Here are my best reads in English during 2019. The total was 41 books of which 44% were e-books. Find me at Goodreads! Dear Reader, what were your best reads of the year?
- No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. Ursula LeGuin 2017.
- The Events at Poroth Farm. T.E.D. Klein 1975.
- The Painted Veil. W. Somerset Maugham 1925.
- Balanced on the Blade’s Edge. Lindsay Buroker 2014.
- All Systems Red. Martha Wells 2017.
- Tales from the Inner City. Shaun Tan 2018.
- Code of the Woosters. P.G. Wodehouse 1938.
- Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Mary Roach 2013.
- Radiance (Wraith Kings #1). Grace Draven 2014.
- Someone Like Me. M.R. Carey 2018.
- Barrayar (Vorkosigan Saga #7). Lois McMaster Bujold 1991.
- Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends. Avram Davidson 1981-90.
- Sharpe’s Tiger. Bernard Cornwell 1997.
- Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Salman Rushdie.
- Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown. Stephen Jay Gould 1997.
- Exhalation: Stories. Ted Chiang 2019.
- Judas Unchained (Commonwealth Saga #2). Peter F. Hamilton 2005.
- Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989. Bruce Chatwin.
- Spirits Abroad. Zen Cho 2014.
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Brian Selznick 2007.
- Swords Against Death. Fritz Leiber 1970, stories published in 1939-63.
- The Unexpected Truth About Animals: A Menagerie of the Misunderstood. Lucy Cooke 2017.
- A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson 2003.
Here’s my list for 2018.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
All things considered, I believe the answer will have to be The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie (seems to be a Feb 2019 publishing date).
So far, for 2020, it’s probably A mist of grit and splinters, by Graydon Saunders (fifth, in a series of door-stop-sized fantasy novels that take “magic” and “economy” (and possibly “politics”) and bases the narrative with them as a foundational base, as it were). If you want a single-word summary, it would have to be “dense”.
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