2009 Book Report

David wrote a script that checks my library account every day, and if there are new items, downloads the list to my computer. I copy it into an Excel spreadsheet, and then as I finish with books, I rate them from 0 to 4. 0 means I didn't read it; 1 that I didn't finish it; 2 that it was weak; 3 that it was "good enough"; and 4 that something really stood out about it for me.

In 2009 I read 213 books. Of that 213 I gave a a 4 to 33. Here are some of the ones I think might be most interesting to others:

Fiction

Four of the six high-rated books this year were re-reads of the first four novels in the Aubrey/Maturin series: Post Captain, HMS Surprise, Mauritius Command, and Desolation Island. I can't remember whether this is the third or fourth time I've read the series since I first discovered it six years ago; so very good, full of moments so good that even as I read them, I am already looking forward to encountering them again next time. I love the development of the friendship between Jack and Stephen, the way something happens on one page that turns out to be the setup for a joke ten pages later, the depth of characterizations. I treat the technical shipboard stuff as if it were Geordi telling Capt. Picard that he's going to solve their problems by recalibrating the plasma matrix and modulating the shield harmonics; so much placeholder technobabble. But I understand that for people who actually care about the spritsail, the foretop, the ship's knees, the poop deck, and the cable tiers, O'Brien's expert grasp of the technicalities is a real joy.

O'Brien is the only writer besides Jane Austen that I cannot dip into. If I read two pages of Pride and Prejudice, I will not stop until I've been through all six novels; likewise, I will probalby not stop reading O'Brien until I've set down Blue at the Mizzen--the 20th novel--with a bittersweet sigh. So much left unfinished by O'Brien's death partway through the 21st novel! If only our favorite writers could live forever.

I also gave a 4 to The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos. I only started reading mysteries a few years ago, and this is one of the best I've read. Pelecanos also wrote for the TV series The Wire, and you will recognize style and theme--and even the occasional plot element, such as the recovering junkie living in his sister's basement and not allowed upstairs. Good stuff.

One of only a couple of books that kept me up reading past bedtime, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is a young adult novel that is full of respect for its young readers, and for its characters. It is the story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who decides to transfer to a white school off the reservation in search of a better education. It's a small-ish book, a quick read, and yet so much is laid bare for us, with sympathy and humor. With terrific cartoon illustrations by Ellen Fornoy.

Memoir

I have always been a fan of the memoir, so the recent memoir trend has been very satisfying to me. Yet only one memoir made my hit list this year:Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Derfner (click on the link and look at that picture: gay, gay, gay!). Hilarious and poignant.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

I don't actually read a lot of fantasy, but I really liked Brandon Sanderson'sMistborn Trilogy, although in some places it was too gruesomely violent for me. David enjoyed it, too.

And another re-read: Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, about which I can not say enough good. I find Willis a very uneven writer: Passage was barely readble, Promised Land is a favorite guilty-pleasure bad book for me, but Doomsday Book is a masterpiece. I would like to put together a reading group on sci-fi books that deal well with faith; Doomsday Book and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow would be the first two: a time-traveling historian encounters the Black Plague; and Jesuits make first contact on an alien planet.

Picture Books

I see that I have a few picture books in this category; I don't usually rate picture books because that would be silly--I don't think you can really count the approximately 700 picture books I read to the kids as "books I've read." But I do flag any we especially like. This year I flagged Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear by Emily Gravett; Duck! Rabbit!, an optical-illusion book that had the kids over the moon with glee; Brown Angels, a collection of found photographs of black children from around the turn of the 20th century;The Brain by Seymour Simon; and The Top of the World: Climbing Mt. Everest, which is one of the best non-fiction books for kids I've ever read.

Religious

I read 25 books on religion this year, and gave my highest score to four. Two are actually pamphlets: Arthur Larrabee's Experiencing God: Three Spiritual Practices, which I remember just electrified me when I heard him deliver it as a plenary speech at the FGC Gathering in (I think) 1998; and Reflections on Quaker Worship by Esther Greenleaf-Murer, a collection of articles she wrote for her yearly meeting newsletter on the experience of worship. A note in the "comments" field in my spreadsheet says I thought it was worth further study.

Another Quaker book I gave a 4 is Liz Oppenheimer's Writing Cheerfully on the Web: A Quaker Blog Reader. Liz (I can call her by her first name because she's actually a friend of mine) has been involoved in Quaker on-line community for awhile, and earlier this year she followed a leading to collect writings from Quaker blogs into a print anthology, which was released last summer. Like all anthologies, it's uneven, but overall it's very strong. I appreciated the inclusion of Quakers from more than just my own liberal unprogrammed tradition, and the expression of various viewpoints. There is a lot here to chew and savor--I expect to re-read my much-flagged copy this year, and I think it would be a great text for an adult religious ed group. I was happy to hear recently that it is one of the year's 10 best sellers at Quakerbooks because it is a book that I think can be edifying for Friends as individuals and as a body.

Finally, I gave a 4 to Sara Maitland's A Big-Enough God: A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theology and commented that I thought it was "worth revisiting" and yet, even after peeking at a couple of reviews, I remember almost nothing about it. One of the hazards of reading so much, I suppose.

Non-fiction

If I had to limit myself to just one genre, it would be non-fiction. I love learning about things, and although I am now abstinent from higher education (for over 8 years now, after spending 12 of my first 18 years after high school as a full-time student at one institution or another), I fill that need with non-fiction. Usually fiction is only about 25% of what I read. This year my non-fiction reading was blessed with a number of humdingers:

Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. About the people who were so inspired by Whitman they put him at the center of their lives, including John Addington Symonds, who wrote to Whitman for 20 years trying, desperately, to get Whitman to admit that his poetry was about same-sex love (WW never did). A great read; good insight into Whitman and into the culture of the late 18th Century.

Class by Paul Fussell. Re-read after being inspied by this Atlantic article. I read it probably 25 years ago when it first came out, and remembered it--which is saying a lot, since, when you consider that I have been reading close to a book a day for most of the last 38 years or so, it takes a lot for something to stick with me. Back then, I read it as a spoof; this year, after I've spent a couple of years studying social class, it was more resonant.

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover. Stunt journalism at its finest: unable to get access as a journalist, Conover went through training and became a corrections officer at Sing Sing. A great example of a book that is sympathetic to its subjects, and not what you expect when you go in.

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington. Snake handlers are the butt of many a religious joke; Covington goes so deeply among them that he is led to hadles some snakes himself. The result is a very sympathetic, enlightening portrait.

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing and Speeces of Martin Luther King, Jr. 'Nuff said.

Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption by Barbara Katz Rothman. The topic of this blog so far, mostly. I've been very unwell for about two months, but I do mean to get back to it in 2010. One of the few books I thought was worth buying after I'd read it (yeah, I know it's backwards, but that's how I do things.)

How to Keep Kosher: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Jewish Dietary Laws by Lise Stern. if there is anything more interesting than the vexed question of whether Israeli marshmallows are really kosher, I don't know what it is!

Columbine by Dave Cullen. One of the things I love about non-fiction is finding out how wrong or skewed what you thought you knew was. That can be especially true of anything that has been a media circus. I was inspried to read this after Susan Klebold broke 10 years of media silence with her essay in Oprah's magazine. The New York Times review the link goes to gets it right: "What intrigues the author are perceptions and misperceptions: how difficult a shooting spree is to untangle; how readily mass tragedies lend themselves to misinformation and mythologizing; how psychopaths can excel at the big con."

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriageby Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. I can't do two sentences on this book; would have to be a whole essay at least. Here is someone else's short essay on it.

And, finally, The Book of the Year: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. A fascinating and readble book about, of all things, cholera: specifically, the last big cholera outbreak in London, in 1854. Two million people crowded together with terrible sanitation; a model of the spread of disease that doesn't take into account poop in the water supply; and two men who start to have a new idea. It's a story about sewage, certainly, and politics. It's also a story about developing notions of how data can be collected and used. Sewage! Contaminated wells! Rice-water stools! Miasma! Maps! This page-turner has it all.