The books I finished reading last year

These are the books I finished reading in 2019. And notes about my favorites.

• Ten Years in Japan by Joseph Grew. Grew was the US ambassador to Japan from 1932 until the war. I was fascinated by the diplomatic stories in the book, and I was surprised to find how much golf was in the book too. I wrote a blog post about that: A Golfers’ Paradise.
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
• Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. This was my favorite book of the year.
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford.
• The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddharta Mukherjee. This was my second favorite book of the year.
• Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens.
• Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India’s First Newspaper by Andrew Otis.
• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
• The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins. This was my third favorite book of the year.
• Quichotte by Salman Rushdie.