2020 in books: fiction

As I mentioned in my previous post, I read a lot last year, and a whole lot of it was good. It was hard to narrow things down for the usual year-in-review lists that I’ve done since starting this blog. You can see everything I read in 2020 here. What I’ve selected for inclusion in this post are a few favorites, that is, “those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.”

So without further ado, I present my:

Top ten fiction reads of 2020

One additional note: any books I listened to, whether on Audible or Hoopla, are marked with an asterisk, as I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake the feeling that audiobooks are a form of cheating. That said, most of these I read the good old-fashioned way.

Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard—Aging airline stewardess Jackie Burke, who has made an occasional bonus by smuggling cash out of Jamaica for Miami gangster Ordell Robbie, finds herself caught in the middle of a sting operation. Cooperate with the feds and she will be killed by Ordell. Cooperate with Ordell to mislead the feds and she will go to prison for a long time. Throw in a local bail bondsman who gets involved, a wildcard ex-con who doesn’t have any scruples about murdering people, and a wonderfully rendered Miami setting, and you have one of Leonard’s most intricate and engaging crime stories. My favorite of Leonard’s crime novels remains Freaky Deaky, but Rum Punch now runs a very close second.

Brave Ollie Possum, by Ethan Nicolle—A really fun and inventive kids’ novel from the creator of Axe Cop. Brave Ollie Possum is the story of Ollie, a boy who is afraid of almost everything, and the nightlong journey he takes after an ogre masquerading as a children’s phobia counselor turns him into a possum. Full of bizarre situations, gross-out humor, and the right kind of danger and scares, this novel is hilarious throughout and even surprisingly moving. Nicolle’s numerous illustrations are an extra dash of fun. I read this with my wife as our bedtime read for a few weeks and we got a kick out of it. Looking forward to sharing it with the kids.

The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London—A lesser known late work of Jack London’s in which a virulent disease breaks out and rips through the population of the world, killing almost everyone and throwing human society—what there is left of it—back into tribal hunter-gatherer conditions. The novel begins in San Francisco and follows James Smith, the narrator, as he tries to avoid the plague, holes up with other survivors only for the disease to infiltrate even their ranks, and flees into the wilderness, where he lives alone until, hesitantly, reconnecting with other people. The story’s frame narrative involves Smith recounting these events to his grandsons, half-savage children growing up in the ruins of our world. The Scarlet Plague is a quick, shocking story that reads like the template for every epidemic or zombie apocalypse story since, and I was really captivated by its energetic writing and thoroughly imagined epidemic scenario—especially since I read this right at the beginning of our coronavirus woes. You can read The Scarlet Plague for free at Project Gutenberg here or in this inexpensive Dover edition.

HMS Ulysses,* by Alistair MacLean—My first big audiobook “read” for the year was Alistair MacLean’s debut novel. HMS Ulysses takes place during World War II aboard a Royal Navy ship. The Ulysses’s mission is to escort an Arctic convoy around the North Cape of Norway to carry Lend-Lease materiel to Russia. This is an unenviable task owing to the long Arctic night, the sub-zero temperatures, and the constant danger from U-boats and land-based Luftwaffe aircraft. Furthermore, the crew of the Ulysses have come near mutiny at the prospect of another Arctic escort mission, and it’s up to the captain and officers to hold the ship together and get the merchant vessels under their charge safely to port. This is the novel that established MacLean’s reputation, and its one-thing-after-another series of reversals, surprises, and catastrophes—culminating in a powerfully moving final act—agonizingly conveys the stress and difficulty of this often forgotten theatre of the war. I listened to Jonathan Oliver’s audiobook reading of HMS Ulysses via Hoopla.

Campusland, by Scott Johnston—A scathing satire of higher ed, campus politics, woke activism, and an entire culture shaped by social media, Campusland is set in an Ivy League university suspiciously similar to Johnston’s own alma mater. An English professor of humble origins looking for tenure, a posh New York society girl upset to be out of the influencer loop for anything as silly as education, and a host of other administrators, activists, journalists, donors, and deans of diversity and inclusion collide when a false rape accusation, a daily act of performative protest, and a media storm turn the campus into a quagmire of status jockeying disguised as concern for safety. Some of Johnston’s targets are pretty low-hanging fruit, but the novel is carefully plotted, doesn’t pull its punches, and really nails a lot of what is wrong with an academy more concerned about “justice” than education and truth and not even aware of how easily its system can be gamed. It’s also very, very funny.

Mr. Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard—Part Western, part crime novel, with the best parts of each. Mr Majestyk follows a typically Elmore Leonard hero—taciturn, principled, impossible to break, and with a few surprises up his sleeve—as organized crime tries to move in on his Arizona melon farm. Fast-paced and economic storytelling, some really nasty bad guys, and a great climactic confrontation make this one of the best of Leonard’s novels that I’ve read yet.

Vindolanda, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Perhaps my favorite discovery of the year, Vindolanda is the first in a novel series by historian Adrian Goldsworthy set in Roman Britain at the end of the first century AD. Romanized Briton Flavius Ferox is an unpopular man because of his interest in pursuing the truth, which makes him the ideal investigator for a series of brutal murders along the small forts lining Hadrian’s Wall. Part drama, part action thriller, part mystery, Vindolanda is exciting and well-written, peopled by interesting and well-realized characters from many walks of life, and full of authentic historical detail and a wonderfully rich vision of the polyglot, multiethnic edges of the Roman Empire and the army that guarded it. A great look at Roman Britain and a thrilling adventure all its own. Interestingly, Goldsworthy holds the distinction of having books on both my fiction and non-fiction lists for 2020.

Greenmantle,* by John Buchan—The second of Buchan’s novels to feature South African adventurer Richard Hannay (after the classic spy novel The Thirty-Nine Steps), Greenmantle takes place during World War I and follows Hannay on a mission into Germany and across Europe to the Middle East, where the Germans are cooking up serious mischief. It’s Hannay and his team’s mission to find out what they’re up to. What I most enjoyed about Greenmantle was its well-realized and realistic World War I setting; the team of colorful characters paired with Hannay, especially a dyspeptic American genius and an old Boer comrade; the minutiae and fieldcraft of World War I-era spy work; Hannay’s travels across the breadth of Europe, which include more than one near miss with his German pursuers; and its dramatic conclusion. Buchan’s premonitions about the political dangers of radical Islam add a startling layer of prescience to the plot—startling because this novel was written and published during the war, well before the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the French and British mandates in the Middle East, and all that flowed from that. But read this novel for the adventure—it’s excellent.

Favorites of the year

I’m not going to cheat like I did with my non-fiction and declare two winners, turning the top ten into a top eleven, but I will declare a tie for first place between two books:

The Silmarillion, by JRR Tolkien

Somehow I, a fan and admirer of Tolkien since high school, had made it to the age of thirty-six without reading The Silmarillion all the way through. This was the year I finally fixed that.

How to summarize The Silmarillion, and what to say about it that hasn’t already been said? It’s richly imagined, dense with detail, and heavily freighted with Tolkien’s insight into human nature—even when he is not, strictly speaking, writing about humans. His understanding of the tragedy of our fallen condition infuses every page, giving each story—from the creation of Middle-Earth and the rise of Melkor to the tragic story of Túrin Turambar and the cataclysmic fall of Númenor—a beauty and poignancy that other authors labor for entire books to achieve. Tolkien also excels at one of the most difficult tasks a writer can undertake—to make goodness not only believable and appealing.

I was overwhelmed by The Silmarillion, which really is so rich that it will take multiple complete readings to begin grasping it to its fullest. But after years of dipping into it here and there, I’m glad I finally read the thing through, as it was meant to be. I’ll be revisiting it soon, hopefully after another long expected reading of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

If you’re interested, a powerful and unsettling passage from Akallabêth, late in the book, led to one of my most read and commented upon blog posts this year. You can read that here.

Old House of Fear, by Russell Kirk

An American industrial magnate of Scottish extraction calls a young lawyer, a veteran of World War II and former student at a Scottish university, to his office with a special mission—travel to the most remote islands off the coast of Scotland, to a rocky islet called Carnglass, and pay a visit to Lady McAskival, the elderly heiress who has isolated herself in the ancestral home there, the Old House of Fear. Upon reaching her and gaining an audience, the lawyer must negotiate the sale of the island and its estate to the industrialist, a distant relation of Lady McAskival. Simple enough, right?

But Hugh Logan, the lawyer, discovers that this errand will be much more involved and far more dangerous than he could have expected. Even on the journey out, as he attempts to find passage to this isolated and dangerous island, he is accosted and waylaid by mysterious strangers, and the fisherman who know the waters around Carnglass seem to want nothing to do with him. When he finally arrives in near deadly weather he discovers that armed men patrol the island. Intruders disappear. And as Logan probes and investigates, it becomes clear that a Dr. Jackman, a purported mystic, has Lady McAskival in his power and is using the island for his own ends. Logan becomes his prisoner, but not before meeting the beautiful Mary McAskival, a spritely young girl who knows the island—and especially the house—inside and out and becomes one of Logan’s only allies in this seemingly hopeless situation.

Russell Kirk was a great lover of the gothic—brooding and atmospheric tales of desolate, out of the way places, buried secrets, long histories, ineradicable memories, and the ever lurking uncanny. Old House of Fear is one of the best evocations of the gothic mood I’ve come across. I loved every moment of it. Especially powerful is a scene in which Mary leads Logan out of the house through a series of hidden passageways, down from the early modern mansion through its medieval understructure, and from there into darker and gloomier and more primitive Norse and Celtic foundations until they emerge onto the windswept shore through a cave, having descended not only through the guts of the house but through a thousand years or more of its history. Awesome.

But Old House of Fear isn’t just a masterpiece of atmosphere, its story also pits upright and honorable characters, characters rooted not only in principles but in place and tradition, against utterly pragmatic ideologues willing to use guile, cruelty, and violence to achieve their ends. Logan, a veteran of the Pacific Theatre in World War II, is no stranger to violence and brute force, but that he will not bend to the level of his enemies offers the reader a dramatic and thrilling illustration of ancient virtue against modern utilitarianism.

Even to describe this theme is to make Old House of Fear sound boring and didactic. It isn’t. Read it for the adventure, for the atmosphere, for the eerie old castle and the sweeping romance—in both senses of the word. The themes, perfectly attuned to Kirk’s traditionalist conservatism, are there just as the Old House of Fear’s subterranean foundations are there—almost invisible, but supporting an incredible structure above them and offering a way of escape.

Honorable mentions

Here are five books—four novels and a collection of stories—that didn’t break into my top ten for the year but that I enjoyed enough to mention. All of them are worth reading.

Tishomingo Blues, by Elmore Leonard—World champion high diver Dennis Lenahan witnesses a mob hit from the top of his eighty-foot diving platform and finds himself slowly drawn into the shady internal politics of the Mississippi casino where he works, the local Civil War reenacting community, and a brewing rivalry between the local “Dixie Mafia” and a Detroit mob looking to expand. Another compulsively readable Leonard crime novel with some great characters, and the reenacting angle was particularly enjoyable.

Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson—A work of apocalyptic fiction, dystopia, sci-fi, and theological fantasy, Lord of the World is a wildly imaginative but prophetic novel published in 1907. Set primarily in Britain in the early 21st century, a time in which religion has been excised from public life, weak and compromised progressive strains of Christianity have died away leaving only a Catholic remnant, and massive empires governed by atheistic secularist regimes exercise total control over the world. Benson tracks a handful of characters—an functionary of the British government, his wife, an increasingly lonely priest on the run from the state—through the rise of a mysterious figure from America who resolves the world’s simmering political conflicts and, as a reward, accepts greater and greater power and higher and higher honors.

Though written before the Bolshevik Revolution, the League of Nations and the UN, the era of industrial genocide, mass aerial warfare, widespread sentimental but unforgiving worship of progress and “humanity,” and the possibility of one-world government through a charismatic politician accorded semi-divine status, and the atomic bomb, Benson prefigures all of these, creating a thoroughly believable speculative world—a world that’s only become more believable in the 113 years since the novel’s publication—with a chillingly plausible Antichrist and the only convincing buildup to Armageddon that I’ve encountered in fiction.

I read this after Jack Butler’s enthusiastic endorsement in this excellent article and, to be sure, Lord of the World is well worth your while, but be aware that it’s written in a florid and sometimes difficult late-Victorian style. You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg here or in this inexpensive edition from Dover.

Ride, Sally, Ride, by Douglas Wilson—One night in the near future, clean-cut Christian college student Ace Hartwick is asked by his neighbor to keep his “wife”—actually a sex robot—company while he runs an errand. Ace crushes the robot in a trash compactor and, after an ambitious progressive prosecutor takes an interest in the case, finds himself charged with murder. What follows is a satirical romp through an only slightly exaggerated version of our culture’s confusion about personhood, identity, gender roles, and the proper role of the state. It’s enjoyable, funny, and goes down easy (I read it in three days), but doesn’t have quite the nasty bite that I wish it had. Wilson acknowledges a debt to Wodehouse in his fiction; if he mixed in a little Waugh his satire would really sting.

Trail of the Apache and Other Stories, by Elmore Leonard—A solid collection of some of Leonard’s early Western fiction, including his first published story from the December 1951 issue of Argosy. Goodreads review with some discussion of the individual stories here.

Where Eagles Dare,* by Alistair MacLean—This story has an interesting history. It began as a treatment for the film, then MacLean himself wrote the novelization of the screenplay. So the novel Where Eagles Dare is almost identical to the film Where Eagles Dare, but with the third person roller coaster ride of false leads and plot twists characteristic of MacLean’s zanier espionage thrillers. I listened to this via Hoopla as read by Jonathan Oliver. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Classics

As in my non-fiction reading list, this year I reread a few books that don’t feel like simple “fiction” but deserve their own section. They’ve been around longer than anything else on this list—I figure they’ve earned it. In this case, it’s two epic poems:

The Nibelungenlied with the Klage, trans. William Whobrey—A good prose translation of the great work of medieval German epic and chivalric poetry. The Nibelungenlied is a German chivalric retelling of the much older Germanic legend of Siegfried (the Old Norse version of the story, about Sigurd, is the Volsungsaga, and of course Wagner would retell it in operatic form as the Ring cycle.) Its plot is much too convoluted to summarize here, but it entails multiple overlapping acts of deception and betrayal, coldblooded murder, and bloody, bloody revenge. It’s great—a favorite of mine since college.

Whobrey includes another shorter work, the Klage (“lament”), in this edition, noting that in all complete manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied the Klage is included as a companion piece. The Klage picks up directly after the sudden conclusion of the Nibelungenlied and ties up a lot of loose ends. Goodreads review here.

The Odyssey, by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles—Homer needs no introduction. I reread the Odyssey to prepare for the latest series of the Core Curriculum Podcast, which is going right now. I enjoyed the reread and the discussions I got to have on the five episodes I participated in. Look it up, subscribe, and listen in!

The Charles Portis farewell tour

Charles Portis has long been one of my favorite novelists. I discovered him, like I suspect a lot of people have, through True Grit, which I read in grad school. Over the next couple of years I eagerly read through his other four novels as well as the short stories, journalism, travel writing, short memoir, and play collected in Escape Velocity. I started rereading his work last year, beginning with True Grit and his secret society/conspiracy spoof Masters of Atlantis.

That was as far as I’d gotten when I learned he died, in February, aged 86. I commemorated him on the blog here. I recommend reading that to learn what it is about his writing that I and others love so much.

So, like my project to read as many Roger Scruton books as I could this year (more on that later), as an act of piety and gratitude I finished reading through Portis’s novels, which I’ve given their own section separate from this year’s other rereads. The three I finished the “farewell tour” with were:

Norwood*

Portis’s debut introduces us to Texan Norwood Pratt, who is enlisted by a shady car salesman to drive a car—and a girl—to New York for him. It does not go well, but Norwood bounces from one adventure to another along with a cast of oddballs and verbose con artists and showmen. It’s hard to explain as there’s no plot to speak of, really, but that’s not the point. The characters, the situations, the vividly observed details of life in the country, the big city, and everything in between, and Norwood’s naïve drive—to become a country singer, to recover some cash lent to a buddy when he was in the Marine Corps, to give that car salesman some payback—make this novel a hoot from beginning to end.

For this reread I listened to the audiobook narrated by Barrett Whitener (whose performance of A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to). Goodreads review and reflections here.

The Dog of the South

When Arkansan bore Ray Midge’s wife Norma runs off to Mexico with her first husband, he traces their movements via his credit card bills. Finally, temporarily abandoning the passivity with which he has mostly approached his life, he decides to track them down—if not to get Norma back, at least to recover his car. Ray falls in with an assortment of odd characters along the way, including Dr Reo Symes, a devotee of an otherwise forgotten self-help book and an opinionated old cuss.

Like Norwood and True Grit, this is a picaresque journey through strange lands with even stranger characters. Like Norwood, there isn’t a ton of plot to get in the way of the characters, settings, and especially Ray’s hilarious narration—full of wry asides, historical trivia, and deadpan irony. Portis said he set out to create narrator who was a total bore but still entertaining and he succeeded.

The Dog of the South is some people’s favorite Portis novel. It’s not mine, but it’s a good one to start with to get a feel for all the things that make Portis’s fiction unique.

Gringos

The order of my favorite Portis novels keeps shuffling, and I think Gringos is currently number two (after True Grit). Gringos follows American expatriate Jimmy Burns, who is whiling away his life in the Yucatan alternately giving guided tours of Mayan sites and trafficking in the odd illicit antiquity. His mild and unhurried life is complicated by two women—one a local busybody who decides to make reforming Jimmy her project, and the other a young girl who appears with a band of sketchy hippies one day and turns out to be a runaway. Then Jimmy learns that her parents are looking for her, desperate to get her back.

Jimmy, in his way, investigates and finds that the hippies’ leader has, Manson-style, formed his own cult, and like a lot of other weirdos has fixated on the Mayan temples as sites of immense spiritual power. But it also becomes clear to Jimmy that the stakes are much higher than drug abuse and petty criminality, and the stage is slowly set for a confrontation with the hippies.

Gringos has the strongest narrative drive of any of Portis’s novels, second only to True Grit, and I think that’s one reason I enjoy it so much. As in all of his books, the colorful cast of conmen, talkative layabouts, and cranks, as well as the vividly realized settings and the rapidly escalating absurdity of the situations, make Gringos a joy to read. And it goes without saying that it’s dang funny.

Rereads

As I mentioned in the non-fiction year-in-review, I’ve been trying to develop the discipline of rereading. Too often I have panicked at the thought of how many books I haven’t read and put off revisiting an old favorite. This year I managed to reread—or, via Hoopla or Audible, revisit—quite a few good novels. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Shiloh, by Shelby Foote*

• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by CS Lewis

• Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis

• Moonraker, by Ian Fleming*

• Perelandra, by CS Lewis

• Diamonds are Forever, by Ian Fleming*

• That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis

• From Russia With Love, by Ian Fleming*

• The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis*

• The Black Flower, by Howard Bahr*

• Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton

• Last Stand at Saber River, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins

• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King

• Dr. No, by Ian Fleming*

I reread CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy for the first time in perhaps thirteen years for a series of podcast episodes on City of Man. Check those out here, here, here, and here. I’ve been listening back through Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels in their most recent audio recordings via Audible. The performances are excellent, and include readers like Bill Nighy, Damien Lewis, and Toby Stephens. I’m looking forward to listening to the next in the series, Goldfinger, as narrated by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville.

Conclusion

That’s it for my favorite non-fiction and fiction reads from the past year! But there’s still more to come. Stay tuned for two more year-in-review posts covering my favorite movies of the year—a short list, given the circumstances—and my tour through a dozen of the late Sir Roger Scruton’s books. Thanks for reading!