Based on the 2023 thread, our reading (or reporting on reading) was up to pandemic-era levels. We're typically in the 12 page range, but 15 pages in 2023 and 2020. Here's to happy reading in 2024 I am working on two books from the same genre, more or less: the popular experiential book. One I'm reading is popular science - Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by conservation biologist Thor Hanson - and the other is popular sport - Rise of the Ultra Runners by Adharanand Finn. Finn writes books along with being a columnist for The Guardian and this is his third book about running, and that it's sort of a thing he does comes through. I am . . . less comfortable or less confident in his narrative for some reason, and looking at reviews I seem to be alone in this take. It just seems less an exploration of the rise as it is a running reporter taking up the sport and writing the book as he goes along. Which it is; doesn't pretend to be anything else. But even for a popular work like this, something a bit more purposeful would be appreciated. Which brings me to Hanson's book which, on the surface, is quite similar. But with the work organized into coherent chapters, at least his time spent studying bees seems to serve a larger narrative than his own bee journey, if that makes sense. Interesting book, and accessible to the non-scientist.
Something happened to me during the pandemic. My attention span cratered. In the last three years, I finished only one book -- King Lear, after seeing the play -- even though I started dozens. Instead, I watched way too much tv. I actually made reversing that my new year's resolution. So, I asked my best friend to tell me her most engaging read and she suggested: All the Light we Cannot See -- Anthony Doerr It was engaging, a very easy read, and I stayed up last night to finish the last 200 pages. Such an experience used to be par for the course for me, but new territory all the same. The chapters are very short -- three to four pages -- and the cast of characters is very limited with the story toggling mostly back and forth between the two main characters. From what I'd heard of it, I expected more of a fantasy angle, there is a cursed diamond supposedly at the heart of this work, but instead this is mostly a war story. Overall,I found the book unfulfilling. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead springs to mind, wihch until now had been the most anti-climactic book I've ever read. It's about a reconaissance platoon in WWII in the Pacific theater. They scout an island ahead of an allied landing. They've lost their lieutenant and it takes them a while to decide that they want to carry on with the mission. The platoon has to ascend this ridge to spot for the incoming forces where the Japanese are. It's an almighty slog -- lastly probably 300 pages -- and just as they are about to get to the top, one of the soldiers disturbs a hornet's nest and in panic the platoon flees down the mountain. When they get down at the bottom and look back up to the ridge line, they just give up. They don't have the will to try again. They are beaten, they're defeated and it wasn't the enemy. It was bees. I found Light to be similarly anti-climactic. It is so apparent from the get-go, even without reading the book's jacket, that Marie-Laure and Werner are going to intersect, and it takes so long for them to get there and I'm almost imploring the book to just get me to the Saint-Malo story line. And then they are only together an hour or two. And then I think that they will get back after the war only for Werner to anti-climactically step on a mortar. After the war is over. And that's ultimately what the book is about. Children living through, and getting broken by, the war. The story basically ends when Werner steps on the mine, only there is still 100 pages left to go. Werner's oldest friend and his sister, and Marie-Laure all meet, ostensibly to share their love for Werner, but they are all so broken and scarred that those are the most joyless post-war reunions I've ever read about. (And I read a lot of those narratives in real life.) Something more uplifting would be the Hollywood ending (though those really did occur in real life.) And it would be a different book. The point here is their brokenness. I enjoyed the book as I was reading it, but I'm pretty sure I won't return to it.
Lonfellow: Poems and Other Writings, in which I mostly read the famous long poems ("Evangeline," "Song of Hiawatha," "Courtship of Miles Standish," " Tales of a Wayside Inn" and the like) that I had never read before. Given that I claim "American Poetry" as a specialty, that was a bit of an oversight, though in my defense, no one in my generation was encouraged to read Longfellow (if anything, the opposite was the case). While he's not the best American poetry of the 19th Century, I don't think he deserves oblivion because the future of American poetry went a route different from the one he was on.
One Minute Out - Mark Greaney Another Gray Man book, another page turning thriller. Court Gentry takes a solo job to kill a former war criminal hiding out in Serbia. Shenanigans ensue and he ends up going to Croatia, Venice, and eventually Hollywood to break up an international sex trafficking ring while making sure not to kill the leader since that guy is a government informant. This clipped along at a faster pace than most of the previous books and it put Court in a few different situations where he had to work with someone who had no experience and then a group of retired military personnel to make the formula feel fresh.
I won a state title in HS reading O'Flaherty's short story, The Sniper. So, I read this years ago. I thought it was just an OK read that got better toward the end.
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera. I got this book for Christmas, but I got feeling an ex would have bought this for me. Fun fact: Kundera wrote the book in Czechoslovakia, but it was originally published in French. I find the book hawt.
Finished this fun read this morning: It's a great history of the institution from the Roman Empire to the present-day. The beginning briefly acknowledges pre-Roman libraries, notably the Library of Nineveh, but argues that none of those earlier ancient libraries had any direct effect on subsequent institutions. Also, this is largely a Western-centric history, given that the authors are interested in the provenance of the modern institutional library, so royal or monastic libraries of non-Western cultures, while notable achievements in their own right, get only passing mention. As the subtitle suggests, the main theme here is how tenuous the library as an institution has been for it's entire history, and how the destruction or loss of libraries and the books they contain has been the rule, rather than the exception, for the entire 2000 year period covered. Something trivial but interesting I learned--papyrus is a very unstable, impermanent media; it's extremely vulnerable to humidity, so unless it's stored somewhere like a desert, a papyrus library essentially needs to be replaced every generation or so. The legendary Library of Alexandria was almost certainly a victim of this mundane reason, rather than the pillaging/book-burning previous generations blamed either on early Christians or early Muslim conquerors.
I'm starting Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Is this a penis book, or genuinely great? Imma gonna find out!
Borderlands - Brian McGilloway First novel in another Irish crime series, about a Garda Inspector in Lifford, County Donegal. This one is more police procedural than noir.
William Cullen Bryant: Author of America a biography of the first solid poet born in the United States, and the best 19th C. American poet not named Dickinson or Whitman, by Gilbert Muller. Bryant was one of the great walking poets of all time. His idea of a good weekend was a walk from Manhattan to West Point.
Roughing It by Mark Twain. It's an autobiographical tale of his travels through America. It's a prequel to his trip around Europe, which is detailed in his book, The Innocents Abroad. This should be enjoyable.
So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport This is his first book after finishing his post doc and beginning his professorship at Georgetown. Written in 2012, it might be even more important today. He tackles the idea of "following your passion" when looking for what to do with your life and comes away with a fairly detailed case showing that passion for your work typically comes after you've begun developing rare and valuable skills and collecting career capital that gives you greater autonomy to build your work life the way you want it. He digs into concepts like deliberate practice and finding the adjacent possible and applies them to knowledge work in a way that hadn't really been done yet when he wrote this. This was a re-read for me and I'm thinking I'll probably revisit it again 8-10 years down the road. It's not as robust as his later works, and definitely not as well written, but you can already see the guy who eschews all social media and values concepts like deep work and digital minimalism.
First novel of the year is Connie Willis's Crosstalk which is a romantic comedy/sci fi book centered on cell phones and telepathy. She's in my top five favorite authors so I'll read almost anything she publishes (I say almost because three times now I've checked out a collection of her short stories from the local library that is too large to hold while lying on the couch or in bed, so I've never started it). This has some enjoyable parts but is also too much in other parts. I like where it ended up but the journey was not as enjoyable as most of her books.
The last two of my "impulse borrow" books from my holiday stop at the public library are done and returned. Both are advice books, though I didn't know one of them would be. That one is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, which caught my eye after having seen off a trusted colleague into retirement. Perhaps folks are familiar with it; Pausch was a well known and popular professor at Carnegie Mellon who received a terminal diagnosis and decided to take advantage of a traditional lecture series. It isn't a lecture or reflection on teaching the way I imagined it might be, rather reflections on how to achieve your childhood dreams. The vignettes (each of the fifty or so chapters are about 3-4 pages long) are directed as much to his young kids as to the college audience, and most of them land well (though there are some reflections on his own teaching methods that were the height of hubris). So it ended up more of an advice book than an academic one, which links it to the next book, Amy Alkon's Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*CK. My wife was with me at the library and the title is both funny and descriptive of her, so I had to check it out. But yeesh . . . it's a very different set of advice and suggestions than any I ever expected to come across, where naming and shaming people with whom you disagree or who offended you is suggested and celebrated.
Miracles: A Novel that is barely fiction about a Japanese woman quite similar to author Sono Ayako investigating the life of Polish Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe, who died in Auschwitz, after taking the place of a Jewish family man who, because of Kolbe, survived. I was giving it a test read for the World Literature class I teach to see if it's a suitable substitute or complement to Endo's Silence, but alas, I don't think it will work. Not bad, though.
Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. It's a novel about a British consul in Mexico, which was published in 1947. I'm glad that I bought this. Should be fun.
Finished Spencer Quinn's Mrs. Plansky's Revenge. I did not expect an author to be able to deploy every stereotype of seniors and rural Romanians and feds and still end up with a rather enjoyable book. Loretta Plansky is a 70-ish widow, scammed by someone pretending to be her grandson, and then off to Romania to get her money and dignity back. No surprises once you've read the blurb on the dust jacket and it plays out just so. Which, in this case, is just fine. As is the book: just sort of fine.
Listen to the Marriage -- John Jay Osborn So one of the prompts on the reading challenge I am embarking on is to read a book in a genre that you never explore. So I found this one in the library de-accession cart. It feels very chick-lit, if men can write chick-lit. Maybe beach read. (Is that a genre?) The book is about a couple in marriage counseling with their therapist. The book is all dialogue, roughly 25 sessions with the therapist. The only action is the wife screaming at one point, the husband standing up suddenly to walk to the window to look out, and the therapist offering tissues to the wife. That's it. Other than that, all talk and way too much sub-text from the therapist who's the narrator. But it's brief and breezy so it never gets to the point of being tedious. Most interesting fact about the book is that Osborn wrote The Paper Chase. I had a definite love/hate relationship with the tv series. Osborn must have had an interesting career. 50 years after writing one of the seminal books of the early 70s is writing a throwaway exercise on dialogue.
Also watching. Decided I need to make a better effort at reading serious and more thoughtful novels. Gonna go though the Booker-Mann nominees. But, I have started poorly. For those who have avoided both novel and book, it is about the rise of future President Coriolanus Snow. Somewhat interesting until the last chapter. The ending felt forced. Makes me not even interested in the movie.
Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now - Walter Brueggemann Brueggemann was a professor of theology, with an old testament focus, from 1961-2003 at Eden Theological Seminary and then Columbia Theological Seminary. He still serves as a professor emeritus at Columbia at age 90. His emphasis here is looking at the relationship of the 4th commandment, sabbath, to the 1st and 10th. Most of the writing is through the lens of consumerism and "acquisitiveness" as antithetical to the concept of sabbath. Brueggemann's denominational ties are with the more mainline, liberal protestant churches and it shows in a few of his takes. Still, it's very well thought out and there are quite a few nuggets to mull over. It's a short read, 6 chapters with corresponding "study guide" sessions at the back that total about 140 pages of actual text. I took it a chapter/guide a day, but it could easily be read in a single afternoon. The only item I wish he had explored is Hebrews chapter 4 and how it relates to the idea of sabbath in the new testament context as it's the only one of the original ten commandments that's not explicitly reiterated and expanded on in the new testament. Otherwise, it's a solid counter to much of the consumerism and church as product approach that plagues large swaths of the current conservative protestant landscape in the US.
How did you come to pick that book out, Joe? I mean, the title is awesome, but Brueggerman has published something like 80 books; are you familiar with his work? His study guides are phenomenal. The very best biblical study guide I've ever read is Brueggerman's I and II Samuel. So I imagine this must have been fun to read. Because as you noted, Brueggerman knows the value of brevity.