Just for the heck of it, here are the books I have read so far this year. I just finished Rose Madder
, by Stephen King – and added it to the list. Yes. I keep a list.
Underworld
, by Don DeLillo – which I had started in the fall – before I went to Ireland – and it took me FOREVER to finish it. The damn thing is so LONG though that I didn’t feel like i could stop reading, even though I eventually found it so boring. I had put in so much time that I had to finish it. So no – the whole book wasn’t worth it. But the opening 100 pages? Cannot be touched in terms of brilliance. The rest of the book doesn’t live up to it … but that opening. I still pick it up and read it on occasion.
Okay – I won’t comment on every book but on that one I had to.
George Washington: A Life
– by Willard Sterne Randall
The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams
– this is probably my 5th time reading it all the way through
East of Eden
– John Steinbeck (a re-read. I love this book.)
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
– Joseph Ellis
Darkness at Noon
– Arthur Koestler
The Prince
– Machiavelli (this is a re-read. I have periodically gone back and re-read all the stuff I was forced to read in high school.)
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
– by Robert Conquest (huge post about it here)
102 Minutes : The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
– by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
Crowds and Power
– by Elias Canetti. (Woah. That’s all I have to say)
Chechnya: To the Heart of a Conflict
– by Andrew Meier (yawn)
Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How A Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine
– by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
The Aran Islands
– by John Millington Synge. Ahhhh. Love this book. (Here’s a huge post I wrote about Synge)
Charming Billy
, by Alice McDermott. Wonderful novel.
A Secret History of the IRA
, by Ed Moloney. The jury’s still out on this one.
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
, by Margaret Atwood
Middlemarch (Signet Classics)
, by George Eliot. Wow!!! I blithered about it here.
Aspects of the Novel
, by EM Forster
On Writing
, by Stephen King (phenomenal)
If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
, by Brenda Ueland (writers out there: do yourself a favor and pick up this book. Dumb title. Great great book.)
Tracy and Hepburn
, by Garson Kanin. So good I never wanted it to end.
Great Expectations
, by Charles Dickens. Blew my mind.
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
, by Bernard Lewis
Miracle At Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May – September 1787
, by Catherine Drinker Bowen. This book was literally like injesting crack. Even though I’ve never injested crack. I am a drug addict though. A Second Constitutional Congress drug addict.
Letters to a Young Contrarian
, by Christopher Hitchens. hahahaha
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, by Edmund Burke. Another re-read. Even better than the second time. Is it wrong to have a crush on him? Don’t worry, Anne – I won’t steal your dead boyfriend. I already have my own.
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship
, by David Halberstam (here’s one of my favorite stories from that book)
Cary Grant: A Biography
– Marc Elliot. Bah. Didn’t enjoy this. Despite my obsessive archive. I love entertainment biographies – because I love anecdotes about acting and film-making. I love to hear backstage stories about movies I love. This book wasn’t interested in that stuff. The filming of his movies were sidelines to the theme of the book. So I found it boring.
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
– Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King (a re-read. So much fun)
A Room with a View
, by EM Forster
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
– JK Rowling
The 9/11 Commission Report
– hahahahaha I’m sorry, don’t mean to laugh – it just cracks me up – to go from Harry Potter to that, but hey – that’s what the list says. So it must be true!! Welcome to my world.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
– JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
– JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
– JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5)
– JK Rowling
The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing
– Jayna Davis (I guess I like my Harry Potter experience to be bookended by the war on terror)
Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media
– by Seth Mnookin – really really enjoyed this book. Fascinating.
Rose Madder – by Stephen King
Great Expectations and Middlemarch, yay! I loved both of those books. (I’m reading Bleak House right now – don’t love it quite as much as Great Expectations but it’s still wonderful. I love how Dickens names his characters.)
have read most of “American Sphinx” – put it aside when I got busy and forgot it. I should pull it out and read the rest of it. I also have a couple of biographies of Franklin (of all the “Founding Fathers,” he’s the one who fascinates me the most) and the John Adams book in my stack to read.
And – I have the first two Harry Potter books. Read the first and part of the second (I think that was about the time I moved house) and never finished it. I keep thinking I should get the others and just have a giant Harry Potter binge some weekend, just sit down and read as many of the books as I possibly can in as short a period as possible. (Sigh. I can’t do that as often as I did when I was in high school and college and had far fewer responsibilities).
If you’re reading books on writing – and you’ve not read it already – you might want to read “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott. I am not one for “self-help” books of any variety but I loved this one. I love her description of “free yourself to write a shitty first draft” (that is the BEST advice ever to someone who is a perfectionist and is often paralyzed by that fact. And it doesn’t just apply to writing.) and about “Radio KFKD.” (I consciously remind myself some days that I need to turn off “Radio KFKD.”)
and can I say how jealous I am of how much reading you get done? I’ve read a buttload of scientific journal articles and reread every chapter of every textbook I use in my classes, but that doesn’t expand the mind quite in the same way as reading books on Islam or the Founding Fathers or the French Revolution does.
most nights by the time it’s “fun reading” time for me, I’m so exhausted that I fall asleep before I get 30 pages read.
Jesus, Sheila. What a great list.
Do you have to dumb down to hang out with me?
Yes.
what??? Okay, right, Ms. Whiteness of the Whale, yes, I dumb down to be your friend.
By the way – Charming Billy is really good – read it, if you haven’t. It’s lovely.
How can you go on about silly things like books when the news has just broken that Paris Squared have broken up?!?! And I really thought this one would last. I no longer believe in love.
*Sniff* Were’ds by tissues?
Emily – we all have different ways of coping with total and utter catastrophe. Please. Let me have my escape from all this misery.
Gosh, I envy your reading time! I’ve read more of those you list than not (IOW, the FICTION, and none of the non-fiction, except for “On Writing” by SK) and pretty much agree with your assessments. I was talking to a “booky” friend the other day who said she thought Dickens was BORING! I nearly died.
I’m curious, have you read “The Historian” yet? I’m interested, but it keeps being compared to “The Rule Of Four”, which rather disappointed me.
what did you think of 102 minutes? i’ve hard a hard time getting through it.
Sheila,
Of course.
Of course.
How could I have demanded so much from your pain? By all means, escape.
I’m here for you.
belinda – i have not read The Historian. Heard much about it – but have not read it. It looks right up my alley, frankly.
Dickens – boring? I honestly don’t believe the man wrote a boring sentence in his life!
I need to go back and re-read more of his stuff – I read David Copperfield when i was – 15?? Need to read it again. And ricki – I have never read Bleak House – another one that I really must pick up. I love Dickens.
beth – I read 102 minutes in the course of a weekend. Couldn’t put it down. It was awful to read. But I forced myself through it.
Frank de Martini (I think that was his name) is emblazoned in my mind forever. But so many of those names are … his was just the one that really struck me reading that book.
Far too busy this year to read much but I am slowly fulfilling a lifetime promise to myself to read Proust’s “In Search Of ….” – almost finished volume 5. I think I will be glad I persevered.
To break up the slog I re-read Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy for the first time in 30 years and enjoyed it even more than before.
Best of all was Claire Tomalin’s biography of Samuel Pepys (I confess to being a Pepys tragic).
Sheila, you must read “Bleak House” to be a complete Dickens fan, altho personally I find his soppier passages hard to take these days.
Sheila — What did you think of Rose Madder? I tried getting into it a while back and couldn’t, for some reason. Do I need to give it another chance?
I’ve always loved Dickens. The idea that people trampled each other at the docks when the new installments of his serials came in…wow.
When the geneaologist in our family discovered that the “Dickens” line on my mother’s side of the family actually traces back to THE Charles Dickens, I was THRILLED. And imagine our delight when a letter was found describing his visit with his American cousins, in this country. Um, I believe some of the key words were “barbaric” and “uncouth”, and more of the same….Yep, that sounds like us! ;-)
Tracey – frankly, I found it a little tough-going at times – although parts of it were intriguing (and yes, I did have one nightmare from something that happens at the end). But I would say if you didn’t get into it – don’t bother trying again. It’s not his best.
Rose Madder only worked for me as part of that pseudo-trilogy he had…the “women’s issues” books, I called them. First was “Delores Claiborne”, then “Gerald’s Game”, then “Rose Madder.” They all fit together with the solar eclipse/tragic event thing in common, and the characters even sometimes had “visions” of characters from the other two books. I might have the order of those first two reversed, I’m not sure, but I remember wondering, as I have at other times when he’s written from a woman’s POV, how much Tabitha helped him with that.
Great list, might I suggest one? Flicker, by Theodore Roszak. You would especially like it. Its about actresses, actors, and particularly- film. How they were made in Hollywoods Golden Age. In fact, it reads as a film; you can feel the a directors hand as it skillfully describes the scene(s).
Rumour has it Hollywood has turned it into a film project.
If you read up to chapter 28 and stop, it has a happy (relatively) ending. Thats what I did when I re-read it, because I couldn’t bear to read the ending again. Read past Ch. 28 at your own risk.
Confirms my postulate about art: it always arrives too late.