2019 – A Year in Books

What I read in 2019, the comprehensive list.

How to read this list:

*  = Recommend
** = Really recommend
NC = No comment (or, really, do not bother)
RR = Re-read
F = Fiction
NF = Non-fiction

If you trust my reading recommendations, I suggest you purchase a copy of whatever catches your eye at your favourite local second hand book shop (most of the books have been in print for some time, I have found books that age well, well, age well) as they probably need your money much more that Jeff Bezos needs it (and more than I need the affiliate marketing crumbs) and (bonus!) they are less likely to track your personal data in exchange. Hence the lack of online purchase links. Enjoy.

1. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman (F)
2. Darwin’s Watch – Terry Pratchett (F/NF *)
3. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John le Carre (F *)
4. Superfreakonomics – Stevn Levitt & Stephan Dubner (NF – RR *)
5. Valley of the Dolls, Jaqueline Susann (NF)
6. Manage Your Money Like a F*cking Grownup – Sam Beckbessinger (NF)
7. Anarchy, State and Utopia – Robert Nozick (NF *)
8. Radical Markets – Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Well (NF *)
9. The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (NF **)
10. To Live – You Hua (F * But be emotionally prepared.)
11. On Truth and Lies – Friedrich Nietzsche (NF)
12. Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu (NF)
13. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro (F *)
14. The Hero With The Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell (NF *)
15. Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang (F *)
16. The Golden Bough – J.G. Frazer (NF *)
17. Man’s Search for Meaning – Victor Frankl (NF **)
18. The State of Affairs – Esther Perel (NF *)
19. The Course of Love – Alain De Botton (NF *)
20. How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain De Botton (NF **)
21. Neuromancer – William Gibson (F – NC – It’s a nope from me)
22. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer (F)
23. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (F *)
24. Penses – Blaise Pascal (NF)
25. Hyperbole and a Half – Allie Broch (NF – RR *)
26. The Dispossessed – Ursula Le Guin (F)
27. Almost Zero – Natan Dubovitsky (NF – NC – Yeah. No.)
28. Eat Your Greens – Wiemer Snujders (NF *)
29. To Kill a Mocking Bird – Harper Lee (F *)
30. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (F – RR **)
31. Limits to Growth (The 30 Year Update) – Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers & Dennis Meadows (NF *)
32. Utopia, New Atlantis and the Isle of Men – Thomas Moor, Francis Bacon and Henry Neville (F*)
33. Mythos – Stephen Fry (NF *)
34. Beowulf – The Tolkien translation (F/NF * But don’t bother too much with the commentary after the poem.)
35. Permanent Record – Edward Snowden (NF *)
36. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nobakov (F *)
37. Vladimir Putin: Life Coach – Rob Seers (F/NF)
38. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible – Peter Pomerantsev (NF ** Damn.)
39. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest – Ken Kesey (F *)
40. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (F ** I was surprised. This is good.)
41. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffery Eugenides (F*)
42. The Napoleon of Notting Hill – Gilbert Keith Chesterton (F * Weird, but read it anyway.)
43. The Richest Man in Babylon – George S Clason (NF *)
44. The Bone Woman – Clea Koff (NF *)
45. Middlemarch – George Eliot (F **)
46. The Secret History – Donna Tart (F)
47. The Prince – Machiavelli (NF)
48. 4321 – Paul Auster (F)
49. Unseen Academicals – Terry Pratchett (F – RR ** – Just read all the Pratchett, ok?)
50. Pleasures and Days – Marcel Proust (F)
51. Justine – Lawrence Durrell (F)
52. Submission – Michel Houellebecq (F **)
53. The Road to Serfdom – Friedrich Hayek (NF *)
54. Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse (F)
55. AI Super Powers – Kai-Fu Lee (NF)
56. The True Believer – Eric Hoffer (NF **)
57. Foresight – Johan Sani (NF)
58. Your Inner Game – Matt Brown (NF)
59. 2084 – Boualem Sansal (F)
60. The Age of Reason – Jean Paul Sartre (NF *)
61. The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt (NF **)
62. The Philosophy of Terry Pratchett – Jacob M. Held et al (NF *)
63. A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War – Joseph Le Conte (NF **)
64. This is Marketing – Seth Godin (NF *)
65. Don Quixote – Cervantes (F – NC – The only incomplete read on the list. Life is too short, and 280 pages in should count as “a book” read anyway.)
66. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis (F * – But damn, really.)
67. The Globe – Terry Pratchett (NF **)
68. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking (NF *)
69. The Human Stain – Philip Roth (F **)
70. The World According to Xi – Jerry Brown (NF *)
71. The Body Politic – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (NF **)
72. As I Lay Dying – Williams Faulkner (F *)
73. The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson (F)
74. Reflections on the Revolution in France – Edmund Burke (NF)
75. High Fidelity – Nick Hornby (F **)
76. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes (F *)
77. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshanna Zuboff (NF *)
78. The Trial – Franz Kafka (F **)
79. Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman – Richard Feynman (FN **)
80. Our Man in Havana – Graham Green (F *)
81. Facial Justice – L.P Hartley (F *)
82. Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain (NF **)
83. The Lacuna – Barbara Kingslover (F)
84. R.U.R. – Karel Capek (F **)
85. Foundation, Foundation and Empire & Second Foundation (the trilogy in one volume) – Isaac Asimov (F *)
86. The Fall – Albert Camus (F *)
87. Why Nations Fail – Aaron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson (NF)
88. Atomised – Michel Houellebeq (F *)
89. Team Human – Douglas Rushkoff (NF)
90. The Art of Conjecture – Bertrand de Jouvenel (NF *)
91. London’s Strangest Tales – Tom Quinn (NF)
92. Nothing to Envy – Barbara Demick (NF **)
93. Tarantula – Bob Dylan (F/NF)
94. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (F *)
95. Death of the Gods – Carl Miller (NF **)
96. Envy – Helmut Schreck (NF **)
97. The Circle – Dave Eggers (F – NC – This is a bad book.)
98. The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump – Rob Sears (F/NF)
99. The Elements of Moral Philosophy – James Rachels (NF *)
100. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (F **)
101. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Bruges (F)
102. Capote – Gerald Clarke (NF *)
103. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – Oliver Sacks (NF *)
104. Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler (F **)
105. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson (F)
106. Freedom – Margret Atwood (F/NF)
107. Howards End – E. M. Vortser (F **)
108. Robot Rights – David J. Gunkel (NF *)
109. Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov (F **)
110. Ethics – Aristotle (NF *)
111. A Year of Reading Dangerously – Andy Miller (NF *)