2019 Review: My pre-2019 Discoveries

As always, I read a ton of books every year. Probably the highlight in all the fiction I read was I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich. Trashy as it sounds, that book was surprisingly engaging. I've also been reading a lot of Eric Ambler lately, such as Judgment on Deltchev, Passage of Arms, The Levanter and The Schrimer Inheritance. Espionage fiction isn't usually an interest of mine, but Ambler's books stand out because of the unusual characters he writes and the off-kilter problems they encounter.

Another book worth noting is The Night Comes On by Steve Duffy, a collection of short fiction deliberately written to be evocative of M. R. James. As a James fan, I enjoyed the book, but it couldn't help but be a little too predictable owing to its inspiration.

My interest in Africa took me to a variety of books; I was thoroughly fascinated by Naulila 1914 by Jakob Zollmann and I'm sure I'm the only person to ever make that claim! It's an entire book on World War I in Angola - that's pretty well targeted to my interests. I was also deeply engrossed by Prevail: The Inspiring Story of Ethiopia's Victory over Mussolini's Invasion, 1935-1941 by Jeff Pearce, which did a tremendous job of explaining how the Ethiopian War with Italy came about. Another interesting book was A Labyrinth of Kingdoms by Steve Kemper about Heinrich Barth's journeys through Africa in the 1840s.

Having enjoyed the rest of Adam Hochchild's writing, I sought out Spain in Our Hearts, his account of the Spanish Civil War. I hadn't read anything about that conflict before, so it was informative to get Hochchild's perspective. I also read The End of the Spear by Steve Saint, Erebus by Michael Palin, This Gulf of Fire by Mark Molesky, Pre-Code Hollywood by Thomas Doherty (which was much more thorough on the subject than I'd first assumed, a nice surprise), Devil in the White City by Erik Larson and The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon.

Having enjoyed the motion picture adaptation, I sought out the comic version of The Death of Stalin by Fabien Nury & Thierry Robin. Although I liked it, I was surprised to find it hewed closer to the historical record and was much less humorous than the film.

The best older films I sought out included Three Days of the Condor, one of the few recommendations from a book on thrillers which actually panned out; Black Dynamite, which I had learned of thanks to Move Sign with the Mads; The Girl on the Train was a competant thriller which I enjoyed mainly because I figured out the twist before the film explained it to me; I didn't find Creed II to be anywhere near as good as its predecessor, but it was all right; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was fun and loaded with neat Easter eggs; and Darkest Hour was a well-acted Winston Churchill film.

Tomorrow I'm going to begin a retrospective on the 2010s!