Alas a slow burn for me at the end of the year ... was hoping to fit another couple in, but I am still somewhat near the beginning of the last one I listed ... Life got in the way ... Xmas can be a bit like that. Throw in a six day holiday, catch-ups, family and health issues, and my reading really suffered. Still, I am not displeased with what I did manage for the year.

My reading list for 2019

Yes, I'm reading speculative fiction chronologically, with some mainstream classics and game related books in between.

Awesome! But wait. Do you realize that with completing books of 3 years in one year of reading you still need 22 years to reach 2020? And after these 22 years we'll be in 2042? :)

For me the most exciting years is from the mid sixties to the eighties, my formative years being in the seventies and eighties. Besides after ca. 2010 there's too much political agenda, identity politics, polarization and censorship for my taste.
Anyway, I'm enjoying the ride. :-)

I read a lot of German books in 2019, but I'll still add my list, maybe some of it might be useful:

- Hartmut Boockmann, Der Deutsche Orden. Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte.
Book about the history of the Teutonic Knights, critical of nationalist interpretations (both German and Polish). Very good, only minus is that it's focused on Prussia, there's little about the order in Estonia and Latvia.
Rating: 5/5
- Ian D. Armour, A history of Eastern Europe 1740-1918. Empires, nations and modernisation
What it says in the title ("Eastern Europe" here includes not just Poland and Ukraine, but also the Balkan countries and Greece). I liked the book and would recommend it.
Rating: 4/5.
- Matthias Becher, Chlodwig I. Der Aufstieg der Merowinger und das Ende der antiken Welt
Book about the Frankish king Clovis (he who converted to Catholicism), but despite the title there's actually a very large part about the history of the Franks before Clovis, starting in Late antiquity. Informative and enjoyable.
Rating 5/5.
Ian Wood, The Merovingian kingdoms 450-751
From one of the leading experts on the Merovingians, probably one of the best books one could read on the subject. Not always an easy read (the book is honest about the huge gaps in our knowledge and the often problematical nature of the sources), but highly recommended, if one's interested in the subject.
Rating: 5/5.
Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg. Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42.
Book about the Wehrmacht (and its crimes), focused on an in-depth investigation of 5 divisions (one "elite" armoured division, two infantry divisions, two occupation divisions) in the first year of the war against the Soviet Union. Brilliant and nuanced book, dealing with all aspects (military operations, war crimes, anti-partisan warfare, occupation policies, the Wehrmacht's role in the Holocaust etc.). Pity, it hasn't been translated into English.
Rating 5/5.
Alexander Demandt, Marc Aurel. Der Kaiser und seine Welt
Book about the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Competent and with interesting sections about Christianity, philosophy etc. Some parts about dynastic history were a bit boring, but a good book in general.
Rating 3/5.
Alexander Demandt, Hände in Unschuld. Pontius Pilatus in der Geschichte.
Book about Pontius Pilate, or rather about the entire history of Roman-Jewish relations in the first century AD. Very interesting, though I suppose religious people might not like some aspects of it (e.g. Demandt demonstrates quite convincingly imo, that everything in the gospels about Jesus' birth and childhood - apart from his origin in Nazareth, which is plausible - is fiction created to prove him as the Messiah).
Rating: 5/5
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin. Paradoxes of power, 1878-1928
First part of a Stalin trilogy. The parts up to the early 1920s are the best imo, they're less a biography of Stalin, more of a general history of Late Tsarist Russia and the revolutions of 1917. The part dealing with the 1920s focuses more on Stalin and is pretty tedious to read at times, imo Kotkin needs an editor who tells him to cut down to the essentials. As it is, the book is too long imo and takes an effort to finish (huge end notes too!). I'd still recommend it though, especially for the early parts.
Rating: 3/5.
- Manfred Zeidler, Kriegsende im Osten. Die Rote Armee und die Besetzung Deutschlands östlich von Oder und Neiße 1944/45
Book about the end of WW2 in what was then Eastern Germany. Informative, if rather short.
Rating: 3/5
Gerd Krumeich, Die unbewältigte Niederlage. Das Trauma des Ersten Weltkriegs und die Weimarer Republik
Book about the aftermath of WW1 and its effects on the political culture of Germany ("Stab in the back" myth etc.). The book is too disorganized and somewhat incoherent imo, but it has some very interesting information which gives more nuance to the issues than found in many other accounts.
Rating: 3/5.
- Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, Andreas Rose (Editors), The wars before the Great War. Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War.
Collection of essays about international politics in the last years before WW1, deals with Italy's Libyan War, the Balkan Wars, the international peace movement among Socialists, the foreign policy views of British Liberals and much else. Quality of the essays varies, but some are very good, all in all definitely recommended.
Rating: 4/5.
- Gerd Tellenbach, Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis zum frühen 12. Jahrhundert
Book about the history of the Western Church in the age of church reform and the investiture contest (10th-12th centuries). I didn't like the occasional hints of the author's own Christian views, but on the whole this is a top class discussion of the issues, even if some questions (why did church reform with its radical demands arise in the 11th century?) can't be answered with certainty.
Rating: 5/5.
- Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer. Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42
A sort of collective biography of the generals commanding Germany's war against the Soviet Union in 1941/42. The first third of the book deals with their experiences before 1941, starting with their socialization as cadets and young officers in imperial Germany. Rest is about the war against the Soviet Union, with heavy emphasis on criminal orders, war crimes etc. Informative, if rather grim reading.
Rating: 4/5.
- Julius Ruiz, The "Red Terror" and the Spanish civil war. Revolutionary violence in Madrid.
A study of Republican violence in Madrid during the first months of the Spanish civil war in 1936. Balanced and fortunately quite free of polemic, I'd recommend it to anybody interested in the Spanish civil war.
Rating: 5/5.
- Julius Ruiz, Franco's justice. Repression in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War.
Deals with the various aspects of repression in Madrid after Francos's victory, up to the mid-1940s. Some of the information in it is now outdated (it was written before the book above, imo they should be read together), and a bit dry at times, but lots of interesting information, e.g. about the obsession of the Francoist authorities with alleged conspiracies by freemasons.
Rating: 4/5.

Quite a lot of censorship in American SciFi of old too :-( I have sometimes enjoyed it when authors made it obvious where the censored parts are.

My last couple of books for the year:

Kyrik and the Lost Queen, by Gardner Fox. This is pretty middle-of-the-road sword-and-sorcery book cranked out by Fox. Kyrik's girlfriend is kidnapped because she happens to be a lookalike of a queen who's being subjected to a coup by her devil-worshipping high priest so Kyrik has to sort stuff out. There isn't much to say about it. Has some fun parts, some not so good. It's a great example of the kind of itch-scratching story that used to exist when publishers could still afford to have midlist books on hand. It wouldn't be the first, second, third, fourth, etc., example of the genre I would recommend, but if you've read all the classics and are just wanting something similar, you might check it out, or not.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson. I had read this one back in middle school, I think, but I figured it was time to revisit it. I remembered thinking it was a bit overrated back then, but when I started to read it, the beginning was so good I thought, "Man, younger me was stupid!" But then I kept reading and started thinking that younger me was probably not too far off after all. It's basically a heist story in which the protagonist, Case, has no idea what the job actually is, he's just doing his part because he's getting paid a lot and his bosses imposed a fatal time limit on him, sort of like Escape From New York. Actually, a lot of the book feels like it was written while Blade Runner (physical world), Tron (cyberspace), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (godlike AIs), among other movies, were running constantly in the background.

If you're just going sentence by sentence, it's very good. As basically the first "official" cyberpunk novel, it brings a hard-boiled crime sensibility to sci-fi writing. The heroes don't want to save the world or enlighten anything. They just want to make some money so they can get more cybernetic implants and/or get high. The plot gets less interesting as it goes along. Case isn't a very interesting protagonist - Molly, the woman with mirrored lenses grafted over her eyes and retractable blades under her fingernails, is consistently more dynamic and intriguing - and once they pull a job to steal a digitized version of a brilliant dead hacker, Case feels like his main function as a hacker isn't even necessary anymore. A lot of stretches involve him just jacking into the computer, viewing snippets of whatever exciting stuff Molly is doing, and then talking to the hacker personality to get updates on whatever it's doing. He feels like he's in the book just to learn what's happening, try to get wasted, and for other characters to tell him stuff. There are many interesting and fun ideas, and it's a very important book, but the story just ends up falling a little bit flat in the end.

Try the idea of mini-habits. With easy target as 1-page-per-day you cannot fail (don't tell me anybody has got no time for 1 page a day) and you can easily create a habit of reading.

That's very interesting approach. Too hard for me, but great that you enjoy it. I suppose it gives some great view on a genre's development and may be really interesting. There were some authors I've read like this and it always gives you some additional value to all the readings.

Thanks! Added to OP. I also invite you to 2020 edition!

Yes, Isaac Asimov was fond of the word "unprintable", for example.

But back then the writers were struggling against the restrictions of the taboos. Today too much is "problematic".
There was censorship back then, but the development was towards a more liberal (in the non-political sense of the word) attitude.

Sorry for a bit late update, but these ones belong to 2019 ;)

★★★ Wy jesteście światłem świata / Martin Rhonheimer
★☆☆ Słowo na każdy dzień. Ewangelia 2019 / many authors
★☆☆ Kolebka nawigatorów / Karol Olgierd Borchardt

List of all books read in 2019.

I finished an unofficial Dracula sequel: Dracula: The Undead by Freda Warrington.
It is written in the same style as Dracula via Journal entries. It’s certainly better than the official sequel - Dracula the undead by Dacre Stoker & Ian Holt. I also like this too.

oops, wrong reading year, sorry ;)