There are only a few hours left in 2020, so it's unlikely I'll finish any more books/plays by the end of the year.
The tally, then, for 2020 is 55 - the most I've read in my post-grad school life. Since I retired in June, I've read 44, suggesting that next year, my first full year of retirement, I'll easily surpass that 55.
Here's the list:
The Virtue Driven Life by Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.
Love … An Experience Of by Peter McWilliams
Beauteous Truth: Faith, Reason, Literature and Culture by Joseph Pearce
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Santa Claus Is for Real by Charles Edward Hall (with Bret Witter)
Holiday Tales: Christmas in the Adirondacks by F.W.W. Murray
The Spear by Louis de Wohl
Blue Water Line Blues (chapbook) by David Michael Nixon
Hunting the World (chapbook) by David Michael Nixon
Tales of a Magic Monastery by Theophane the Monk
St. Nicholas The Wonder Worker by Anne E. Neuberger
North of Boston by Robert Frost
Poetry of the Spirit edited by Gerard E. Goggins
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold by Regina Doman
God's Door-Keepers: Padre Pio, Solanus Casey, and Andre Bessette by Joel Schorn
Earth Keeper by N. Scott Momaday
A Book of Bees by Sue Hubbell
Bundled Wildflowers - Haiku Society of America 2020 Members' Anthology
Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Father Jacques Philippe
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
The History of the Honey Bee by E. Readicker-Henderson
Dead Man's Ransom by Ellis Peters
Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Enchantment of the World: Scotland by Dorothy B. Sutherland
Heritage of Scotland by Nathaniel Harris
A Surfeit of Similes by Norton Juster
This Side of Jordan by Bill Kassel
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Twenty Poems to Pray by Gary M. Bouchard
In the School of the Holy Spirit by Jacques Philippe
Now and In Other Days by Yehuda Amichai
Classic Haiku edited by Tom Lowenstein
A Boy's Will by Robert Frost
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
1984 by George Orwell
Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir by Jim Forest
Silent Night: The Story of The World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub
Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare
Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly
The Screwtape Letters (with "Screwtape Proposes a Toast") by C. S. Lewis
The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K, Chesterton
Knight of the Holy Ghost by Dale Ahlquist
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
The Mass of Brother Michel by Michael Kent
Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection
My Name is Lazarus edited by Dale Ahlquist
Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss
Saint Jose: Boy Cristero Martyr by Father Kevin McKenzie
A mix of spiritual, mysteries, poetry, fiction, drama, biography, history, research, and classics.
This coming year I plan to read at least one Shakespeare play a month with a goal of reading all of the plays I haven't read yet - though I might not finish that task until 2022. I've already started The Tragedy of Richard II.
I want to read more mysteries. I just grabbed a copy of Dorothy Sayers's Unnatural Death off my bookcase, and will start that one soon. After that - more Wimsey? A Christie? Ellis Peters perhaps?
Some works are slower reading, ones that must be read in small doses. There are currently two on that list that I've actually started. Poems Every Catholic Should Know, compiled by Joseph Pearce, will be part of my poetic reading. I've also started something more topical - The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin containing more than 500 of his Easy Essays that helped to inspired and guide the Catholic Worker movement. Those essays need to be read slowly and savored.
Another topical one I want to read is Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured People by Charles Camosy.
Given the current political/social climate, I also plan to reread The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I haven't read the full Trilogy since the 1970's!
I also will continue working through all the books of poetry of Robert Frost - Mountain Interval is next.
For spiritual reading, I plan to start with a history of the 40 Days For Life Campaign - appropriately named 40 Days For Life. There are several books I want to reread - Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis are high on my list. I'm sure other old and new books will come along as well.
And there will be other books just for fun, classics I've always meant to read, and so on.
No matter what happens in the world, I have the pleasure of reading to keep my mind sdharp and my spirits up.
As W. Somerset Maugham observed: "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
Pax et bonum
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