My Dear Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie. Recommended at Reading Ladies Book Club.

The Kennedy Debutante by Kerri Maher and Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth by Paula Byrne. Both recommended at The Paperbag Princess.

The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis. Recommended at BooksPlease.

Tear Down This Wall: A City, A President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War by Romesh Ratnesar. Recommended at An Adventure in Reading.

Separated By The Border: A Birth Mother, A Foster Mother, And A Migrant Child’s 3,000-Mile Journey by Gena Thomas. I heard about this book on NPR.

Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson. Andrew Peterson’s new book about art, worship, and creativity.

The Less People Know About Us by Axton Betz-Hamilton. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

Ladysitting by Lorene Cary. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

God in the Rainforest by Kathryn T. Long. Recommended at Patheos, Anxious Bench.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou.

I finished reading this book about Elizabeth Holmes and her ill-fated start-up company, Theranos, last night, and I also watched the documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. The entire story of an entrepreneur turned liar and crook got me to thinking about lies.

We constantly tell ourselves stories. Some of these stories we repeat to other people. We don’t usually tell others the stories that put us in a bad light (confession)—even though the Bible tells us to “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.” Maybe that’s because we often aren’t honest with ourselves to begin with, not about the sin and failure and mess in our lives. No, we like to tell ourselves good stories.

I tell myself in regard to lies that a little exaggeration, a little rearranging of events and actions, won’t hurt anyone, and it will smooth the way, make things more understandable, less messy. After all, one can be too scrupulous. And everyone else does it, too. This is exactly what I think Elizabeth Holmes told herself at first. All of the businessmen (most of them are men) in Silicon Valley exaggerate and fudge numbers and build up their expectations of success in order to appeal to investors. Holmes told herself she was just playing the game by the same rules as everyone else.

But then, slowly over time, the little lies and exaggerations become big lies and exaggerations. And if I’m not careful, if we’re not careful, we begin to believe our own lies. Elizabeth Holmes believed that she was creating a new technology that would revolutionize health care; she told herself and then others that this technology would work, that it had to work, that if only she could get enough investment funds to gain enough time to make her ideas into reality, she could change the world. After all, isn’t that what entrepreneurs do: sell an idea that hasn’t yet come to fruition. And if she had to fudge, even lie and deceive, to keep the investors happy and keep the money rolling in, then it wasn’t really lying. It was casting a vision, creative storytelling.

Until it all came crashing down. Holmes’s technology of blood testing using just a finger prick drop of blood wasn’t near realization. It wasn’t even close to being a reality, if it could be done at all. But Elizabeth Holmes was so invested in her story that she ignored the problems and the caution lights and just kept right on forging ahead. If she had to lie and deceive some people to keep on realizing her dream, well, then, that was the price she had to pay. And how dare anyone try to stand in her way? Elizabeth Holmes was the heroine of this story!

Oh, Lord, help me to be careful about the stories I tell myself and the stories I tell to others. I am often the heroine of my own story, and I am prone to believe a lie, to become caught up in my own story, to ignore the warnings and the issues and the messes that I am busily leaving in my wake. Lord, give us eyes to see, and grace to repent, and tongues to tell the truth. Kyrie eleison.

I would like to spend the month of January reading books from the years 1900-1909, either books published in 1900-1909 or books set in that decade.

Classic children’s books published in 1900-1910:

Already read: The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900); Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (1902); The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (1902); The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter (1903); Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (1903); A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett(1905); The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908).

The Adventures of a Brownie by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1900). I do think this little book can go on my reading list for the month.

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902). Maybe this one, too.

Why the Chimes Rang and Other Stories by Raymond Macdonald Alden. I’ve read Why the Chimes Rang, and enjoyed it as a sweet Christmas story, but I haven’t read the “other stories.”

Fiction Bestsellers, 1900-1910:

I’ve read: Unleavened Bread by Robert Grant (1900), Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900), Janice Meredith by Paul L. Ford (1900), The Hound of the Baskervilles by A. Conan Doyle, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905); The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906).

I’d like to add to my reading: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908) and The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903). The latter book has a movie coming out soon with Harrison Ford as the main character.

Some other books published in the first decade of the twentieth century that I’d like to read:

Diary from Dixie by Mary Chesnut.

Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlof (1902). Selma Lagerlof, first woman author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, wrote this story of a group of Swedish families who set up a Christian colony in Jerusalem. It would count for the Reshelving Alexandria reading challenge to read a book in translation.

Some books set in the years 1900-1910 that I would like to read:

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War by Robert Massie.

The Greatest Adventure: A Story of Jack London by Frederick A. Lane. I have this book in my library.

The Outlander by Gil Adamson. Idaho and Montana, 1903. A nineteen year old woman murders her abusive husband and then runs away from his brothers who are thirsty for revenge.

Abel’s Island by William Steig. (1907 setting?) I also have this one in my library.

Also I should add some famous and popular poets of the decade to my “poem a day” project: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Houseman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Anna Akhmatova.

If you want to read more posts about books and other news and arts from the years 1900-1909:

1900. 1901. 1902. 1903. 1904. 1905. 1906. 1907. 1908. 1909.

That should be enough for January, especially since I also have some reading plans that are not related to the 1900-1909 decade. Happy reading, everyone, wherever and whenever you are doing it.

I plan to read a poem a day this year, aloud. I always told my students that poetry was meant to be read out loud. And in reference to the poem by Tennyson that I chose for the first day of 2020, I told someone yesterday morning that the actual date may be arbitrary, but human beings need a reset date, a time to start over and think and examine our lives and begin again. It’s that time of year, a time to start anew, to throw out the things that are not working or that are slowly dying.

I put some covers of books I suggest for celebrating the new year down the side of this post. Enjoy.

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.”

?Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I have a goal of reading one books that I haven’t already read by Dickens each year until I’ve read all of his novels. I’ve already read Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and now, Bleak House. Any suggestions for a Dickens novel for 2020?

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. I actually read several of the books in Turner’s Queen’s Thief series this year and enjoyed them all. The first time I read The Thief, I wasn’t that impressed, but this time I really dived into the series headfirst and found it fascinating in its treatment of personality, relationship, and political intrigue.

Great Northern? A Scottish Adventure of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. I highly recommend the Swallows and Amazons series. I also read We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea this year and it was just as good as the others in the series. I just have one or two more Swallows and Amazons books to read, and then I’ll have to throw a party or something Finishing the series seems to require a party or something.

Forward Me Back to You by Mitali Perkins. Great YA fiction, published in 2019.

A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich. I just finished this family saga/woman’s life story novel a week or so before Christmas, and I loved it it. I want to read more books by this author.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. This was a re-read along with the Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, and I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time I read it.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. This was also a re-read for me, this time in conjunction with my in-person book club that just started this fall. Such a good, but heart-rending story.

The Iron Lily by Barbara Willard. I enjoyed reading all of the Mantlemass Chronicles by Willard this year, but this one may have been my favorite.

The Friendship War by Andrew Clements. Deceptively simple story about a button-collecting fad that reveals a lot about character and friendship in a group of elementary age children. Mr. Clements died late this year, after having published a number of solidly entertaining middle grade fiction titles over the course of his career. His most well-known book is probably Frindle, about a class of fifth graders who make up a new word and campaign to have it accepted into the language.

A Dawn in the Trees: The Thomas Jefferson Years, 1776-1789 by Leonard Wibberley. This book, too, was a part of a series of mildly fictionalized biographical novels about our illustrious third president. I like Jefferson better in fiction than in fact. I did enjoy these books about the story of Jefferson’s life.

What are the best fiction books you’ve read this year? What fiction are you looking forward to reading in 2020?