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: Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1981, Second Revised Edition 2002)

Paperback cover of the 2002 updated edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, by Matthew J. Bruccoli. On the Fitzgerald book shelf, of course. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1931-2008.

Matthew J. Bruccoli was the leading scholar on the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During his long career, Bruccoli wrote or edited over 30 books related to Fitzgerald. Bruccoli’s biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Lift of F. Scott Fitzgerald was originally published in 1981. Bruccoli updated the book in 1991 and again in 2002. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is the definitive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in part because of Bruccoli’s masterful command of the facts of Fitzgerald’s life. 

Bruccoli traces Fitzgerald’s life from his birth in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1896, to his death in Hollywood in 1940. He keeps track of Fitzgerald’s peripatetic lifestyle, and one of the most useful tools is the chronology in the beginning of the book that traces Scott and Zelda’s movements from one place to another.  

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is a sympathetic biography of Fitzgerald, but that doesn’t mean that Bruccoli makes excuses for Scott’s behavior. By all accounts, Fitzgerald was a charming man when sober. When he drank, however, his personality totally changed and he was often aggressive and belligerent. Bruccoli doesn’t revel in stories about Scott’s alcoholic dissipation, but he doesn’t downplay it either. 

Bruccoli has a deep appreciation for Fitzgerald’s writing, and he’s a good judge of the highs and lows of Fitzgerald’s work. Bruccoli is no fanboy apologist telling you that this obscure short story from 1936 is actually the best thing Scott ever wrote. In fact, Bruccoli is quite critical of Fitzgerald’s short fiction of the mid-1930’s, as Fitzgerald had seemingly lost his creative spark. 

Although today Fitzgerald is best-known for his novels The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, during his lifetime his short stories made him a lot more money. For example, in 1929, Fitzgerald earned $27,000 for eight short stories that he sold to The Saturday Evening Post but he earned just $31.71 in book royalties! Fitzgerald hoped that the money he earned from short stories would buy him time to work on his novels. However, it didn’t always work out that way. As Bruccoli writes, “He was a methodical planner all his professional life, preparing schedules and charts for his work; that he rarely kept to these plans did not discourage him from making them.” (p.143) 

One of the enduring myths about Fitzgerald was that he was a “natural writer,” someone who had an abundance of God-given talent, but not the intelligence to make the most out of that talent. Bruccoli soundly punctures that myth, in part by showing what a dedicated editor Fitzgerald was. Fitzgerald made significant changes to The Great Gatsby when it was in galley form, and he persevered through seventeen drafts of Tender Is the Night. (Bruccoli’s very first book about Fitzgerald was The Composition of Tender Is the Night.) 

Bruccoli also shows us how Fitzgerald’s own friends and contemporaries denigrated his intelligence. Edmund Wilson, who met Fitzgerald at Princeton, “never broke the habit of patronizing Fitzgerald. Although his affection was genuine, Wilson was unable to believe Fitzgerald was a major writer—in fact, a greater figure than himself.” (p.169)  

The Great Gatsby failed to meet Scott’s hopes for a blockbuster best-seller. It sold about 20,000 copies, less than 10% of what it now sells in a year in the United States, and Fitzgerald made more money from selling the movie rights to the novel than he did on royalties. Scott and Zelda’s life, never a model of stability, now took a darker turn. Scott began introducing himself as an alcoholic to people he was meeting for the first time. (p.251) When Zelda felt that Scott was flirting too much with the ballerina Isadora Duncan she threw herself down a flight of stone steps. (p.252) Bruccoli writes of the Fitzgeralds: “Having gone to France to escape the distractions of New York, they now returned to America to escape the dissipations of France.” (p.254) This reminded me of what Scott prophetically wrote in a 1926 letter: “Wherever you go, you take yourselves and your faults with you. In the mountains or in the city, you make the same things happen.” (Fool for Love, by Scott Donaldson, p.172) 

Bruccoli writes of Fitzgerald in 1933-4, as he was struggling to finish Tender Is the Night: 

“Heretofore, despite his self-indulgences, he had believed in his destiny and in his ability to preserve the best part of his genius. Now, struggling with his novel and grinding out unfelt stories, he came to feel that he was starting out all over again without the confident illusions that had sustained him in 1920.” (p.355) 

After Zelda’s third mental breakdown in 1934, Scott knew that it was extremely unlikely they would ever live together again. I think that contributed to Scott’s depression during these years and was part of the reason why Fitzgerald’s mid-1930’s short stories are so uneven. Fitzgerald was clearly floundering, searching for material anywhere he could possibly get it. In the same year he published the beautiful and heartfelt novel Tender Is the Night, he was also writing a mediocre and hackneyed screen treatment for George Burns and Gracie Allen titled “Gracie at Sea.” (“Gracie at Sea” was eventually published in the 2017 collection I’d Die for You.) 

Bruccoli continually unearths interesting tidbits about Fitzgerald. For example: just before Fitzgerald went to Hollywood in 1937 to work as a screenwriter for M-G-M, he briefly considered an offer to host a radio show that toured college campuses. (p.416) If Fitzgerald could have remained sober, it might have been a decent job for him, since he was funny, intelligent, and charming, but if had been drinking, it would have been a total train wreck. 

Fitzgerald worked hard in Hollywood, but he found screenwriting challenging. During the last year of his life, he planned and began writing a novel about a movie producer. At the time of Fitzgerald’s death in December of 1940, he had accumulated more than 1,100 pages of drafts, along with 200 pages of background material. “None of the episodes was regarded as final,” showing again what a painstaking reviser Fitzgerald was. (p.472) The unfinished novel, published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon, was the very beginning of the Fitzgerald revival and reevaluation of his talent. 

Fitzgerald was a true artist of remarkable grace and skill, and it seems fitting to let him have the final word. 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)