One thing I have discovered about being 80 is that I really do have more time to read a book. Maybe this is also because the COVID pandemic kept us inside so much that my habits changed, and now that we can get out and about more, we are out of the habit. It’s hard to know. But…..

Now that 2023 is already half over (how can that be?, you ask), I thought I would list the books that I have read this year and to which I have given the grade of A. (I do rank my books, A through C: if it is lower than C, I won’t finish it.) Because my reading habits have been so strange, with my emphasis on older Penguins, you may not have even heard of some of these books, but if you run across them, don’t run away.

Let’s start with the Penguins:

(1) “Foreigners” by Leo Walmsley. This is an autobiography/coming of age book. Walmsley had a rough and tumble upbringing in the north of England on the Yorkshire coast. Luckily, he writes well, has a good sense of self and humor, and carries the reader right along.

(2) “Brown on Resolution” by C.S. Forester. Here, at least, you might have heard of Forester, even you have never read any of his Horatio Hornblower books. This is not one of those, but is the story of a young woman, who meets a Naval officer several classes above her, gets pregnant, has a son out of wedlock when that was just not the thing to do, and raises him to emulate his missing father, who has totally disappeared from her life. You can guess what may happen next. You really feel for his characters.

(3) “The Trespasser” by D.H. Lawrence. One of his shorter books, it’s the story of an unhappily married violinist who meets the love of his life, and then things really fall apart. So well written, like most of Lawrence.

(3) “Clochmerle” by Gabriel Chevallier. A comic French novel, yet published as a Penguin. You think we are polarized today? Just think about the differences between the conservative church going Frenchmen who live in a small village, where the progressive mayor wants to both upgrade his town and take a stand against the more Catholic of his constituents by taking municipal funds to build the town’s first public toilet. Right across the street from the church.

(4) “England in the 19th Century” by David Thomson. Perhaps a strange choice (there are many good English history books amongst the Penguins), but it is very, very readable, and shows you both the economic changes that redid the entire face of the British Isles in the 19th century, plus the enormous influence of Queen Victoria and how she changed the monarchy.

(5) “Three Plays” by Euripides. These are short comic plays that I had not read before. Especially recommend “Iphigenia in Taurus”, how Iphigenia rescues herself and her brother Orestes (of course at first they don’t recognize each other) from captivity in Tauris. A story that you probably don’t know, but it’s quite an adventure by two very clever siblings.

(6) “A History of the English Church and People” by the venerable Bede. Another surprising entry, huh? Certainly surprising for me. Written in the 8th century, but Bede was an archivist and he looked at even earlier church archives all throughout the British Isles. Fascinating picture of Britain when Christianity was expanding – all the groups you would expect to find are here. Except for the Vikings – they haven’t arrived yet. Interesting battles between different Christian groups, too – And so easy and pleasant to read. Who knew?

(7) “Agricola” and “Germanica” by Tacitus. OK, another one you wouldn’t expect on this list. “Agricola” is a biographical essay about Tacitus’ father-in-law, who was a very successful Roman governor of England, and “Germanica” is Tacitus’ description of the tribes of what is now northern Germany, which live very differently from the Romans.

(8) “Edmond Campion” by Evelyn Waugh. You may know some of Waugh’s fiction, but this is a fascinating biographical piece set during the time of Elizabeth I, when the monarchy was firmly Church of England and determined for once and for all to root out all Catholics from the country. Campion (and this is a true story) was an Oxford educated priest, someone who intellectually and personally was clearly one of the best, but whose views became closer and closer to Catholicism, and who left France to teach at a seminary for English Catholics which had been established in what is now Belgium (who knew, again?) and then moved to Rome where he got a position in the Vatican. At some point, he was sent back to Britain under cover to see and report back to the Pope how the remaining Catholics in Britain were faring. Things did not work out well.

(9) “Life in Shakespeare’s England”. This is an anthology of contemporary writings from the turn of the 17th century. What was rural life like, urban life, travel, theater, literature, industry….you name it. I found it very interesting.

(10) “Two Satyr Plays” by Euripides and Sophocles. Short plays meant to balance out the heaviness of the tragedies. Euripides rewrites Odysseus’ experience with the Centaurs with the help of the Satyrs, and Sophocles (in one of the funniest plays I have ever read) has the Satyrs help Apollo find his missing cows.

(11) “Britain BC” by S.E. Winbolt and “The Beginnings of English Society” by Dorothy Whitelock. These two books complement each other. The first talks about the people that came to Britain (before and after the land bridge to the continent disappeared) – no one was native; they came from France, from Germany, from all over. The second book follows up with how they all related to each other – before the Romans came, and before even England was anything but an always changing patchwork of mini-kingdoms.

I also read a few non-Penguin A rated books, such as Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”, which I expected to be dry and outdated, but found out it was neither, and “Spencer Fullerton Baird” by William Healey Dall, the biography of the fascinating Baird who was, among other things, the first curator and second Secretary of the Smithsonian Museums, and the donor of much of the museum’s large bird (stuffed) collection.

If anyone reads any of these books, I’d like to know what they think. Was my judgement accurate?