What Have You Read 2010? What Do You Hope To Read 2011?

We did this at the end of the year last year, and so I suppose it shall become the very first regular feature of my very irregular blog.

The Challenge: What have you read this past year? What was your favorite? What was your least favorite? What book would you most recommend to others to read? Also list one or two reading goals for next year. What do you hope to read? Do you hope to read more? Do you hope to read more of a particular type of material?

Even if you haven't read any books- what blogs, news sources, message boards, or magazines have you read?


Either leave your list in the comments or on your own blog with a link in the comments!!

What I Have Read 2010

My Detachment Tracy Kidder
Dog Soldiers Robert Stone
A Soldier's Heart Elizabet Samet
Generation Kill Evan Wright
Lolita Nabokov
The Quiet American Graham Greene
Girl With The ( fucking) Dragon Tattoo Steig Larson
Count Of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
Mountains Beyond Mountains Tracy Kidder
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Dias
Gifts Of Imperfection Brene Brown
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey
Paco's Story Larry Heinemann

Favorite: Read some very life changing and really great books this year it's hard to narrow it down. Least Favorite: Duh...Girl With The Dragon Tattoo . What Everyone Should Read: Cuckoo's Nest, Gifts of Imperfection, Generation Kill.


I did complete the War Through the Generations Challenge! Woot! (But only since they counted movies ...lol!) Next year is the American Civil War, and there is not much from there which calls to me to read right now, so I might skip it.

Goals for 2011
Really to just try to read steadily. I got waaay bogged down in several books this year, and that always spells disaster. I even quit in the middle of a couple books, and that is very unlike me. I'd like to read some Dicken's this year--it's been a couple years since I've read him and I miss him. Would like to read Henry Miller, too--I feel like he is a big gap in my American reading.

My Detachment

Let me begin by saying that Tracy Kidder is hands-down one of my very favorite living writers. He has refined the tradition of Truman Capote's nonfiction novel, creating books which are truly remarkable in their storytelling. Kidder combines an engaging and engrossing narrative style with an uncanny ability to reveal the stories behind the story. My Detachment is no exception.

Unique among Vietnam War memoirs, My Detachment features no grunts humping long distances, no coming to terms with one's mortality in the midst of a firefight, no teetering on the brink while battling a drug habit in the midst of war. Rather the story centers around Kidder's year in Vietnam as a rear echelon lieutenant who ended up in Army Intelligence after graduating from Harvard. Fearful of being drafted into the infantry after matriculating and hoping to avoid the war, Kidder joins ROTC while still in school, yet lands in Vietnam as part of radio operations pinpointing the locations of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong radios.

The main similarity of My Detachment to other books about Vietnam is Kidder's struggle to balance the juxtaposition of events real and imagined. Because of his non-combat position, however, this struggle is in many ways more poignant for it's transparency than in other depictions. The entire memoir is interlaced with passages from Mr. Kidder's unpublished novel written upon returning home entitled Ivory Fields, which features a sort of alter ego, bad ass infantry lieutenant Larry Dempsey who dies standing up for what he believes is right even though he knows that defense will cost him dearly. My Detachment is also set among the back drop of a love affair with the archetypal girl-next-door-back-at-home named Mary Ann, but in this case the relationship is lackluster and decidedly one sided on the part of young Mr. Kidder. We read along as Kidder writes awkward letters back home of lied about bravado and hinted at tragedy which doesn't exist.

This exposed blatant untruth, in my opinion, makes this a great memoir of Vietnam, since the creation of the proverbial war story is in itself, according to Tim O'Brien a sort of untruth, or half truth, or at least a manipulation of the truth. We rarely get glimpses into the emotions which serve as primary mover for the crafting of war stories, yet young Mr. Kidder's piteousness leaves the reader feeling awkward and uncomfortable as we experience the feelings of inadequacy, of wanting to make sense of things we don't understand, of hiding our cowardice, of packaging our experiences in a way to make them more palatable to those in the world.

Serving as a balance to these poignancies, are the Catch-22esque retellings of the operations of the military hierarchy: stories of classified letters being blown away by helicopter, the subsequent results and new "triple wrap" protocols stemming from losing that letter, the colonel who shouts his own name while yelling at troops on the ground from the chopper above, the ridiculousness of Mr. Kidder's Radio Research job itself, which amounts to basically getting outdated information and passing it on to his higher ups.

Filling out My Detachment is an absorbing set of characters. The most compelling of whom is Pancho, both a thorn in the side of Kidder ,as well as someone who he admires on some level. It is Pancho's approval Kidder seems most to seek. It is the loss of Pancho's approval Kidder seems to feel most keenly when Kidder has his own moment of truth. Unlike his fictional Lt. Larry Dempsey, Mr. Kidder does not meet his trial with courage and character; rather, he crumbles and is left wondering if his men heard him crying over the stress of inspection preparation. Pancho goes onto work for the CIA and turns up to see Kidder years after the war. Summing up Kidder writes, "He had wanted to have an interesting life, I wanted to be interesting”

This book was reviewed- over two days while nursing, having toddlers climb on me, and competing for computer time with a couple tweeners- as Book 1 of

What Have You Read-2009? What Do You Hope To Read- 2010?

We did this at the end of the year last year, and so I suppose it shall become the very first regular feature of my very irregular blog.

The Challenge: What have you read this past year? What was your favorite? What was your least favorite? What book would you most recommend to others to read? Also list one or two reading goals for next year. What do you hope to read? Do you hope to read more? Do you hope to read more of a particular type of material?

Even if you haven't read any books- what blogs, news sources, message boards, or magazines have you read?


Either leave your list in the comments or on your own blog with a link in the comments!!

What I've Read 2009:
One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Mr. Ives' Christmas- Oscar Hijuelos
Bridge of San Luis Rey- Thorton Wilder
Things They Carried- Tim O'Brien
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace-
Mister Pip-Lloyd Jones
Bachelor Brother's Bed and Breakfast-Bill Richardson
Robber Bridegroom-Eudora Welty
Between, Georgia- Joshilyn Jackson
Going After Cacciato- Tim O'Brien
Roxanna Slade- Reynolds Price
Steve and Me- Terri Irwin
Fathers and Sons- Ivan Turgenev
The Good Earth- Pearl S Buck
My Mortal Enemy- Willa Cather
The Open Boat and Other Stories- Stephen Crane
Camino Real- Tennessee Williams
The Autobiography of Santa Claus- Jeff Guinn


Favorite: Roxanna Slade Least Favorite: Going After Cacciato. What Everyone Should Read: Mr Ives' Christmas.

Goals For 2010
Mostly I just want to complete the War Through The Generations reading challenge. I want to be realistic in what I am able to do while not sleeping and having a wee baby in the house. Though I think in the next few weeks here, the time has absolutely come for me to read Nabakov. It astounds me often, the big gaps in my reading! Time to ammend at least this one.

The Last 5 Books

What are your last five books to show up in your house, from the library, from a friend, from the store, or wherever? How did they get to you and why?

1. The Original Scroll of On The Road...which my husband gave me for Valentine's Day prefacing it with "Just to remind you that I really like being married to a crazy person."

2. Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead- for the War Through the Generations Challenge (which is killing me, I've been so, so bogged down in From Here To Eternity--I need to seriously head down, power through it and move on with my reading life)

3. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos- from my husband, because it was on the bargain table and I had just finished and loved, loved Mr. Ives' Christmas.

4. The Duty of Delight, The Diaries of Dorothy Day...from my husband, who somehow knew I really wanted to read through this despite me never having told him.

5. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones..which I bought after reading a synopsis on a site where you can get free books to review on you blog. This book sounded so fun, but was only available for free to Canadian reviewers...so I bought it.

Reading Plans

I have been searching and perusing lists looking for WWII novels. In the process, I have found other books about other wars I really want to read. I thought I'd just put them here so I could keep track of them; paper lists inevitably immaterializing in our little house. Please feel free to add suggestions!!!

WORLD WAR I
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
Parade's End- Ford Maddox Ford
Soldier's Pay- William Faulkner
Kangaroo- DH Lawrence
All Quiet on The Western Front- Erich Maria Remarque
A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway

VIETNAM
The Short Timers-Gustav Hasford
We Were Soldiers Once and Young- Moore and Halloway
The Quiet American-Graham Greene
The Sorrow of War- Bao Nihn
Going After Cacciato- Tim O'Brien

War Through the Generations: Reading Challenge

War Through The Generations is sponsoring a reading challenge running from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009, for readers to read five books relating to World War II. This project seems like such a great means of ensuring continuing dialogue about our history, as well as an impetus to continue reading great literature which so often comes out of the strife , struggles and horrors of war.

This seems like a very timely blog-challenge for me. I just checked out From Here To Eternity from the library, and have The Naked and the Dead on my short list for reading this year. That leaves only three more books to complete this challenge. Too bad I so recently read Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five ! I think in addition to Jones and Mailer, I will try to read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (which I don't think I have read, but I am not entirely sure...), having previously read a book about Doolittle's Raiders which I really loved. I don't know about the last two. I think Atonement would be suitable, and it is also on my short list, so maybe that for my fourth. And possibly Gravity's Rainbow for my fifth, as I have long meant to read some Pynchon.

Any suggestions? Any Russian novels about WWII? Anyone want to join in?

The Things They Carried ~ Tim O'Brien

I have been drawn to stories of the Vietnam War, ever since I was a girl just entering adolescence. When I was in 7th or 8th grade I won a writing contest sponsored by the Detroit Free Press with a story I wrote entitled "I Died and Lived To Tell About It", which if I remember correctly, revolved around a man who watched his entire platoon be killed, but somehow managed to survived. I know right around that time, I also wrote a chronological- based fiction work entitled "Watershed Tears" based on the main character living through the events of 1968. While the rest of the seventh and eighth grade girls were swooning over pop stars and actors, I was reading about the tunnels in Cu Chi and couldn't wait for the opening of Platoon. I remember thinking at the time if perhaps if re-incarnation was real, that I had died there- just one of those thoughts seeking out greater understanding of the connections I felt to that time and place and those people.

Eventually, my reading expanded and that fiction consumed more of my attention. There were all of the distractions of growing up, especially those I had created leaving home on and off starting when I was 15. My attentions turned towards boys, and music, and poetry; fading away from Southeast Asia.

The year before last, I read Dispatches by Michael Herr and If I Die In A Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien. Along with the World War II novel, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, those books began to push and nudge awake this piece of me, which had been such an integral part of my growing up. I had planned since then to read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, which I honestly thought I had read before, but seems to have come out when I was in high school which would make it unlikely that I had read it heretofore.

Words seem so inadequate to talk about The Things They Carried. Reading it is like a first love affair. Speaking about it out loud, seems to do disservice to it's sacredness. It is all consuming. It makes you greedy for more as you read. Even it's destruction, and some of the stories do destroy you, is alluring the way young passion makes us unable to turn away.

For me, the experience was especially full of emotion, for though I am firmly routed in my Catholic beliefs, the familiarity and sense of some other life overshadowing my own current life lingered just over my shoulder, just out of view. The whispers of ghosts, just beyond hearing. The connection which was so powerful when I was a girl, nearly knocked me over. The tears flowed freely.

The Things They Carried is beyond a book. It is a piece of all who ever ever fought war. All who ever lived with those who have returned from war. I cannot recommend it enough--even though it appears now on lots of required reading lists., which sometimes make people feel as though are boring or too difficult to read. If you are not unchanged after reading it, I would be beyond surprised.

For any who have read it- what are your thoughts? For those who have not, are there any times or places toward which you feel particularly drawn??

The Shannon Book Club- The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Shannon Book Club is so named, because I am pretty much the only one who ever reads this stuff. LOL!

This month the selection is The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder. It's a very short (150 pages) novel. The basic plot is as follows:

On July 20, 1714, "the finest bridge in all Peru" collapses and five people die. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, happens to witness the tragedy, and as a result, he asks the central question of the novel: "Why did this happen to those five?" He sets out to explore the lives of the five victims, and to understand why they died. Ironically, his quest will lead to his own death.


The last book, Mr. Ives' Christmas, turned out to be in the top 20 best books I've ever read. I still need to write up a review for it. Let me know if you are up for reading and discussing The Bridge of San Luis Rey!!!

Edited to add my Review:
I think my reading was a little skewed because of the book which I read just before this one---which was just so, so intense. However, I will still try to give my thoughts.

The writing itself, is quite lovely. Not in an ornate way like Fitzgerald or James, and not in a total tightness and precision like Hemingway or even Steinbeck...but the language is unassuming and unobtrusive, nearly formal, but not enough so to make it difficult to read.

The book winds through the lives of the five people who were killed when the Bridge of San Luis Rey collapsed. We are reading with the aim of trying to piece together why these five were killed at that specific time. Though the look into each of their lives is brief, their lives all intertwine loosely with one another, and the reader gains a satisfying enough glimpse to feel as though the reader truly knows at least the three adults who died. We get fewer insights into the lives of the two children involved- so much less, in fact, that one doesn't quite know until the last pages of the book that the two children are the other two who comprise the five who died. That lack of information, in my opinion, is the one main shortcoming of the book.

In the case of the adults, each one of them was seen as dying to avoid either maligning a new start or conviction, or to avoid great harm, or to preserve their last good action. We are given a sense of the unseen lives on either side of the tragedy in question, lives which are made up of much vice and many shortcomings. However, before their death, fir each of the adults their is a small act of redemption. In the lives of the children, we are left to wonder if they were possibly preserved from a life of dissipation or of faltering into sins which hadn't yet overtaken them.

I found the framing of the story involving Brother Junipero's book rather awkward and somewhat artificial--almost like Wilder didn't quite know how to begin and end. However, we do gain some insight into the the disposition of Mr. Wilder, I believe, which is one of hope.

If you are looking for a very solid, worthwhile read, but do not have much time to commit to reading I heartily recommend this book. It is a firm reminder that the events of our lives and the lives of those around us are interconnected. It is a firm reminder that though we on the outside might never know, that there are unseen depths in the lives of those around us. It is a firm reminder that in the face of inexplicable tragedy to maintain hope that there is purpose.

What Have You Read-2008? What Do You Hope To Read- 2009?

I always find it satisfying to go back at the end of the year and recap what I've read over the previous year. It feels like an account of , at least in part, how I've spent my time.

The Challenge: What have you read this past year? What was your favorite? What was your least favorite? What book would you most recommend to others to read? Also list one or two reading goals for next year. What do you hope to read? Do you hope to read more? Do you hope to read more of a particular type of material?

Even if you haven't read any books- what blogs, news sources, message boards, or magazines have you read?


Either leave your list in the comments or on your own blog with a link in the comments!!


What I've Read 2008

1. Bridge of Sighs - Richard Russo
2. The Beautiful and The Damned- F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. E=MC2: A Biography of The World's Most Famous Equation- David Bodanis
4. Rebecca- Daphne DuMaurier
5. Wise Blood- Flannery O'Connor
6. Canticle for Liebowitz- Walter A. Miller
7. Pudd'nhead Wilson- Mark Twain
8. Gang Leader For a Day- Sudhir Vankatesh
9. There Are No Children Here- Alex Koltowitz
10. The Maltese Falcon- Dashiell Hammett
11. Papillon- Henri Charriere
12. The Heart of The Matter- Graham Greene
13. Love In The Time of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
14. The End - Salvatore Scibona
15. Straight Man- Richard Russo
16. The Idiot- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
17. Whatever It Takes- Paul Tough
18. The British Museum is Falling Down- David Lodge
19. Sentimental Education- Gustav Falubert
20. Native Son- Richard Wright
21. A Question of Upbringing (A Dance To The Music of Time part. 1)- Anthony Powell
    

Currently reading:

1. One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (lol! It was lost for a few weeks, and so I started a new book and haven't gone back to finish yet)
2. Our Mutual Friend- Charles Dickens
3. Mr. Ives' Christmas- Oscar Hijuelos

Favorite: Bridge of Sighs. Least Favorite: Wise Blood. What Everyone Should Read: There Are No Children Here.

Goals For 2009

1. A Remembrance of Things Past- Marcel Proust (I've waited until I was getting more sleep, so that I could really read this--so I am hoping this year sleep, and hence Proust, will come)
2. An American Tragedy- Theodore Dreiser

Wanna Read It With Me?

Mr. Ives' Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos. Available at your local Barnes and Noble, your local library, or if you must-used through Amazon for like a penny. Here's a blurb for it:

"The spirit of Charles Dickens seems to hover over the pages of Oscar Hijuelos' fourth novel. A Christmas Carol comes to mind frequently, for most of the transformations in Edward Ives' life occur during the holiday season. As a very young child of unknown parentage and uncertain ethnicity he is admitted to a Catholic orphanage. His years there permanently fuse in his imagination his love of the season with a belief in the redemptive power of faith. He is adopted by a sweet-tempered widower at Christmas. He meets his wife Anne at Christmas. And, in the tragic event at the heart of the novel, he loses his 17-year-old son to an act of random violence during the holiday. Much of the novel's action is taken up with Ives' long struggle to retain his faith in the face of loss, and to reaffirm it by reaching out to his son's imprisoned murderer.

As he demonstrated in his exuberant earlier novels (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien), Hijuelos shares with Dickens a deep conviction that often serves to preserve or redeem us. He's also fascinated with the way in which place shapes our lives, recording here an exact, gritty portrait of Mr. Ives' New York City neighborhood from the 1920s to the present.

What I Am Reading

I am 2/3 of the way through Native Son by Richard Wright. I've had such conflicting reading behaviour as I've been reading, which I think turns out to be reflective of the vortex of emotions in this book. I have wanted to just quit reading-overcome by the stark nature of the brutality. I have wanted to greedily skip ahead to find out what will happen. I have put off reading for hours. I have had periods where I have shut everything else out while I read voraciously.

Native Son, published in 1940, is the story of Bigger Thomas, a black man in Chicago in the 1930's. The story tells of his acts of murder, his flight from justice, and his trial. There is also some discussion of Communism thrown in there for good measure-as Richard Wright was at one point affiliated with the communist party. Mr. Wright's attempt in writing Native Son is to write a novel about race "which is so hard and deep" that readers would have to face the truth "without the consolation of tears." Feeling that a sense of pity, can lead one to believe that one has led to an understanding of the characters--and this sense of consoling identification can yield to a person feeling as though they have actually accomplished a good, done a right to correct a wrong-Mr. Wright rips away any sentimentality an interloper might feel towards Bigger Thomas.

Recently on a forum, I was told that people like me are the reason that racism lingers on. Not because I am a racist, but rather because I am of the opinion that centuries of systematic and intentional oppression of people of color in America cannot be undone in a few mere decades. It was said that if white people like me would just let it go--that we'd be able to move forward. (This was written by other white people) I am of the opinion that race relations are still tenuous, and that African Americans still do not have truly equal opportunities, because of the disproportionate numbers of black people living in poverty. Though the recent election has demonstrated that we have definitely made some enormous strides in the right direction, it seems to me that we still have a long way to go to undo treating an essential component of our society as sub-human. Acknowledging what is, doesn't seem to me inconsistent with healing and progress. Rather it seems like an essential step, if we will ever have true equality--both in law and opportunity.

I mention this only by way of prefacing a few quotes from Native Son, perhaps to explain why they resonated with me:

He shut their voices out of his mind. He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, they shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair.

And one other:

There were rare moments when a feeling and longing for solidarity with other black people would take hold of him. He would dream of making a stand against that white force, but that dream would fade when he looked at the other black people near him. Even though black like them, he felt there was too much difference between him and them to allow for a common binding and a common life. Only when threatened with death could that happen; only in fear and shame, with their backs against the wall could that happen. But never could they sink their differences in hope.

So far while reading I can't help but feel like one of the Daltons. Someone who is well meaning and trying to do right --but yet is still so far outside anything approaching understanding or empathy that it is just another sense of enslavement.