Books I Plan to Read in 2019

Last year was not a very good year for my “Books to Read in 2018” list, with five of my fifteen books unread. On the other hand, I got to read Middlemarch (for the first time) and Kristin Lavransdatter (second time) with online book groups. And those big, shared books made it hard to find the right time to pick up something like Grant.

In other reading news, I read 190 books total (just over 57k pages) over 2018, and, much to my amusement, the book I read that Goodreads told me was read by the most other Goodreads users was Middlemarch! The book with the earliest publication date was The Cloud of Unknowing.

I’m still interested in the books I didn’t get to, but I think I’ll not transfer them over to this year’s list. The way I think about this list is that it helps me give myself permission to make time for these books, when they’re competing with work, hobbies, or my ever growing stack of library holds. The list is my reminder that these books can take priority.

So, without further ado, the books I’d like to read in 2019:

• (√) The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Clarissa W. Atkinson)
• (√) The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
• (√) Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Hasok Chang)
• (√) Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (James Chappel)
• (√) When the Well Runs Dry: Prayer Beyond the Beginnings (Thomas Green, S.J.)
• (√) Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (edited by Jeffrey Hamburger and Susan Marti)
• Shakespeare’s Binding Language (John Kerrigan)
• Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (Alexander Langlands)
• (√) The Death of Christian Culture (John Senior)
• (√) The Restoration of Christian Culture (John Senior)
• (√) The Child in the City (Colin Ward)

I’d definitely like to include one more old-enough-to-be-public-domain doorstopper, but I have the feeling my Middlemarch-Kristin group will settle on another book to share and fill that gap for me.

Update, we’re reading (or, in my case, rereading) The Brothers Karamazov.