2010 Reading Report: The Highlights

I knew I wasn't reading as much as usual in 2010. Since 2006, when I began keeping my little Excel spreadsheet, I've averaged 300 books a year (give or take 10-20). With 10 days left in the year, I've "only" read 195 in 2010.

Why? A few reasons, I think. For the first time in my life, I've had stretches of days when I just didn't feel like reading. I caught up on some TV shows I missed when they first aired, or re-watched some series David hadn't seen before (The Wire, Buffy/Angel). I did a lot of magazine reading. I'm a big fan of longform.org and GiveMeSomethingToRead, which combined with InstaPaper has kept my iPad pretty well-stocked with long essays, a form I love. I probably read at least a few book-equivalents worth of essays and articles.

I also just hit a dry spell. I've read so much on topics I'm interested in (education, parenting, homeschooling, politics, economics, adoption, religion) that the law of diminishing returns has hit me hard. My log for this year includes 67 books I started and didn't finish, and the second-most common comment on them is, "nothing new here." (The most common? Variations on "bad writing." A sampler: Crap writing; crap writing; hated writing style; desperately needed competent editor; writing so very bad; ow ow two pages in wanted to gouge out my eyes; couldn't stand author's "random" use of "quotations"; overwritten; tedious, annoying.) There are a lot of books I did finish on which I also commented, "nothing new here for me." Heh, I see that on a book about mountain climbing I wrote, "think I've sucked the juice out of the stranded-on-a-mountain genre."

Feeling like I've sucked the juice out of a lot of genres. And haven't yet happened upon the new thing to get interested in.

So, what did I read and like?

Well, I gave a "4"--my highest rating--to 29 books. 19 of them were re-reads: the Aubrey-Maturin novels; the Clare Fergusson/ Russ Van Alstyne mysteries by Julie Spencer-Fleming, which I re-read in anticipation of the newest book in the series coming out in October, though its publication has been pushed back to April; and The Preaching Life, by Barbara Taylor Brown.

Of those, I would call the Aubrey-Maturin novels great books. The others? More like "great if you like that kind of thing." Which I do.

The other books I rated highly included The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which I've written about before, and Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which defied my expectations: I thought it was going to be a "nothing new here" adoption book, but it was excellent and thought-provoking. I wrote about it here and here.

I also gave a "4" to Connie Willis's two-volume novel, Blackout and All Clear. These two books are essentially a single 1100-page novel in Willis's time travelers universe, the same one that sent historians to the Black Plague in Doomsday Book and to Victorian England in To Say Nothing of the Dog. (That latter title is inspired by Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 book about boating on the Thames, Three Men in a Boat...To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is so very much worth a read on its own merits.)

Anyway: in Blackout and All Clear, historians from 2060 are stuck in London during the Blitz. The books could be tedious at that length--and some people certainly find them to be. This Amazon reviewer is not wrong:

Essentially, this book is a classic example of what happens when you have a good setting but a poor plot. The setting is fantastic - a bunch of time travelers lost in WWII with bombs falling all around them, but the plot is absolute rubbish. Take the following two lines, copy and paste them until you run out of space in one book, and then continue through the end of a second book: 

"Gasp! We might have changed the space-time continuum!" 

"Oops, oh, no. Everything is fine."  

Intersperse with too many repeated cliffhangers involving chapter ends with historians nearly dying (Will They SURVIVE?) and some slapstick involving nobody being able to get ahold of each other, ever, and you've basically got Blackout and All Clear. 

The first time this device is used, it's interesting and tense. The 47th time the historians wonder if they altered events (and they didn't) you just sort of roll your eyes and hope for more details about parachute bombs or V1 wrangling. 

And yet I found these books compulsively readable--and so did David; there were a couple of days when we were both reading the same copy of All Clear, and we devoted our lives to distracting each other so we could steal it back. I will probably read them again someday. And I would highly recommend them to anyone who isn't intimidated by 1100 pages in two volumes and who "likes that sort of thing." Also, I need all of you to read it so you can be in the joke when David and I mention that we think Yehva is like Alf and Binnie Hodbin rolled into one.

I think those of us who love genre literature learn to embrace its flaws. Yes, we all know it's ridiculous that Data can not use contractions, and agree that the whole "Western in Space" thing was the worst idea Joss Whedon ever had. Yes, I can see why people find the digressions in Cryptonomicon to be a self-indulgent bore (really? two whole pages on how to eat Captain Crunch?). Yet we love these things anyway; sometimes, their flaws are part of what we love about them.

Blackout and All Clear are like that. Yes, Connie Willis went a little nuts, and maybe a strong editor could have helped her get this down to one hefty volume. Maybe we could have used two or three fewer trips around the "I'll take the train to where I think Mike is, but oh no, I just missed him, he's on his way to the theater to find Eileen, who was there until two minutes ago when she went to see if the relief ladies had a coat in her size" merry-go-round. But, as with Doomsday Book, I enjoyed the detailed immersion in the period, and was carried along very comfortably by the charms of the characters Willis populated the books with. If you like that sort of thing, you will really like these books.

I gave a "4" to Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl, which is, I suppose, obligatory for a book that won the National Book Award. I have written about Zarr before, here and here. I think I liked her better as a writer talking about writing than I did as simply a writer, but some of the flaws I see in her books come directly from her very well-thought-out and articulated ideas about what young adult novels should be doing, and how they should be treating their audience.

I'll stop there because this is long. But I might do a second post on books I flagged as "recommendable," books that didn't get my highest rating but that I thought might be worth mentioning to friends when they're looking for something to read.