's not a new or unique story, but it's told well, and Eagle has the knack of convincing you her characters will build a happy future amid the challenges and conflicts of their world.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Normally I avoid the kind of books that get reviewed on NPR, snapped up by book clubs, etc. But The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, 2008) sounded intriguing enough when I heard about it on Morning Edition that I decided to make an exception, and I'm glad I did. It has just about everything that makes me happy in a read--a lively community of characters, a vividly developed historical setting, a romance arc, an ability to deal with serious business without taking itself to seriously, and, last but not least, a happy ending.

The book takes place in 1946, when Britain is just beginning to put itself back together after WWII. The heroine, a London newspaper columnist, begins a chance correspondence with a man from the island of Guernsey, which was occupied by the Germans during the war. It's a purely epistolary novel, deftly written in a pleasantly old-fashioned voice. (Shaffer, the primary author, died after the book was accepted but before publication--Barrows is her niece.)

Miss Darby's Duenna

Miss Darby's Duenna (Sheri Cobb South, 1999) is an old-school traditional Regency romance of the light comedic romp tradition, and it's delightfully well-written, even if the hero's disguise as an old lady made about as much sense as no one noticing Superman looks just like Clark Kent without glasses, and even though the villain turned into the hero of a secondary romance plot awfully quickly. In other words, a good, relaxing read, but more about the fun than the realism.

The Wordy Shipmates

The Wordy Shipmates (2008) is Sarah Vowell's rambly exploration of the early years of Puritan settlement in New England and its impact on American culture on through to the present day. And I had a lot of fun reading it because I kept imagining it in her voice.

The key word here is "rambly." Linear this book is not, and I wonder how much sense it would've made to someone who didn't go in with a fairly solid grounding in American colonial history. Then again, maybe her audience is only other history geeks like me and it doesn't matter.

Anyway, if you like Sarah Vowell, you'll like this book. Reading it made me wish I could hang out with her and geek out over historical crushes and obsessions, because she talks about John Winthrop, Roger Williams, etc. just the way I talk about the Duke of Wellington, Eugene de Beauharnais, etc.

A Reputable Rake

A Reputable Rake (Diane Gaston, 2006) is a Regency historical romance with one foot in high society and one in the London underworld. The heroine is an unconventional young woman who, when one of her maids is unhappy at her work and believes herself ruined because of previous sexual escapades, decides to train the maid to be a courtesan so she can at least have a better life than that of a common streetwalker. Along the way she picks up three more pupils and draws the attention of her neighbor, a rake who is trying to reform.

The courtesan school isn't quite so implausible as it sounds--it's not 100% realistic IMHO, but it didn't go so far that I lost my ability to suspend disbelief, and I enjoyed the book for its engaging characters, both the hero and heroine and a larger and better-rounded cast of secondary characters than you often find in romance these days.

The Unthinkable

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why (Amanda Ripley, 2008) is at times a harrowing read, but if there's one book I've read this year that I'd recommend for everyone, this is it.

Of course, that's mostly because anyone reading this could theoretically find themselves facing an earthquake, a tornado, a tsunami, a terrorist attack, etc., while most of what I read is more driven by my personal quirks and interests. But the value of The Unthinkable isn't just in its universal topicality, but in the amount of surprising and usable information it contains. E.g. people rarely panic in a disaster--they're more likely to go numb and not act until it's too late. But authorities have a bad habit of not training and informing the public about risks out of fear of creating panic...which just makes the numb phase worse, because the more information people have, the better and more quickly they respond. (Which is why military and medical personnel tend to do well in disasters--not because they're a higher order of being, but because they're trained to think in a crisis.)

So. From now on I'm going to leave the office immediately when the fire alarm goes off instead of grumbling to myself about how it's NEVER a real fire and waiting a few minutes to see if it'll stop before going out into the cold and rain. And I'm also going to actually look at the safety cards on airplanes and notice where the emergency exits are. Because when you look at fires or plane crashes with only a handful of survivors, it's often the ones who paid attention and heeded warnings.

The Year of Living Biblically

In The Year of Living Biblically (AJ Jacobs, 2008) an agnostic who describes his background as "Jewish like the Olive Garden is Italian" decides to follow the Bible as literally as possible for a year (8 months focused on the Old Testament, 4 on the New).

I first heard about this book several months ago, but I didn't put it on my holds list, because it sounded like Yet Another Gimmicky Lifestyle Change Memoir. But someone on my LiveJournal friendslist recommended it, so I gave it a try. I'm not sorry I did. I mean, it is a Gimmicky Lifestyle Change Memoir. But it's funny, engagingly written, and managed to make me think all the same. Jacobs follows obscure ceremonial laws and visits a snake-handling church (though he honors his promise to his wife not to pick up a rattlesnake himself), but he also tries not to lie, gossip, or speak ill of others, and he muses upon how to love his neighbor in a New York apartment building and what to do when two laws come into direct conflict. And it made me realize that even back when I was a much more literalistic Christian, I wasn't so good at the not gossiping, avoiding of convenient white lies, etc.

The Big Sort

Seattle is a happy city today. People danced in the streets last night. I exchanged words of jubilation with total strangers...and that's RARE. Northwesterners are normally a reserved, standoffish lot. Closest thing to this was the M's run in 2001, and even that happiness wasn't quite so joyous or universal.

Most of my friends' Facebook statuses and LiveJournal comments were in the same celebratory vein. But for some of my relatives and old, old friends--we're talking high school here--last night felt like the end of the world. They feel, well, pretty much like I did after the Bush v. Gore verdict in 2000, or on election night in 2004. They're my fellow Americans, but I don't understand them. Sometimes I feel like there's no overlap at all in what we love about our country or in the future we desire for it. And if it weren't for the fact I grew up in their world before leaving for college in Philadelphia at 18 and gradually adopting most of the politics and worldview you'd expect from someone who went to an elite college and chose to spend her adult life in liberal cities, I'd have no contact with people like that--people on the other side--whatsoever. (And, boy, was that a long and convoluted sentence.)

It wasn't always this way. Thirty or forty years ago, communities weren't so segregated by ideology. Close elections were close all over the country. But now, prosperity has enabled greater mobility, and we as a nation have self-sorted into communities who think like we do, worship like we do, play like we do...and vote like we do. It's a natural phenomenon--it's human nature to want to be part of a group that shares our values. But it's become so extreme that it's threatened the fabric of our democracy. Even in those close elections, most counties are landslide counties, where the winning candidate has a margin of victory or 20% or more. And so our politics have become more contentious, because politicians and their constituencies are so divided and tribalized that there's no desire for compromise. At least, that's what Bill Bishop contends in The Big Sort (2008), and I confess I recognize myself in its pages. Obama's victory seems to run counter to Bishop's theories to some degree, however, so I'll be watching Bishop's blog to see how he analyzes it.

Albion's Seed (or, I really haven't stopped reading books!)

I'd been hearing great things about Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (David Hackett Fischer, 1989) for ages, and over the past two weeks I finally got around to reading it. It's as good as advertised. Fischer compares the four major pre-Revolutionary migrations from Britain to America (East Anglian Puritans to New England, mostly south and southwest English royalists to tidewater Virginia, midland and Yorkshire Quakers to the mid-Atlantic, and "British Borderers" from Northern Ireland and along the English-Scottish border to the Appalachian backcountry) on various cultural markers.

It's a wonderful read, rich with anecdote, but what stands out, even before you get to the last section discussing how the four cultures influenced American history and culture post-1776, is the amazing continuities. For example, I am, by and large, a descendant of that fourth migration. I didn't grow up with any awareness of being part of an ethnic group or subculture, but the more I learn about Scots-Irish history and culture, the more I see how I'm a product of it. (To put it another way, you can take the girl out of the South, but you can't entirely take the South out of the girl.) Even my interest in military history and the fact I'm writing adventure stories now probably owes something to growing up in a subculture with a strong warrior ethic. It's strange to think that my personality and interests have roots going all the way back to the English-Scottish wars and border feuds of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but Fischer makes his case persuasive.

If you're at all interested in British or American history or culture, read this book.

Guyland

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (Michael Kimmel, 2008) is a depressing book. Kimmel's theory is that our culture has added a new stage between adolescence and adulthood, especially for young men--"Guyland," roughly the ages between 16 and 26. And that stage is pretty messed up. While acknowledging that not every guy fits the mold and that most don't go to the worst extremes, Kimmel paints a depressing picture of binge drinking, hazing hell, misogynistic porn, dysfunctional relationships with women, and post-collegiate aimlessness.

Mostly this book made me feel glad I (and my male friends) are well past this stage, and that I spent my college years in a different subculture where my only interaction with Guyland guys was occasionally having to walk by the frat houses where the brothers sat on the porch and called out 1-10 ratings or speculated on your sexual orientation. And, it also made me apprehensive when I think of my daughter being a teenager in less than a decade.

But the funny thing is it also made me feel a bit sorry for the guys, insofar as we as a culture have let them down--it doesn't make me forgive the misogyny, not even a bitty bit, but I can relate to feeling like the American Dream is slipping away from your generation and to knowing you want more from life but being totally clueless and therefore aimless about how to get there.