January 2019 Book List
The year is beginning with a pretty slim list of new books. Many of these books were on my previous lists. The Amazon always publishes a list of the books for the current month, so those titles are new. The New York Times Book Review did not offer a lot that was new and Publisher’s Weekly was mostly looking back at the best books of 2018 so I did not even include PW in this month’s list. This gives us a bit of breather to try to catch up on our reading. (haha)
Amazon
Literature and Fiction
Elsey Come Home: A Novel by Susan Conley
The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obloma
Ghost Wall: A Novel by Sarah Moss
Unmarriageable: A Novel by Soniah Kamal
Late in the Day: A Novel by Tessa Hadley
99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai
The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay
The Weight of a Piano: A Novel by Chris Cander
Sugar Run: A Novel by Mesha Maren
Mysteries and Thrillers
Freefall: A Novel by Jessica Barry
The Burglar by Thomas Perry
An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen
The Au Pair by Emma Rous
The Suspect by Fiona Barton
The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye
The Dreamers: A Novel by Karen Thompson Walker
No Exit: A Novel by Taylor Adams
She Lies in Wait: A Novel by Gytha Lodge
The Current: A Novel by Tim Johnston
Nonfiction
The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americans by Eric Rutkow
The Soprano Sessions by Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall, David Chase
It Was All a Dream: New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America by Reniqua Allen
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer
The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry that Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll by Ian S. Port
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Freuer
Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff
Why We Fight: One Man’s Search for Meaning Inside the Ring by Josh Rosenblatt
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker called “Alien” by Jeremy Smith
Biographies and Memoirs
Queen Victoria: Twenty-Four Days that Changed Her Life by Lucy Worsley
Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America by Weijian Shan
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon by Joshua Mezrich
Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison – Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High Stakes Diplomacy and the Extraordinary Efforts it Took to Get Me Out by Jason Rezaian
Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Whithers by Preston Lauterbach
Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Rabitz and the Secret History of L.A. by Lili Anolik
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land, Barbara Ehrenreich
The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America by Tommy Tomlinson
Joy Enough: A Memoir by Sarah McColl
Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi
48 Hours by William R Forstchen
The Winter of the Witch (3rdbook in the Winternight Trilogy) by Katherine Arden
Marked by S. Andrew Swann
New York Times Book Review
Dec. 9
Fiction
The Little Snake by A. I. Kennedy
Those Who Knew by Idra Novey
Love is Blind by William Boyd
Short Story Collections
Catch, Release by Adrianne Harun
Better Times by Sara Batkie
Its Color They Are Fine by Alan Spence
The Dogs of Detroit by Brad Felver
Nonfiction
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know by Colm Toibin
Why Religion? By Elgin Pagels
The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen (essays)
We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher
John Marshall by Richard Brookhiser
Books That Give Hope
Interior States by Meghan O’Greblyn (essays)
What If this Were Enough? by Heather Havulesky (essays)
Books by Lucia Berlin
Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin
Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters by Lucia Berlin
Books About What Ails America
The Politics of Petulance by Alan Wolfe
America Compromised by Lawrence Lessig
Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen I. Carter
Dec. 16
Poetry – This week NYT Book Review featured poetry.
Nonfiction
Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II Scrapbook
New and Noteworthy
Perennial by Kelly Forsythe
Anagnorisis by Kyle Dargan
Who is Mary Sue? By Sophie Collins
The Gilded Auction Block by Shane McCrae
So Far So Good by Ursula K LeGuin
The Terrible by Yrsa Daley Ward
There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald
Dec. 23
Nonfiction
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Man in the Glass House by Mark Lamster
The Patch by John McPhee (essays)
The Day that Went Missing by Richard Beard
Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller
Creating Things that Matter by David Edwards
Fewer, Better Things by Glenn Adamson
Nothing is Lost: Selected Essays by Ingrid Sischy
The Nationalist Revival by John B Judis
Fiction
All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuraha Roy
Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates
Come With Me by Helen Schulman
The Shortlist
Inhuman Resources by Pierre Lemaitre
An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten (short stories)
Some Like Me by M.R. Carey
Dec. 30
Fiction
Insurrecto by Gina Apostol
Graphic Novels That Defy Gender Norms
Dirty Plotte by Julie. Doucet
Fruit of Knowledge: TheVulva vs The Patriarchy by Liz Stromquist
My Brother’s Husband, Volume 2 by Gengoroh Tagame, trans. by Anne Ishii
Flocks by L. Nicols
Fiction
In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne
The Day The Sun Died by Yan Lianke
Nonfiction
Late-Life Love by Susan Gubar
God in the Qur’an by Jack Miles
The British in India by David Gilmour
3 French Novels
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard, trans. by Charlotte Mandel
Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano, trans. by Mark Polizzotti
Strike Your Heart by Amélie Nothomb, trans. by Alison Anderson
New and Noteworthy – Audiobooks
Where Do We Go From Here by Bernie Sanders
Jeff Wayne’s The War of the World’s: The Musical Drama by H.G. Wells
Broken Ground by Val McDermid
Wrinkle in Time by Margaret L’Engle
Chasing Hillary by Amy Chozick
8 New Books We Recommend
Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl: Volume 1 and 2 by Uwe Johnson, trans. by Damian Searls
The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert
Come With Me by Helen Schulman
The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century by Mark Lamster
The Patch by John McPhee
Nothing is Lost: Selected Essays by Ingrid Sischy, edited by Sandra Brant
The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard
Someone Like Me by M.R. Carey
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 