I'm going to separate my response out into two posts. First, my ten-best. I usually aim for half fiction, half non-fiction, but this year even after tweaking the best I could do was a four/six split. Close enough. Here they are, in no particular order.
Non-fiction:
- The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
- In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's War, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow
- The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World by Lizzie Collingham
- The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
- 1924: The Year That Made Hitler by Peter Ross Range
- Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich
Fiction:
- The Natural by Bernard Malamud
- Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonald Fraser
- Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
- The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
Only one of these books, Kagan's
Peloponnesian War, got five stars from me at Goodreads this year, so I'd have to call it the best book I read this year. It was truly astonishing how Kagan made living history from events millennia ago.
Other observations: I see five of my six non-fiction books were war related. Three of them were part of my various reading challenges. Even though I read a lot of books about women's issues this past year, only one made my best list (several would get honorable mention). Two of my fiction choices,
The Natural and
Edwin Drood were New Leaf Book Club selections, although at least a couple of others would get honorable mention also. Finally, only one book published in 2019 made my list,
The Five, but ditto on honorable mention.