Comparing my Goodreads shelves with my physical book diary, I find my total of books read for the year to be about 80. That’s been about my average for the past three years, and quite a respectable number! If you’d like to browse the complete list of books I logged on Goodreads you can click here; in this post I’ll hit the highlights. Links go to my Goodreads review where there is one, and titles that made this year’s top-ten list are marked with an asterisk.*

I haven’t set myself any particular goals for reading classics over the last few years, but I always like it when I get a few in—and this year yielded some good ones. Middlemarch* by George Eliot was the standout, a nice hefty, thought-provoking novel; The Country of the Pointed Firs* by Sarah Orne Jewett a lovely quiet, exquisite bit of New England literature; and The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope also an enjoyable read—despite the desire to smack most of the characters. Washington Square by Henry James started out quite interesting, but wound up unsatisfying in the end (not altogether a surprise). Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream proved unexpectedly diverting, being basically the 16th-century equivalent of a screwball comedy. The Winter’s Tale, on the other hand, I found slightly underwhelming. The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton was…well, definitely not as puzzling as The Man Who Was Thursday, but a little less focused; interesting and a little off-the-wall and yet again something I feel I’ll want to re-read for a second impression. Basically, whatever happens when G.K. writes speculative fiction.

It was also an understated but good year for Westerns! Whispering Smith* by Frank H. Spearman was the standout; First Blood by Jack Schaefer, The Desire of the Moth by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and Desert Conquest by A.M. Chisholm were also good. Borden Chantry by Louis L’Amour was a pretty nice little attempt at a classic-style murder mystery set in a Western town, but a couple more by L’Amour that I first read years ago—Showdown at Yellow Butte and The Tall Stranger—didn’t hold up so well upon revisiting, Showdown in particular.

Nonfiction (prepare thyself for subtitles!) was the most-represented genre on my top-ten list this year! Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making* by Andrew Peterson, Founding Gardeners: Nature, the Revolutionary Generation, and the Shaping of the American Nation* by Andrea Wulf, Heroes Without Glory: Some Goodmen of the Old West* by Jack Schaefer, and This Hill, This Valley* by Hal Borland were each outstanding in their own way. Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape by Mark Lee Gardner was a little out of my usual Western wheelhouse, but a solid and moderately interesting read. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell was okay, though not quite the absolute delight indicated by reviews and recommendations I’d read. And the two theology titles I finished this year, The Life of Peace by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and With Christ in the School of Prayer* by Andrew Murray, were both excellent.

Mysteries were probably my most-read genre again if you were to crunch the numbers. I continued my way through Elizabeth Daly’s Henry Gamadge series (which I wrote about for a blogathon earlier this year)—only three left to go, alas! All of them are good, but the standout among those I read this year was probably The Book of the Lion (I do love a good “lost rare manuscript” trope in a mystery!). I read two more in Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael series—Monk’s Hood was satisfactory and St. Peter’s Fair* was excellent. Funeral of Figaro, on the other hand, was probably the weakest of Peters’ stand-alone mysteries I’ve read so far.

This was also the year I dug into the works of the only Golden Age “Queen of Crime” I’d yet to read: Ngaio Marsh. My feelings are mixed. The first two in the series were pleasant if not extremely original or memorable. After that Marsh seemed to hit a stride stylistically, but while I like her Inspector Alleyn and his investigative team quite a lot, the rest of the characters peopling her books as suspects are typically a nasty, unsavory, and unlikable crew that it’s hard to keep patience with for the length of a novel. I stopped after about eight books (not all in order) because they just weren’t really appealing to me. The standout of the ones I did read was Death in a White Tie, with Overture to Death in second place. On the other hand, Artists in Crime probably gets the dubious award for worst book of the year, with Death of a Peer jostling fairly close behind.

In the autumn I read two anthologies of mystery short stories: Blood on the Tracks edited by Martin Edwards, a collection of train-themed mysteries from English authors, and Golden Age Detective Stories edited by Otto Penzler, a mixed bag of mid-century American shorts. Having been favorably impressed by a short story by Michael Gilbert in Blood on the Tracks, I read one of his novels, Death Has Deep Roots, which was quite solid.

Beyond this there was a wide range of middling-to-lackluster mystery novels: The After House by Mary Roberts Rinehart started promisingly but let me down in the end; Wyllard’s Weird by Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a satisfactory example of a Victorian mystery-melodrama, but I found it somewhat predictable since I guessed the solution within the first few chapters! The Arsenal Stadium Mystery by Leonard Gribble was more of a novelty item than anything else; The Cape Cod Mystery by Phoebe Atwood Taylor and Two-Way Murder by E.C.R. Lorac were lightweight but moderately entertaining for the moment. Skye Cameron by Phyllis A. Whitney was probably one of her better books, though still a bit melodramatic and easy to predict the plot twists. I tried a couple new American authors in the romantic-suspense/Gothic genre: Dune House by Eunice Mays Boyd was…well, the best way I can think of to describe it is that I’d have thought it was by Phyllis Whitney if I didn’t know any better. I had hopes for The Listening House by Mabel Seeley, but though the writing was good, the story left rather a bad taste in the mouth (not unlike the Ngaio Marsh books mentioned above).

Miscellaneous novels and short story collections? I began the year by finished up Journey Into Christmas and Other Stories* by Bess Streeter Aldrich, a simply lovely collection of holiday stories; and when December rolled around again I enjoyed The Christmas Hirelings by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a sweet Victorian Christmas novella. The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer was a charming surprise, mainly because it was much more of a comedy than the back cover copy made it sound! New Chronicles of Rebecca by Kate Douglas Wiggin, a book of short stories that are essentially like deleted scenes from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, was a pleasant read, a chance to revisit scenes and characters from the novel without dramatically changing or spoiling anything in the original book (though Wiggin might have left well enough alone with the Simpson family after just a story or two). Finally, Sawdust in His Shoes by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, a nice YA historical set in Depression-era Oregon, and The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff, a quiet slice-of-life novel about an average English family’s seaside holiday in the 1930s.

Previous years’ reading roundups: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.