Books 2005

I kept a reading journal in 2004, and it proved to be an interesting exercise. I'm going to do it again this year, but I'm not going to set a goal for the number of books to read. It put too much pressure on me. I felt like I was reading on a deadline instead of reading for fun. I also felt guilty every time I put down a book to read a magazine - like I wasn't doing my homework. I had many flashbacks to graduate school and being behind on my weekly reading assignments. I don't need to go down that road again. While I don't have as extensive a list of books that I want to read as I did last January, I do have several waiting on my bedside table for me. So here goes - my 2005 book list.

27. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt
I pulled it out after reading City of Falling Angels to see if it was as funny as I remembered it being. It's not, but it's still very good. I suppose my recollections are tempered by the terrible movie. I can still see John Cusak smirking his way through it. I love John Cusak, but I hated him in the movie.

26. City of Falling Angels, John Berendt
Oh how I long to go to Venice. It's a lovely little book about Venice, centered on the burning of the Fenice Opera House. But mostly it's a love letter to Venice and it's residents. I want to go there desperately, but only if I can live there for a while and be something more than a tourist hitting the high points of the city.

25. A Crack in the Edge of the World, Simon Winchester
It's mostly about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but first you have to get through an interminable lesson on geography. It needed more about the disaster, less about plate tectonics.

24. The Island at the Center of the World, Russell Shorto
This one took me forever. I kept getting distracted and reading other things. I had to make myself finish it before I could buy another book. It's the history of the Dutch founding of Manhattan, and it's very interesting, but at times very dry. And it needed more maps.

23. On Rue Tatin
I can't find the book, so I can't look up the author and I'm too lazy to go to Amazon to check. It was a nice, light read. But she was a bit too cheerful for me - everything was so nice, and so interesting, and so fun - dealing with contractors, paying "bribes" to local officials, difficult neighbors. She thought everthing about living in a little town in France was just too too much. I wanted to barf at times. I also kept waiting for something bad to happen to her.

22. Plan B, Anne Lamott
I had read most of the pieces on Salon.com, but it was still nice to read them again. This book was a little too heavy on the Jesus stuff for me at times. I prefer when she sticks to her son and politics.

21. Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell
I love, love, love her writing style, and I loved much of this book. However, some parts - the ones that dealt with the 2000 election - were just depressing. I didn't need to re-live that particular low point in our country's history.

20. 1776, David McCullough
I think it's a testiment to McCullough's writing that he can make the story of the Revolutionary War that gripping. There were times while reading the book that I wondered how Washington was going to manage to pull it all off. I had to keep reminding myself that we did win the war, eventually. My only complaint is that it needed more maps. I want to see the locations of the battles in relation to each other.

19. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling
Not my favorite of the bunch. That title is still held by Prisoner of Azkhaban, but it was still excellent. And oh did I cry at the end. I can't even imagine how she's going to finish off the series in just one book. There is so much ground she has to cover before she can call it quits.

18. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell
This is the first time I've read Vowell, other than some columns on Salon.com, and I giggled through the whole thing. She has an obsession with assassinated presidents, specifically Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. The book is about her pilgrimages to sites related to the presidents and their assassins. It sounds morbid, but in her hands, it absolutely isn't. I'd love to travel with her. I share her love of stopping to read plaques on buildings. But no one I travel with likes to do that. So I have to pass them by or get left in the dust.

17. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
I always read this as a companion to Jane Eyre. It's the story of the madwoman in the attic, told both by Rochester and Antionette Bertha Mason, his first wife. The details of the story don't quite mesh with Bronte's version, but it's still an interesting conceit - telling the backstory of Jane's doppelganger.

I wrote a paper on the book in graduate school, arguing that even though Rhys was white, she wrote much like a black author. For her, as with black women authors, a sense of place, name and being is very important. Rhys was raised in the West Indies, which shaped much of her sensibilities, and it shows in the book.

16. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
I haven't read this book since college, and I read a review written by a man who had never read the book before, and that inspired me to read it again. I read the book over and over again when I was in high school. It never ceased to amaze and thrill me. Then I wrote papers on it in college, discussing it as a feminist novel. I remember one classmate saying it couldn't possibly be a feminist novel because Jane gives in and marries Rochester in the end. I got pretty riled up at the thought that one couldn't be married and a feminist.

I had different feelings about it now. It's still an amazing piece of literature. And the characters are fascinating. But there are elements that bother me. For instance, why do they have so many internal dialogues, dithering over every little detail of their lives. They just think and talk too much. Also, I can't get past the plot point of Jane just happening to collapse on the doorstep of people who turn out to be her cousins. It's all just too convenient for my taste.

But I can't wait for Ella and Lily to read it in school so I can discuss it with them. It's still one of my favorite books.

15. Marathon Man, Dean Karnazes
I gave the book to my dad for his birthday, and he passed it along to me when he was finished. It's a very quick read. When I mentioned to a friend that I was reading the book, he said that he had heard the author was quite full of himself. I laughed, because it is the perfect description of the author's tone. While he has done some amazing runs, he is very proud of his accomplishments. Still, that criticism aside, I can't believe someone would run for 100 miles straight through some of the worst conditions ever. I can't believe someone could do those ultra-endurance races and still pull out sub-7:00 minute miles.

14. Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt
I took a course in college that dealt solely with Shakespeare's plays, but I haven't read a thing of his since then. The book was interesting and frustrating all at the same time. Since so little is known about Shakespeare's life, Greenblatt does a lot of speculating - "If Shakespeare was home when the traveling speaker came to town, he probably would have gone to hear him" - that sort of thing. I hate conjecture. If you don't know something, don't make up stuff just to fill space.

Still, the information about Elizabethan England, particularly London, was fascinating. And the last part of the book was an analysis of the plays and how they may have related to Shakespeare's life at the time. I also hadn't realized how many of his plays were from other sources - Hamlet was a well-known story and had been turned into plays many other times. MacBeth was drawn from real Scottish history. The book made me want to go back and read some more of his plays, especially the Henrys.

13. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
I haven't read this since college, and I remember not liking it much then. As part of one of my freelance projects, I had to create a Powerpoint presentation that dealt with the book and Fitzgerald, so I thought I'd read it again to see if I still didn't like. I didn't. I understand completely why it's considered one of the greatest American novels and how it defined an age in American literature and society, but I still don't like it. It's about spoiled, self-centered people who are careless with people around them - just the point that Nick Caraway makes at one point in the book. Why would I want to spend time reading about them.

And I've never quite understood the symbolism of the billboard with eyeglasses on the side of the road - are they supposed to represent the eyes of God? of society? Someone enlighten me, please.

12. No Touch Monkey! And other travel lessons learned too late, Ayun Halliday
I swiped this book from my neighbor Lisa because I liked the title. I love reading other people's travel stories, mostly because I know I'll never travel much, at least not until my kids are grown. But I could never travel the way Halliday does - she goes with no real itinerary and a shoestring budget. And often her traveling companions are less than pleasant. It's amazing that one of her boyfriends eventually married her after traveling with her.

She has the worst luck traveling - on one trip she dislocated her knee in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia with no Western doctors in sight. After she spent days stuck in bed, Halliday allowed an ancient Muslim healer to wrench her knee back into place. On another trip, in Amsterdam, she learned that you shouldn't take pictures in the red-light district lest you want to get beaten up by a working girl. And finally, don't accompany your husband to Glasgow with an infant so he can attend an acting camp for a month while you are left to wander the city with the baby - let's just leave it at that.

11. Louis XIV, Louis Cronin
I have no idea if this is a good account of Louis XIV's life or not, whether it's considered scholarly, but I enjoyed it. Louis was an amazing king, and he did a tremendous amount of good for arts, architecture and education in France, at least to hear Cronin tell it. It's such a contrast from the life of Louis XVI, who was pretty much worthless as a king. I'm trying to think of who I want to read about next.

10. A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
I read this book repeatedly in high school and college. It was one of my absolute favorites. But I haven't read it in probably 10 years, so I was interested to see if my reaction would be the same this time around. When I was younger, I saw the book as a great romance - true love winning out over all. But now I'm more sceptical. I felt claustrophobic, like I do when I read Age of Innocence.

I also had a hard time understanding the great romance between Lucy and George - the speak to each other very few times, kiss twice and end up convinced they're in love. I just didn't buy it.

I ended up digging out the movie and watching it when I finished reading the book. I realized how much the movie played up the romance and down played the societal constraints. Unlike in the book, Lucy seems to take and interest in George from the very beginning. I was a bit disappointed in the differences. Daniel Day-Lewis, however, was as brilliant as I remembered him.

9. Queen Victoria, Christopher Hibbert
I knew very little about Queen Victoria, so I picked up the book on a whim at Half Price Books. I have no idea if this one is considered to be a good biography. Even if it isn't scholarly, it was very interesting. Queen Victoria was an interesting woman. I can't even imagine living the life she did. From the time she was a small child, she was raised in the lap of luxury, bred to a life of privilege, and it continued throughout her life. When she traveled, it was with an entourage of 60 people, at least.

She ended up having nine children, but thought being pregnant and having children was disgusting. She told her oldest daughter not to have any. She also told her children, on a regular basis, that none of them could ever hope to be as great a person as their father was. After Prince Albert died, it seems like Queen Victoria became a professional mourner. She wore black for the rest of her life and kept the room where Albert died as a shrine to him.

It was hard, while reading, to keep track of all her children and their children. I had to refer to the genealogy chart at the beginning of the book more than once, which drove me nuts. One plus for the book, though, was that it had lots of pictures, which I always love. I want to be able to see what the people I'm reading about look like.

8. Stormy Weather, Carl Hiasson
Another typical Hiasson book. I read them because they're fun and funny and his characters, at least the well-written ones, are interesting. This book, though, had too many characters and too many sub-plots. I actually had trouble keeping track of everyone and everything that was going on, and that's rare for me. I still think Skinny Dip is my favorite of his books.

7. Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott
I didn't realize when I went to the store to buy it that it was a book on faith, and I almost didn't get it for that reason. I'm not big on reading about other people's religious conversions and beliefs. But I got it anyway. Lamott has addressed her faith in many of her Salon columns, and I've always liked the way she looks at things.

I read the book while Ella was in surgery, and it was a comfort to me. Lamott always manages to find comfort or solace or beauty in her life, in the simplest of things, even when the world is falling apart around her. She has had friends and parents die, she's survived drug and alcohol addiction, and she's been a single parent to a boy who seems to be turning out to be pretty remarkable.

It's reassuring to read her because she has the bad days that I have - the days where she just can't take it anymore, and yet she always manages to pull herself together and pull through, either through her faith or with the help of her friends. I read her stories and wish I could find the strength and faith that she has that would allow me to do the same.

I have good friends, but I'm not good at calling on them in times of need, mostly because I don't want to be a burden. And religion doesn't really work for me. I'm not ready to place my life in God's hands and trust that he/she has a plan for me. I don't know if I'll ever reach that point.

But still, reading Lamott provides comfort for me. I don't know if I would have held myself together as well this week with all the stress and worry of Ella's surgery without her words. I'd love the chance to meet and talk to her.

I'm writing this while I have a migraine and after I've taken a pain pill. I'm not sure I'm making sense at this point. I'll have to re-read this tomorrow.

6. Can You Keep a Secret?, Sophie Kinsela
This is by the author of the Shopaholic series, and I was a bit worried I'd not like it. Kinsela is turning out books pretty quickly these days, which doesn't bode well for the quality. But it was on sale at Target so I picked it up. I loved the book; I read it in one sitting, staying up way too late one night to finish it. The lead character, Emma Corrigan, is fabulous, and her roommates are hysterical. Emma is like the anti-Becky Bloomwood from the Shopaholic books. She even shops at thrift stores. She doesn't get into impossibly, unlikely scrapes only to bail herself in some wild fashion in the end. I hope Kinsela writes another one about Emma.

I loaned the book to my neighbor, Lisa, who has also read all the Shopaholic books, and she loved it, too. My friend Carol liked it better, too. I'm giving it to my sister next.

5. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clark
It was on all of the 2004 Best Of lists, so when I saw it on sale, I picked it up. I had a hard time getting started with it. The first hundred pages or so were slow going, but then it got really interesting. It was sort of a Vanity Fair meets adult Harry Potter story. I don't think I could give a good plot summary except to say that it involves two magicians and the return of magic to England after centuries of disuse. I found myself completely caught up in the book, but it still took weeks for me to read it. As good as the middle of the book was, I found the ending rather weak. It was like the author didn't know quite what to do next, so she just ended things with a whimper.

4. Madeleine's World, Brian Hall
My neighbor Lisa gave the book to me for Christmas. She works for the paper and got it at their annual book sale. It's a biography of the author's daughter during her first three years. Hall presents a lot of interesting developmental facts in his account of his daughter's life, but I couldn't help but think "get a life" while reading it. He watches and analyzes every little thing his daughter does. He's like a pop-psychologist who knows just enough about a dozen different theories to be dangerous. No one should ever use the words "sublimation" and "synecdoche" while writing about one's own child. Leave that to the real psychologists.

Still, I had fun reading about his little girl, mostly because Lily is the same age as his daughter for part of the book. I could compare what Lily is doing now, or has done at different stages, with his daughter. I could also read about how Hall and his wife are raising their children and sniff, "I would NEVER do that." I'll admit I felt very smug and superior at times. But I also felt pretty inadequate, too. I started worrying that Brandon and I don't pay enough attention to the girls, that we don't read to them enough, that we let them watch too much PBS, that they were born in a hospital instead of at home. Then I get a grip and keep on going.

3. Shopaholic and Sister, Sophie Kinsela
I was going to wait until it came out in paperback before reading it, but my neighbor got it for Christmas and passed it along when she was finished. As with the other books in the series, I spent the first half of the book thinking that Becky is just an idiot and that I can't believe I'm wasting my time on the book. But then, slowly, I find myself rooting for her as she works her way out of ever more improbably situations. I'm sure there will be another book in the series, and I'm sure I'll end up reading it.

2. Blue Shoe, Anne Lamott
I started reading Anne Lamott's essays on Salon.com and fell in love with her writing. I read Operating Instructions, which is an account of her first year of motherhood, last year. But this was my first time reading her fiction.

At first I just didn't like the book. It is filled with unhappy people leading fairly unhappy lives. I wanted to shake them and tell them to snap out of it. I suppose I was particularly affected because there are two children in it, and one is named Ella. The sections about the kids dealing with their parents' divorce really hit home, even though I'm not a child of divorce and my kids are in no danger of being children of divorced parents. I just don't like to read about kids being upset or in pain. I have a very strong Mama-bear instinct.

But Lamott's writing kept sucking me in. She uses language so beautifully that I couldn't help but keep reading. And then very slowly I got pulled in to these people's lives and really started to care about them. It's the same thing that happened to me when I read Richard Russo's Empire Falls. But as with Empire Falls, just when I got really interested in the people, and just when things were starting to look up for the characters, the book ends. I wanted to keep reading about them, to find out what happens next. I had grown to care about them so much that I didn't want to leave them or their world. I finished and thought, "But wait! Come back! Tell me what happens!" I was actually sad that the book ended. And that doesn't happen to me very often.

1. Full Circle, Michael Palin
Yes, that Michael Palin, one of the brilliant, if twisted minds behind Monty Python. He's done a number of travel documentaries over the years - Around the World in 80 Days, where he recreated Phileas Fogg's journey; Pole to Pole, where he traveled from the North Pole to the South; and Full Circle, where he travels around the Pacific Rim.

I had seen much of Around the World when it was broadcast ages ago, but I missed all of Pole to Pole and Full Circle (which he did in 1996). I found the book about the journey at my parents' house during our Christmas visit and swiped it.

I love reading about foreign places and other peoples' travel adventures, so the opportunity to read Palin's account of his trip, which took close to a year, was too good to pass up. The book is drawn from his daily journal entries, written in posh hotel and in aboriginal long houses and everywhere in between. The photos that accompany the entries are amazing.

I've added several of the places Palin visited to my list of dream vacation spots, but I've also made mental notes to never go near several others - namely the interior of South America and several spots in Malaysia.

I think, however, that I'm a better arm-chair traveler than a real one. I like the comforts of home a little bit too much. So I'll be happy as long as folks like Palin keep traveling and writing books.

I just searched for Michale Palin on Amazon.com and discovered that he has an amazing number of books available. The most recent is an account of his journey through the Himalayas. But he also has two about Hemingway. There are too many to buy. I may have to hit the library.