Books: My top books of 2019

As Shangrila Towers passes into the futuristic year 2020, I'm recapping my top picks from 2019. Note that these titles weren't necessarily released in the past year, but they're what I happened to enjoy in 2019 - you might like them too...

The Last Policeman - This was one of several speculative fiction books I picked up from my visit to Powell's in Portland, Oregon. Author Ben Winters's premise is killer - an asteroid will obliterate the Earth in six months, prompting the semi-breakdown of society as people quit their jobs and go "bucket list," join apocalyptic cults, or fall into despair. Amidst this chaos, a rookie homicide detective investigates a hanging that everyone else assumes is a suicide. Of course, the case has more than meets the eye, but does that matter, when everyone will be gone soon anyway? If you like existentialist sci-fi dread mixed in with your crime fiction, this is a good read.

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems - This is the third nonfiction title from xkcd creator Randall Munroe, and it functions as the inverse of his first book, "What If?" - rather than present a ridiculous situation and try to explain the consequences with real-world physics (e.g., what would happen if you had a mole of moles), "How To" presents a common situation and applies a roundabout, Rube Goldberg-esque solution that would "solve" the problem under physical laws, but which would be insane in practice (e.g., skiing by hooking up snow machines to blow snow in front of you).

Frozen Hell - This is an expanded version of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s classic novella, "Who Goes There?," working in several opening chapters unearthed from draft manuscripts that Campbell had sent to Harvard. I think the expanded version is actually worse than the original (Campbell wisely excised the opening for pacing reasons), but it's still well-written, and I liked seeing how one of the greatest sci-fi editors of all time ruthlessly revised his own work.

Concealed Carry Class: The ABCs of Self-Defense Tools and Tactics - I really got a lot out of my pistol class with Tom Givens, and this book repeats and condenses a lot of the material Tom teaches in the class and previously wrote about in his book "Fighting Smarter," except this time with high-quality photography and more professional editing. It's not perfect (some of the statistics Tom mentions are a bit suspect), but the core of the book is excellent and grounded in his decades of experience as a law enforcement officer and trainer.