Enjoyed Hemingway here as always. He again captures death and fear between lines of economy prose. But I consider The Sun Also Rises to have been more personally impactful and memorable.

Gatsby contains an excellence that draws even with its reputation. A shimmering mirage overlaid on the base underbelly of humanity. I consider both the opening and the closing to be among the most poetic I’ve read.

A unique look at fundamentalism, the awkwardness of social misfits, and the industry of mid-1800’s Australia. The story appeared to lose steam during its long meandering middle, but Carey redeemed all promises in the end with surprising tempo.

McEwan gives a curious and dark look into the private crisis of marital infidelity. Reconciliation comes less from forgiveness than by resignation and relational inertia. McEwan proves his consummate versatility as he narrates the intimate thoughts of a spurned middle-aged female protagonist.

It seems a curious irony that McEwan’s Atonement is not his Booker Prize novel. Amsterdam plays out the implications and natural outcomes of legalized assisted suicide/euthanasia. I found the story both sound and memorable, but not at the level of Atonement, which remains my favorite McEwan novel.

Ho-hum as novels go, but Saturnalia did provide a decent period piece for immersion in Roman era culture, as it follows a 1st century detective through various political and criminal adventures.

Beautifully woven fantasy, yet the bracketing beginning and ending could have been meatier.

Poignant, beautiful, tragic. Recommended read for the soul. But Death, I’m afraid, proved unconvincing; I walked away feeling that there was a great deal of unrealized potential in his character.

Martin’s masterful language alone would justify reading Game of Thrones. An enjoyably epic-scale world teeming with a Machiavellian ensemble cast.

Commentary on the collective inertia of societal prejudice and injustice, but viewed though the closeup lens of a family household. I found it impactful, but not life-altering. In its day, I have no doubt it shook the stones.

Excellent premise and well told story in a book that could have been ever-so-much more. American Gods embodies a fantasy crafted too casually and with internal plausibility gaps that could have been narrowed.

Joseph Conrad: The Master Craftsman. His craft of language dwarfs the great hordes of journeyman novelists. Lord Jim is one of the greatest character novels I have ever read, and it may well be the finest book I’ve opened this year.

Superbly detailed, high-realism science fiction spun from a thankfully original cataclysm, which threatens the survival of all life on earth. As a multi-millennium epic, SevenEves is really two books in one. The first proves better than the less-developed second.

Without question, the worst novel I have read this year.

Dostoevsky’s classic would be worthwhile for the Grand Inquisitor alone. By the closing, however, I was fatigued by the characteristically Russian excess of words. It could have been 30% shorter while losing none of its effect; par for the Russian novel I suppose. Meanwhile, I believe my preference remains for Tolstoy.

Hawkins’ unusual choice of an alcoholic woman for her protagonist made this a unique read from the beginning. There proved to be more turns to the plot than the first pages intimate.

My first Atwood book. I was surprised at the lasciviously experimental story threads. In audiobook form, the unfortunate male reader nearly tuned me out for good. Interesting read, but not a great pick in Audible format.

It’s the texture of Steinbeck that stands apart. Cannery Row crafts vignettes of authentic brevity among a loose community of strugglers, some misfits, some upstanding. Steinbeck weaves an everyman tale without heroes or villains, and you remember them.

Stephen King wrote what is probably the single best book on writing that I’ve read this year. A mixture of memoir and mentoring, it was so good that I found myself buying it in hardback, digital, and audiobook formats.

In a narrow run against King, I’d have to place Anne Lamott as an extremely close second. She summarizes her advice in memorable sound bites, which I have typed and posted to the wall above my typewriter. One inch picture frames. Shitty first drafts. Double true.

Decent how-to instruction book for developing a good story premise before committing too much to paper.

Solid how-to instruction book for overall novel construction.

In this examination of 20 major plot types, Tobias explains the important why as well as the more formulaic how for each approach. If nothing else, the journey through the 20 allows the writer to disambiguate what sort of story he really wants to tell. And you realize that you can’t tell them all at once.

Excellent, excellent, excellent! Hynes’ lecture series on writing fiction is the best how-to discussion of the craft that I’ve purchased. I’ve listened through the course at least three times, taking many notes along the way. Excellent!

Technically Maier’s book is a novel, but as a New Testament scholar his attention to historical detail was scrupulous. The story is well crafted but unsurprising. Maier’s unfortunately Pollyanna portrayal of the early church leaders yields predictably flat and boring character renditions. The pagans proved far more interesting, because they were real.

My man, John Zande wrote a brilliantly satirical argument for the existence of god; except this god is infinitely evil. His inversion of the typical arguments for god makes for the darkest of humor, but it ably demonstrates just how specious the standard arguments raised by theists actually are.

Anyone who thinks history is boring has never read Herodotus. Written a few centuries BCE, Herodotus recounts major events and characters from Greek culture while commenting on the accuracy of the sources and stories he has collected. Along the way, he illustrates just how superstitious and credulous our ancient ancestors were, and how little human nature has changed since.

I read the Wars of the Jews as a research necessity for my own book project. It portrays the Palestine of Jesus’ day as a hotbed of radicalism and the ancient Jews as a people easily as comfortable with suicidal warfare as the Kamikaze or the Jihadi. I have probably never read a more gruesome tale than his account of the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp portrays a fantasy of blood relish consistent with the Jewish mindset described by Josephus. With dubious and miraculous levels of suffering, it is a work that reveals the depth of mental maladjustment in the early movement of Christianity.

Continuing thematically from the prior two works, the collected letters and works of the early Apostolic Fathers show more of the same. The letters of Ignatius, in particular, reflect a depth of derangement and masochism we moderns would label psychotic.

Richard Carrier’s mighty tome on the non-historicity of Jesus and Christ-myth theory packs a formidable punch. The more of Carrier I read, the more I suspect he may well be right: there never was a Jesus. Superb and detailed argument, but not for the casual reader.

Thomas Paine was flat-out amazing. In an age before the evidences of modern archaeology, and well before the sciences of cosmology or evolutionary biology, he exploded the entire idea of Biblical historicity — using nothing save the Bible itself. His oracular observations have only been validated by hard evidences since.

Myth in Human History was a good series of lectures, but they seemed somewhat weak on structure and organization. I will likely finish them one day, but for now I have laid them aside, somewhat out of boredom.

Dizzying but fascinating. I look forward to my continued march through Joyce’s tome.

The classic I’ve yet to finish. I’m currently listening to the audiobook read by Ian McKellen. Superb.

Vibrant, grizzled prose, feeling almost as though it were written in multicolored ink. When complete, I intend to see the movie as well.

Penning hilarity by way of absurdity, Voltaire brandishes his famed razor wit while disassembling Leibnizian optimism and its assertion of a divine cosmic order.

Post apocalyptic humanity now lives in a gigantic silo to protect themselves from a poisoned atmosphere. The story is curious and interesting, but in the end, I have doubts that this long read will alter my life or expand my mind.