Quodlibets

The Year in Reading

So, my year in reading is over.  From 12 Nov 2006 to 12 Nov 2007, I read (or listened to) 211 books.  That's a slight increase from the reading year before--up to 211 from 203.  I can only surmise that the increased number of hours I've been reading at work added to that.  I didn't count the number of audiobooks last year, but this year it was a healthy 17, which doesn't seem crazy.  I probably listened to fewer last reading year, but the number had to be at least 10.  So I've definitely increased consumption of those, but I'm absolutely sure that has everything to do with the increased amount of commute hours I log.  Between the start of this whole thing (12 Nov 2004) and now, I've read (or listened to) 657 books.  Keep in mind, that number doesn't include anything I've started and not finished (The Fortress of Solitude, A Problem from Hell, the audiobook of Fellowship of the Rings--and I got 11 discs into that baby--among them).  In fact, just yesterday I abandoned a book, though I only got about 40 pages in before I junked it.  All this is to say that I take in a remarkable amount of language a year.  It's astonishing even to me.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.

After the jump, I've posted a list of everything I read (or listened to) from November 12, 2006 to November 12, 2007.  I don't keep track of authors, so there are none listed, but if you're really curious, I'm sure an Amazon search will bring them up.  I'm considering adding author to my list for this next year, but it's going to be a pain in the ass to do so, because I keep one continuous spreadsheet of these, which means I have to modify my existing spreadsheet.  I may do so as sort of a project for the holiday week this year.  I'm undecided.  Right now, my spreadsheet keeps track of month I read a book (so I have precise numbers for every month of the year, though I didn't break things down like that for the purpose of this entry), the category of the book--so, was it from the library?  did I buy it?  is it an audiobook?  did someone lend it to me?  was it a gift?--and the title.  (Just another note about what appears after the jump--I've added in the audio in parentheses, just so you know.  That's not how the designation appears on my own list.)

Some notes on the list:  I happen to love alternative history, so books like Farthing and Fatherland were books I raced through.  I think it's interesting that I started the year with Farthing, and almost ended it with Ha'Penny, the second in Jo Walton's little series about a different WWII world.  Very good, highly recommended if you like those sorts of things.  I also really enjoyed the reading I did about animals--both Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation, and Jon Katz's books about his dogs (A Dog Year, A Good Dog, Dog Days).  You can tell I like something when it shows up all over the list.  Quite a few Time 100 books show up in the first few months of the year, but I've pretty much abandoned those for now, and about the only one I liked was Slaughterhouse-Five.  Mid-year, I read a LOT of football literature, and highly recommend Next Man Up if you're looking for something new and interesting about the subject.  I also read a lot of music books; I've talked about many of the Beatles books here, but it's worth mentioning that I really enjoyed Positively Fifth Street as well.  I read a couple of interesting history books, both concentrating on the Vietnam Era--They Marched into Sunlight (EXCELLENT) and 1968.   I highly enjoyed Penny Vincenzi's trilogy, No Angel, Something Dangerous, and Into Temptation.  They appear one after another in the list, so you can tell I ripped through them with nothing in between.  All in all, I could probably recommend comfortably at least half the books on this list.  Want an autobiography?  Gimp or The Year of Magical Thinking.  Looking for romance?  The Leopard Prince and the other books in that trilogy were great.  YA?  An Abundance of Katherines and Empress of the World.  The point is, I could go on like this forever, but I won't.  If you have questions, ask them.  Otherwise, here it is, in all its glory:

Jewish girl helps Nazi

Summer of My German Soldier is about Patty Bergen, a young girl living in Arkansas during WWII.  Patty is Jewish, which she readily admits is a rare thing to be in the South in the 40's.  But Patty's otherness doesn't just hinge on her Jewishness.  Patty is different, and she knows it.  She can't put her finger on why it is the way it is, but she doesn't act like other little girls, and her parents also don't let her forget it.  Patty's father is mean and physically cruel, Patty's mother is cold and unloving, and Patty's little sister is the family angel--beautiful and well-behaved and much loved.  Patty does have one friend, the family's maid and cook, a black woman named Ruth, who loves Patty equally as much.  All that changes for Patty when a group of German POWs is brought to a prison camp in little Jenkinsville, Arkansas.  Patty meets and befriends one of the POWs, a man named Anton Reiker.  Patty comes to feel loved by Reiker, and helps him hide from the authorities when he escapes from camp.  Predictably, things don't turn out well for Reiker, or Patty, who is found out.

I'm not exactly sure why this book is one of the most banned of the 90's.  First of all, there's no sex in it.  The relationship between Patty and the Nazi is never inappropriate, unless you consider it inappropriate for a Jewish girl to help a Nazi (a Good Nazi, the book makes very clear).  I suppose some people might consider that a reason to ban a book, though I think that's the most ludicrous reason ever.  There is one use of the n-word in the book, but I considered that to be entirely appropriate to the time and place that Patty is living in.  I know books have been banned for the n-word (Huck Finn, for example), but this was one usage in a book full of prejudiced Southerners.  Couple this with the fact that Patty is probably the least prejudiced character in the book, and it seems like you've got a good thing going in this book.  I just don't think that one usage of the word warrants banning.  I can't imagine that's the reason.  And the only other thing I could possibly see would be the extreme beatings that Patty gets handed by her very mean father.  I mean, these are pretty awful beatings, and they're pretty painful to read.  But I also really can't imagine that's a reason to ban a book.  It seems like a really strange thing--parents not wanting their kids to read about kids being abused by their parents--unless the parents are abusers?  I don't know.  I really can't figure it out.  So yeah, I can see no feasible reason for this book to be banned.  No sex.  No bad language.  I'm baffled. 

I'd absolutely recommend this book to a young person, though I can't say how young I'd be comfortable giving the book to.  Depends on the kid, and their level of maturity.  It's also a fairly depressing book, but it paints an interesting picture of a German who isn't all bad.  It's also true that tons of teenagers go through periods of fascination with the Holocaust.  Don't believe me?  Ask a YA librarian.  In that case, this is definitely a good book to fit into that period of time, because it's just a different viewpoint than many of the things I've read.  Again, this book can be brutal at times, and it's definitely not an uplifting book, ultimately.  But there is also a sequel, so you might get away with giving both to a person at the same time.  And honestly, I'm very surprised that I didn't read this book during my teenage years, because it would have been right up my alley then.  Very glad to have read it.

American Craptoral (Time 100)

Maybe there are people on the planet who like Philip Roth's books, but I have regrettably joined the group of persons in the world who DON'T like them.  I finished listening to American Pastoral 12 minutes and 4 seconds after I started my commute this morning (uh, yes, it is very difficult to switch audiobooks on your iPod while driving 65 on the Eisenhower) and all I could think was "Really?"  Because I'd been eaten up wondering when in the last two-thirds of the book we'd get back to the narrator, who was a rather interesting fellow, and the answer is, we didn't.  Which is annoying.  Also, I'd been wondering how Dawn and the Swede end up divorced, and the answer is, "I don't know" because Roth decided to not enlighten us. 

I guess it's not horrible that I at least cared enough about the main character that I was wondering these things, but I also know that the only reason I cared at all was because I listened to the book.  Reading that thing would have been excruciating, and I'm almost 100% certain I would have quit.  My sister hates that I think audiobooks should count toward the Time 100, and I've been trying to explain to her that the only way I'll finish these books is to listen to them, but she still maintains it's like watching a movie-version of the book.  Which is patently ridiculous (no offense, Kate), because the only difference between the book and the audiobook is the someone is reading it to you.  (Also, they occasionally throw in some crappy music snippets, but really, those are stupid.)  Is a mom reading a book to a kid at all like the kid watching the movie version of the book?  I can't imagine anyone who would say yes.  Especially if you only listen to unabridged audiobooks.  Which I do. 

Anyway, the point is, audiobooks force me to slow down and understand every single word.  I'm an incredibly fast reader, and my temptation, when reading Time 100 books, is to skim.  (Which, lets be honest, has to cheating on this thing more than audiobooks are cheating.)  Lest you immediately adopt some sort of horrified attitude, let me tell you that I skim almost every single thing I read.  It doesn't hamper my understanding of books, and let my stellar grades from kindergarten through college and on to my certificate program be evidence of that.  If skimming was really a problem, wouldn't my essays be crap?  Wouldn't I test poorly?  The answer is no.  Once I start to skim these Time 100 books, it's all downhill.  Because I already am bored by the books, and so I start to skim faster.  It's the skimming faster that's the problem here.  Because then I do start to miss things, and it's like I'm in a race to see just how quickly I can finish the book.  And that's bad. 

The audiobooks are helping me enjoy this horribly boring Time 100 books more than I was, which is to say, I no longer hate them so much I want to shred them when I'm done with them.  Now I only sort of hate them, which is a huge leap, don't you think?  I believe that instead of discouraging me from using the audiobook format to complete this task, my sister should cheer and be happy, because I'm actually getting something out of these books when I listen to them every day.  Also, and this is just a fact, there's really not THAT many of them out there on audiobook.  So however many I read will only be a fraction of what is already out there.  This is really the first one I've listened to (unless you account my aborted attempt to listen to The Fellowship of the Ring, but I don't, since I never finished it and will clearly have to re-try.), and I've just bought three more with a lovely gift certificate someone gave me for audible. 

I think, and I know this pisses Kate off, but I think I'll have to keep doing the audiobooks as long as they still have some left.  I won't go buy audiobooks of things we already own, but I'm not going to buy any more of these books in actual book version.  It's not a good value to me; the audiobook clearly is. 

Though I still don't like American Pastoral, and I'm peeved by how many freaking loose ends Roth left.

Plugging away

I'm still plugging away at the Time 100 (now with added librarian recommendations as reported on Chicagoist), though slowly.  I figured out that I have 80 more books to go, which doesn't sound so bad, considering that means I've read 42.  It's only when you look at some of the doozies left on the list that it seems bad.  Really bad.  I just can't wrap my head around reading Infinite Jest.  I have to give my sister MAJOR credit for finishing it, because I can't even bring myself to read past page 20.  And don't even get me started on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I couldn't even finish the freaking AUDIOBOOK version of the Fellowship, that's how bored I was.  I stopped at disc 12.  Out of 16.  It's pathetically awful, because after that one, there are still two more.  And that's not the only trilogy on the list.  Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is three volumes.  That thing strikes fear into my heart.

Right now, I'm reading Invisible Man, which I can see is ever-so-important, in the scheme of books and so on; it's just that it's also fantastically boring.  Is it so much to ask that an important book also be marginally entertaining?  Apparently.  I'm slogging my way through it as if it's an assignment for school, except that of course there is no grade (maybe we could institute a grading policy; I've always been sort of a grade junkie and always read assignments when I knew there was a grade.), which sucks big time, because I already feel as if there's too many books I want to read and not enough time to read them in.  So reading things that feel like chores?  Sucks.

In fact, it feels like being on a diet.  A brain diet.  And being on two diets at once?  Awful.  If I can't eat what I want, I should be able to read what I want.  Oh well.  Back to the grind.

Time 100 Book #2 (Kate and M, don't read; spoilers herein)

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

When Gilead came out, I read a lot about her, and this book in the major news magazines.  But I don't read very much literary fiction, and while I was interested in it, I never picked it up.  I think I just never remembered to.  When I saw it was on the Time 100 list, I thought it might be a good book to buy, since I had been interested in it once upon a time.

It wasn't bad.  It certainly is one of the more interesting works of literary fiction that I've read recently.  I guess I just wish it was more.  More what?  I'm not sure.  It's a very slim book (which has positives and negatives), just 214 pages.  It was short enough, and easy enough that I could read it very quickly (a day and a half of reading time), but like I said, I wanted more.  I want into the the heads of the people I read about, something that just doesn't happen in this book.  I wanted to know where the husbands were.  I wanted some resolution to the relationships in the book.  I wanted to understand the motives of Sylvie. 

But I didn't get those things.  I think there is a reason I read lots of genre fiction, and that I gravitate to series, and I think it has everything to do with how much you learn about the individuals in a book.  Even romance series (which, by definition, have to feature a different male and female protagonist in every book, since every romance has a happy ending, ususally monogamous) can be satisfying, when characters from past books show up in a new book.  And now that I think about it, this whole curiousity to know it all probably influences my viewing tastes too.  I don't really love films; I think I like (good) TV better. 

Anyway, you can see where this whole project is going.  It's going to be very, very hard for me to get through all 100 of these books.  28 down, 72 to go.

One Down, Seventy-Three To Go

If you read my sister's blog, then you know that we're attempting to read all of the books on the Time Top 100 list.  I think it was her idea, but I'm game.  (Even if it means I have to re-attempt the monstrosity that is Infinite Jest.)  Anyway, I just finished my 27th book from the list, Catcher in the Rye.  It's pretty embarrassing that I escaped the American educational system without reading the book, but I think that my other 26 books read kinda make up for it.  I also had NO idea what CitR was about, before I read it.  Somehow, over the course of my education, I got the idea that it was about a boy who lives in sewers.  (That idea came from the same place that created the idea that my grandpa worked at a forest preserve; no, really.  When I was little, I thought my grandpa worked at the forest preserve.  I can even still point out the building he supposedly worked in; but I was wrong, because he worked for the union.)

Anyway, I did know that the main character's name was Holden Caulfield and I knew that he hated phonies.  I'd gleaned that much from a short lifetime of talking about books, reading books, and just imbibing pop culture like mad.  Frankly, that's about it.  Holden Caulfield hates phonies.  The plot of the book.  Done. 

It's not that I didn't like the book, because I didn't not like it.  It's just that I didn't particularly like the book.  I liked the title reference; the poem: "If a body meet a body...."  I thought it was one of the more emotionally resonant parts of the books.  I also enjoyed the parts of the book where Holden interacts with Phoebe, but other than that, I was mostly bored.  I probably could have written a paper about the book in high school (or college) but I wrote a lot of papers about a lot of mediocre books.  (Once, I had to write a paper comparing the book Emma to a book about Paul of Tarsus.  Coincidentally, one of the professors teaching the class (it was a tandem) wrote the book about Paul.  That was the hardest paper I ever had to write.) 

CitR is a classic, of sorts, and that's it.  I'm done with one.