Best Books I Read in 2019

A collage of the Best Books I read in 2019.

I read 30 books in 2019, nearly all of which I’ve reviewed on this blog. Here are my eight favorite books that I read this year. The links will take you to my full review of the book. 

The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, 1907. Conrad’s examination of terrorism is a terrific psychological thriller, one that will send chills up your spine 112 years after it was first published. It highlights what an astute writer Conrad was. 

Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys, 1934. Jean Rhys, the pen name of Ella Williams, was a terrific modernist writer whose novels mostly languished in obscurity until the publication of her novel Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Voyage in the Dark was her third novel. Written in the first person, it is an evocative trip through the mind of Anna Morgan, an 18-year-old chorus girl. It’s a bleak book, but not without moments of beauty. 

Becoming, by Michelle Obama, 2018. Surely the most personal book ever written by a First Lady, Becoming sheds a lot of light on Michelle Obama’s life before she became First Lady. It’s a fantastic book that everyone should go out and read, if you haven’t already done so. 

Burn Baby Burn, by Meg Medina, 2016. A young adult novel that is set in Queens in 1977, one of the worst years in New York City’s history. The city was on the verge of bankruptcy, a 25-hour blackout on one of the hottest days of the year sparked rampant looting and arson, residents were terrorized by the serial killer eventually known as Son of Sam, and the Mets traded their ace pitcher Tom Seaver to the Reds. All these events play a part in Burn Baby Burn, which tells the story of Nora Lopez, a bright girl who is ready to leave high school behind but isn’t quite sure what the future will bring for her. Medina’s evocative writing brings a strong sense of place and history to this novel. 

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1981, Second Revised Edition 2002. Well, there has to be at least one book related to Fitzgerald on this list, old sport. Matthew J. Bruccoli was the leading expert on the life and career of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he wrote or edited over 30 books related to Fitzgerald. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is the most comprehensive biography of Fitzgerald. Some readers may be put off by Bruccoli’s habit of including seemingly every fact he can find about Fitzgerald, but for Fitzgerald devotees there is a lot of great insight here. Do you want to know Scott’s grades at Princeton, and an explanation of the complicated grading system that was used when Fitzgerald was a student there? Then you’ve found the right book! One quote from Fitzgerald to whet your appetite—in an April, 1934 letter to H.L. Mencken, Fitzgerald wrote: “It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.” (p.368)

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, 2004. Tom Wolfe takes on college life at the turn of the millennium! Yesss! Heeeeyyyyaaaa! He breaks it all down for you—why does the school café have such crummy food?? What’s the best time to get snacks at the Gizmo?? The man in the white suit fills you in!! The novel follows Charlotte Simmons, a nice young girl from Sparta, North Carolina, who ends up attending the prestigious, and fictional, Dupont University. The novel follows Charlotte through her first semester of freshman year, as she makes the difficult adjustment to life away from home. Wolfe’s ability to convincingly write about characters fifty years younger than himself is amazing. I attended college during the time Wolfe was writing his novel, and although the school I went to was very different from Dupont, Wolfe hits the nail right on the head often. 

The White Album, by Joan Didion, 1979. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is the first sentence of The White Album. Boom, Joan Didion has thrown down the gauntlet. The White Album is her second collection of essays, and it’s superb. Joan Didion has many obsessions. Shopping malls, orchids, the Santa Ana winds, traffic, dams. We learn about many of these obsessions in The White Album. The book’s centerpiece is the title essay, a 35-page sprawl through the tense paranoia that was California in the late 1960’s. The White Album is one of Didion’s signature works, and deservedly so. 

Dick Tracy: The Official Biography, by Jay Maeder, 1990. This book is just a fun one, as it’s the history of one of my favorite comic strips, Dick Tracy. Maeder’s book is a deep dive into the first 46 years of Dick Tracy, from 1931 to 1977, when it was written and illustrated by Chester Gould. Dick Tracy was a fascinating comic strip, as it presented the square-jawed titular hero, grotesque villains, and a ton of action and violence. A continuing theme of the strip is Gould’s keen interest in technology—Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio, first introduced in 1946, is basically a prototype of an Apple Watch. 

I’m pleased with the books I read in 2019, and I’m looking forward to adding more books to my list in 2020.

Book Review: Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward (1975)

The cover of Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward, 1975. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Steve Carlton's 1975 Topps baseball card. Lots of empty seats at the Vet that day.

The back of Steve Carlton's 1975 Topps card. Pretty basic stats.

Back in June, I reviewed the 1982 baseball book Flamethrowers: Carlton & Gossage, by Bill Gutman. Continuing the trend of reading super old books about baseball meant for 12-year-olds, I recently read Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward, published in 1975. I should probably add that Steve Carlton is my favorite baseball player, which helps explain my reading choices a bit. In reading Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, I was hoping that I might dredge up a few additional nuggets about my favorite baseball player, and I succeeded. 

Author Martha Eads Ward does a good job in producing a readable biography of an athlete who is now famous for his silence with the media. At the time the book was published, Carlton hadn’t yet stopped speaking to the press, although Ward didn’t interview Carlton for this book. Carlton’s relationship with the press has been somewhat misunderstood. It’s a misconception that Carlton didn’t talk to the press throughout his entire career. Carlton gave numerous interviews for the first decade of his career. It wasn’t until the late 1970’s that he started refusing most interview requests. (Although Carlton did some interviews during this time. For example, Hal Bodley interviewed Carlton after the 1980 season for his book The Team That Wouldn’t Die.) Carlton’s silence with the media lasted until July of 1986—when Carlton was signed by the San Francisco Giants he gave a press conference. Anyway, digression over. 

Ward died in 2015, at the age of 93. She published 10 books and was the Children’s Librarian at the Quincy Public Library in Quincy, Illinois, for many years. I learned from Ward’s obituary that she attended Knox College, which is also my alma mater. Ward transferred to the University of Southern California, where she obtained her degree. She did a nice job of researching the book. Now, with the internet, it’s incredibly easy to find box scores of baseball games, but back in the 1970’s finding accounts of individual games would have required quite a bit of work. 

Ward begins the book with an account of Carlton’s incredible 19 strikeout game against the New York Mets on September 15, 1969. Carlton’s 19 strikeouts in a 9-inning game set a record for post-1900 baseball, although it was tied in 1970 by Tom Seaver, and eventually broken by Roger Clemens in 1986 when he struck out 20 batters in a game. Carlton threw 152 pitches during that game, and incredibly enough, Carlton lost the game to the Mets, 4-3, thanks to a pair of homers he gave up to Ron Swoboda. Nowadays, there’s no way a manager would let a pitcher throw 152 pitches during a game, regardless of how many strikeouts he had. 

Later in his career, Carlton was well-known for his unorthodox training regimen, which incorporated martial arts exercises. One of the exercises called for Carlton to stick his left arm in a barrel of rice and work his hand down to the bottom of the barrel. But even early in his career, Carlton was enthusiastic about weightlifting, which was not something most baseball players did in the 1960’s and 1970’s. As Ward tell us, “Some coaches, including Carlton’s former Cardinal pitching coach, Billy Muffett, are not enthusiastic about this exercise program, and some players have a fear that it leads them to become muscle-bound.” (p.26-7) While that comment might sound ridiculous today, that was actually a fear in the 1960’s, that lifting weights would make you too “muscle-bound” to be a good baseball player. Of course, today it seems like nearly all baseball players are extremely muscular. 

One of the more random facts we learn from the book is that Carlton’s “favorite dish is a Ukrainian concoction: dough filled with sharp cheese, potatoes, butter, onion, and sour cream.” (p.30) This tidbit might not seem to be important to anyone other than Steve Carlton, but it reminded me of another quote about Carlton. After Steve Carlton won his 300^th game in 1983, he didn’t speak to the media, but his wife Beverly did. A reporter asked her if there was anything we should know about Steve Carlton. She replied, “Well, he likes Ukrainian food.” Her response, reported in Sports Illustrated magazine, seems very odd. But now the mystery of what Ukrainian food Steve Carlton liked is solved!  

While reading Flamethrowers by Bill Gutman, I learned that Carlton was called up by the St. Louis Cardinals at the end of the 1964 season but didn’t get into any games. This was a fact that I had never encountered before. Ward sheds a little more light on Carlton’s late-season call-up. Carlton said he joined the Cardinals in Cincinnati and saw Bob Gibson hit three doubles. Through the magic of the internet, we can deduce that was the first game of a doubleheader on September 19, 1964. The Cardinals lost the game, 7-5 when Frank Robinson hit a walk-off three-run homer with two outs in the bottom of the 9^th.

Carlton was with the Cardinals for the final two weeks of the 1964 season, as the team won a thrilling pennant race. On September 20, 1964, the Philadelphia Phillies were in first place by 6 ½ games with 12 games left to play. The Phillies then proceeded to lose 10 games in a row, and they finished the season tied with the Cincinnati Reds for second place, one game behind the Cardinals. 

Both Gutman and Ward’s accounts of Carlton’s time with the Cardinals in 1964 refer to Carlton warming up in the late innings of a game against the New York Mets, but not actually entering the game. Ward makes it sound as though the game that Carlton warmed up for was on October 2, 1964, when the Cardinals lost to the Mets, 1-0. However, the Cardinals were still in the heat of the pennant race—Bob Gibson started that game and went 8 innings, and relief ace Barney Schultz pitched the 9^th inning. I doubt manager Johnny Keane would have considered bringing Carlton into such a high-stakes situation for his first major league appearance. The Cardinals’ 15-5 loss to the Mets on October 3^rd, in which 8 Cardinal pitchers were used, is much more likely. (This is the game referenced in Gutman’s book, which is described as a blowout loss.)  

Carlton made his major league debut on Opening Day, 1965, entering the game in the bottom of the 11^th inning, and walking the only batter he faced. (The game, played against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, ended in a 10-10 tie when the game was called because of darkness.) Carlton didn’t get much work with the Cardinals during the 1965 season, as he only pitched 25 innings and didn’t get any decisions. After the season, the Cardinals had to decide what players they would protect from the first-year draft. Their choice came down to Steve Carlton or Dave Dowling. The Cardinals protected Carlton, which was the right move, as he still had 329 major league wins ahead of him. Dave Dowling pitched in two major league games. One of them was the October 3, 1964 blowout against the Mets that Carlton warmed up for. Dowling’s other major league game was on September 22, 1966, when he started for the Cubs, pitched a complete game against the Reds, and won. His major league record is 1-0. Dowling appeared on three Topps baseball cards, in 1965, 1966, and 1967. All three cards used the same photo of him. 

Steve Carlton soon became one of the Cardinals’ bright young stars—he had a record of 14-9 for the World Series-winning team in 1967. Carlton made his first All-Star team in 1968, and the following year he was the starting pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game. Starting the game was big moment in Carlton’s career, and Ward presents us with a quote that seems unlikely, considering Carlton’s future disavowal of talking to the press: “There’s all the prestige, especially for a young player like me. And all the ink. All the great publicity. Interviews. Television and radio tapes.” (p.84) 

A salary dispute with the Cardinals led to Carlton being traded to the Philadelphia Phillies in February of 1972. The trade ended up being a terrible one for the Cardinals, as Carlton went on to win 4 Cy Young Awards for the Phillies, and his pitching helped lead them to the playoffs six times during his 15 seasons with the Phillies. Carlton had an incredible season in 1972, as he won 27 games for a last-place team that only managed 59 wins, meaning that Carlton was responsible for 45.8% of the Phillies’ wins! Carlton won the pitching Triple Crown, leading the National League in wins, ERA, and strikeouts. He was also the unanimous choice for the Cy Young Award that year. 

1973 was a terrible year for Carlton. Facing sky-high expectations, which he had done nothing to tamp down, Carlton went from a 20-game winner to a 20-game loser, finishing 1973 with an ERA almost two runs higher than 1972, and a record of 13-20. Carlton had walking pneumonia during the season, and although he didn’t spend any time on the disabled list because of that, it couldn’t have helped.

Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw ends after the 1974 season, a year in which the Phillies finally escaped the basement, finishing in third place in the NL East. Carlton also rebounded to post a 16-13 record and lead the NL in strikeouts with 240. (He also led the league in walks, with 136.) Steve Carlton turned 30 in December of 1974, and his career record stood at 133-105, for a winning percentage of .559. He was certainly one of the most exciting pitchers in baseball, but I doubt that anyone would have predicted that he would pitch until he was 43 years old and go on to win another 196 games.

1987 Fleer #231 Cliff Johnson

1987 Fleer card number 231, Cliff Johnson. He looks like a friendly walrus, doesn't he?

The back of Cliff Johnson's 1987 Fleer card. He's classified as a "power hitter," obviously the best of the four classifications.

I have another blog that I very rarely update, Baseball Cards of the 1970’s and 1980’s. I’ve only posted a handful of articles on it, and I’ve decided to post my occasional baseball card-themed updates to this page as well, to improve their visibility. Here are my thoughts about the 1987 Fleer card of Cliff Johnson. 

Bill James wrote of Cliff Johnson in the 2001 edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract that if someone would have made Johnson a DH/first baseman from the very beginning of his career, he would have hit 500 home runs. That might be stretching it, but James’ estimation says something about Johnson’s prodigious power. 

The first Cliff Johnson baseball card I remember getting was his 1975 Topps card. Unbeknownst to me, it was his rookie card. I found it, as I found so many of the baseball cards from my childhood, rooting through the 1970’s commons at Shinder’s. If you didn’t grow up in the Twin Cities, let me explain Shinder’s to you. It was a store that sold newspapers, magazines, comic books, baseball cards, and other collectibles. (And they had an “adult” section in the back of the store!) Shinder’s had several locations throughout the Twin Cities, but the one I frequented most was the Richfield location off of 70^th Street and France Avenue. (Technically off of Hazelton Road, but 70^th was the other cross street.) I spent many, many hours there as a youngster in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. My Dad could at least buy tobacco for his pipe there, but I’m pretty sure it drove my Mom batty to wait as I examined the huge stack of cards and tried to remember if I already had a 1977 Bob Forsch or not. 

I liked the bright colors of the 1975 Topps set, and I was always partial to crazy uniforms, which means there are a fair amount of Houston Astros cards from the 1970’s and 1980’s in my collection. So, I purchased Cliff Johnson’s 1975 card, for 10 cents or however much it was, and took it home with me. Eventually I wanted to transfer Cliff’s card from the plastic sleeve it was in to a sleeve in a binder. Shinder’s put tape over the top of the sleeves their cards came in, which I would cut off with a scissors. Usually no problem, but there wasn’t much room in this sleeve between the top of the card and the tape, so I tried to cut the side of the sleeve. Big mistake. I ended up trimming the side of Cliff’s card pretty badly. (I’m happy I didn’t know it was his rookie card at the time!) Oops. 

So that was my introduction to Cliff Johnson, and he gradually became a familiar presence to me in the commons box at Shinder’s. Johnson also played just long enough to make it into all three of the 1987 baseball card sets. As anyone who grew up in the 1980’s will tell you, 1987 was the year that baseball cards achieved perfection, with the iconic Topps woodgrains, the awesome blue Fleers, and the Donruss that had baseballs in the middle of the card borders. (I’m being perhaps a little sarcastic about the perfection of 1987 baseball cards, but for a lot of folks in my generation, these sets were the ones that really started us on our collecting adventures.) 

Johnson’s 1987 Fleer card is a pretty great one. I really enjoy the 1980’s cards where you get a triple dose of the team logo-on the hat, the jersey, and the card itself. I love that Blue Jays logo, and I’m happy they’ve gone back to a very similar variation of it, after ditching it for much of the decade of the 2000’s. It’s just a classic, perfect logo. It tells you all the information you need to know: there’s a Blue Jay, they play baseball, and the maple leaf tells you they’re Canadian. 

Cliff Johnson was one of those players who took a long time to find his way in baseball. It wasn’t his fault; it was more like teams couldn’t figure out what to do with him. Johnson only exceeded 400 plate appearances in four of his seasons in the majors, and the first time wasn’t until 1980, his age 32 season. He still put up four seasons of 20+ home runs and ended up with 196 longballs for his career.

When Johnson was with the New York Yankees in 1979, he famously got into a locker room fight with closer Goose Gossage. Gossage ended up with a sprained thumb and missed almost three months of the season. Not surprisingly, Johnson was traded to the Cleveland Indians before Gossage came back from his injury. 

The 1987 Fleers offered some interesting information on the back of the cards. Hitters were classified as “dead pull hitters,” whatever that was, “singles hitters,” “spray hitters,” which we all knew was just another term for “singles hitters,” and “power hitters.” Cliff Johnson was a power hitter. You had to respect that, since power hitter was clearly the best of the four categories Fleer had delineated. With his mustache and grin on this card, Johnson looked like a friendly walrus. On the cards where he’s not smiling, he looks like a grumpy walrus, and not someone you’d like to get into a locker room tussle with. He’s also listed as 6’4” on his baseball cards, another good reason to stay away from the walrus if he looks grumpy. 

By the time the 1987 baseball cards were released, Cliff Johnson’s career had come to an end. He was granted free agency after the 1986 season ended, but no one signed him. I wonder if he might have been a victim of the collusion scandal of the mid 1980’s that saw owners conspiring to keep free agent signings to a minimum. Of course, it might have simply been that Johnson was a 39-year-old DH/pinch hitter, and no one was interested in signing him for 1987. As a power hitter who walked frequently, Cliff Johnson would fit well in baseball in 2019. Hopefully teams now would know where to play him.