My personal “Best Books of 2018” list, featuring books not from 2018

Published on by Puff

Last year was a great year for me, and not least because I got back on the reading train in a big way. For the first few years out of grad school, I had a lot of other things on my mind. First, I had to find a new job. Then, I had to learn to navigate a city I’d never really been to while finding a place to live and learning a new job. And throughout all of that, I was honestly a bit burned out on reading.

Grad school had me reading (or making an attempt at reading) huge chunks of three books every week, not to mention how much I pored through the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (which was awesome). And don’t get me wrong, I learned a ton, enjoyed most of it, and am better for it. But after leaving grad school…I just had to give my brain a break. Plus, my new job demanded some crazy hours from me, and I was just tired all the time; it was a lot easier to binge “Firefly” for the fourth time while laying in bed with a laptop on my chest than it was to march through a bunch of the books on my I’ll Get To These Eventually list.

Fast forward to 2017, and I finally got back on the horse (reading is both metaphorically a train and a horse in this blog post). A lot of the credit goes to two places here: (1) I read Fahrenheit 451, which, being a short book, allowed me to breeze through it and made me remember how un-daunting a good read is, and (2) my partner, who enjoys reading before bed, and I wanted to join in. Honorable mention goes to George Saunders, an author I was made aware of for the first time who brilliantly combines humor and narrative. I read 13 books that year, more than I completed from 2012-2016.

Now we come to last year, where I beat my goal of reading 16 books by reading…17 books. Ok, it wasn’t a huge overaccomplishment, but I did it, even in the midst of selling a home and moving 400 miles away. And I did it by reading from all sorts of genres and formats that were new to me, like graphic novels, audiobooks, and ebooks.

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So anyhow, in order to honor how much reading has meant to me in the last year, I’d like to present my list of Favorite Reads of 2018, featuring no books that were published in 2018, plus one honorable mention:

This is literally the first book where I’ve ever stopped in the middle of a page in order to document something the author said because of a passage I liked (outside of school, I mean). It’s also partially responsible for the influx of posts on my blog  back in November. It really imparted on me the fact that you just need to get it out, get the Shitty First Draft out of the way, and that’s a big step in the process. And here we are.

I don’t quite remember exactly what I expected of this book when I went into it, except that I thought it’d be a good combination of two interests of mine. If you’re thinking it’s a book that chronicles the growth of the ghost story in American culture, you’re on the right track; Dickey explains how ghost stories were influenced by their contemporary cultures, which is absolutely fascinating. Just don’t expect him to find the existence of ghosts in any capacity other than in the minds of people.

Here’s something I had been looking forward to for a while. This was a very entertaining and informative look at the history of comedy in America, from vaudeville, through radio, early television, the rise/fall/re-rise of stand-up, late-night shows, and touching on modern internet comedy. The best part about Nesteroff’s book for me, though, was that it opened me up to a wide world of comedy that I never knew about (like Nichols and May or Vaughan Meader) and inspired me to seek out acts on their original vinyl. Not to mention, that listening to comedy from way back gives a great insight into the culture of the past.

Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic is one of my favorite books, so I picked this one up to see how he would do with a conventional history rather than a modern investigation of the past, and I’m very glad I did. He tells the tale of Harpers Ferry in a riveting way that kept me intrigued and taught me a ton that I didn’t know about Brown’s raid or its aftermath. If it wasn’t my favorite book I read last year, than it was definitely top 3.

As a big fan of Hodgman, I was excited to read this, although I’m not sure how it took me so long to get to. When I finally did seek it out, it was right after I got a new library app and right before I was to take a long drive to Ohio, so I figured why not dip my toes into the waters of audiobooks? It would be like a long podcast, I assumed. That may have been why I found myself falling out of it a couple times (eight hours is a long time), but its best parts pulled me right back in. Hearing it read by the Resident Expert himself made the book even better.

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And finally, the honorable mention: The Patriot War along the Michigan-Canada Border: Raiders and Rebels by Shaun McLaughlin. I found this stashed in Capitol Hill Books in Eastern Market, and it really piqued my interest because I had no idea what it was referring to; I’d never heard of the mid-19th-century conflict between groups in the US and Canada and was eager to learn. It seemed fascinating! And the information was…but the writing style and formatting of the book was terrible. The whole thing was a slog to get through, and ultimately it felt like an 80-page pamphlet, a bad Wikipedia article, or a too-long list of facts. I appreciate all the new things I learned, certainly, and I applaud anyone who has written a book, but I can’t read that one again.

So that was my 2018 in reading. I’m looking forward to 2019 so much that I hope to put together a list of all the books I’m excited to pick up this year (that should come by next week). Here’s hoping I can meet my reading goal again, and if you have any recommendations (especially when it comes to fiction, since I’m missing a ton of that), feel free to get in touch via comments or email!