Last year in my list of favorite books read in 2017 I had to scrape to come up with just a handful. This years list is markedly different; there are so many books I read and liked in 2018 that I cant include them all and will have to shorten what I write about them.
Last year I remarked that while my fiction reading tends to run to thrillers, all of them I had read fell flat. Not so this year.
Our House by Louise Candlish may be at the top. A woman returns home to find people moving into her house, sold to them by her estranged husband. The beauty of the book is finding out how he was maneuvered into doing that, to his own horror.
Other favorite thrillers include The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware, in which a young woman impersonates the granddaughter of a deceased woman for the inheritance, only to have it dawn on her she does have a connection; The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn, about an agoraphobic woman who witnesses a murder in a neighboring house, but no one believes her; and Whispers of the Dead by Spencer Kope, about an FBI tracker with an unusual ability to see shine left behind by other people.
Earlier this year, I went on a spree of reading young adult books. Several of my favorites this year come from these. Midnight at the Electric is set decades in the future, when a young woman in training for a Mars mission comes to live with an elderly Kansas relative. She learns about relatives and others who lived in that house, with plot timelines in the World War I and Great Depression eras. Every Day by Jodi Anderson is about a boy who wakes up in a different body each day. Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley is about two teens who fall in love through notes left in books in a bookstore.
When I was younger I loved science fiction, but am generally disappointed with modern ones. However, A Darkling Sea by James Cambias seems to me to hearken back to the golden age of science fiction. Its about an alien civilization found in the sea underneath a kilometer deep icepack on the cold planet Ilmatar. Both humans and Sholen (another intelligent race) cooperate in observing this civilization without disturbing ituntil the Ilmitarans become aware of them.
Among nonfiction books, I loved The Age of Eisenhower by William Hitchcock, about the Eisenhower presidency. Hitchcock shows convincingly why Eisenhowers reputation has steadily increased in the years since his death and is now regarded among the half-dozen or so best presidents.
The Men Who United the States was published five years ago by perhaps my favorite nonfiction author, Simon Winchester. The author weaves together stories involving both widely known and little known characters from American history.
Costly Grace by Rob Schenck is a memoir of an evangelical pastor and long-time prominent leader of the religious right. He describes his initial conversion as a teenager; his ministry; his fall into what he now regards as political idolatry, in which destroying political opponents and scoring points rather than sharing the love of Jesus became dominant; and his repentance from that idolatry and attempts to heal some of the divisions he had helped cause.
