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.

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 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.

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.