Best Reads of 2019
Here we are again. The calendar year is winding down and it’s time for me to reveal the best books I’ve read in 2019. So, that you can order them, hopefully read them and discover new, exciting and unexplored paths like only literature can offer. Because it doesn’t matter how well-read you are. There’s always an author or a subgenre of your favorite genre to discover. Or a crossgenre of your favorite genre. Speculative Gothic Westerns, Splatterpunk Romance or whatever.
So, there are the ten best books I’ve read in 2019. Well, my ten favorites. However you want to call them. They were not necessarily written in 2019 or in even in our millennium. Literature is too rich and has too long of a legacy to limit yourself to just one publication year. Books are timeless. Before you lecture me in the comments: I know this wasn’t my best year for diversity in reading. To be honest, as far as reading is involved, it wasn’t my best year in anything.
Without further ado, here are my best reads of 2019:
For turning our collective desires upside down and exposing the schizophrenic nature of living when you don’t have anything to long for.
Max Booth III - Carnivorous Lunar Activities
For being a dick to conventional werewolf horror while showing proper reverence to its important symbols.
For its deep understanding of the complicated nature of human relationships and bringing one of the best series in recent year to a rewarding conclusion.
For eerily figuring out 2019 in 2003, through the melodramatic deforming mirror of his fiction.
Brian Alan Ellis - Road Warrior Hawk: Poems About Depression, Anxiety and Pop Culture
For its heartfelt and accessible deconstruction of social media monoculture.
Brian Evenson - Song for the Unraveling of the World
For challenging conventional genre tropes and leading them to question the very nature of reality.
Noah Hawley - A Conspiracy of Tall Men
For writing a grand, sweeping and… kind of silly conspiracy epic that treats its characters with every ounce of depth and respect they deserve.
Chuck Klosterman - Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction
For using fiction to shrewdly challenge conventional wisdom on socially divisive issues.
J. David Osborne - A Minor Storm
For giving a voice to a discreet generation of young men seeking enlightenment over power or wealth.
Lisa Taddeo - Three Women
For exposing the complexity and the nuances of women’s desire with great empathy.
