Ha! “Psychosomatic” was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That seems…apropos.
(Found out in The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes)
Original goal: to read 20 books by the end of June.
Final results: 16 books read, 1 abandoned, 4 incomplete¹.
It’s only the 28th! You could still do it!
…no. The 4 books left?
- The Rest is Noise - 7300 of 15,103 Kindle locations—after 6 weeks of reading, mind
- His Excellency: George Washington - 535 of 5831 Kindle locations
- The Inheritance of Rome - not started
- 2666 - 77 of 912p
So, I’m calling it.
That said, I’m pretty happy with how much I read and the variety thereof. The 2 biggest reasons I didn’t finish the list: a nearly 2-month break in the middle and choosing the entire list up front in January. I’m giving myself some slack on the break: getting laid off wasn’t exactly planned. Heh.
For the next set of 20 (by New Year’s :P), book selection as I go. I’ll choose a few at a time, so there are always a few on deck, but fixed list…pass! (:
One of the side effects of not letting myself read anything but the list was an ever-increasing backlog in my living room. Ahem…
(full size)
¹ My math’s not off, the final list ended at 21, but I didn’t feel like changing the tag. :D
Progress: 16 down, 1 abandoned, 4 to go (list)
Which: Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
That’s a fun little book. You never really know where you’ll end up with Gaiman and his story-telling, but it’s always a good time. A green fedora, though? Heh.
Progress: 15 down, 1 abandoned, 5 to go (list)
Which: The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
It took a few pages to get a feel for what’s happening here, but that accomplished, the book brings you along on its merry way. The rarely-longer-than-4-pages entries were a welcome relief after books and books of fully-justified, days-long chapters (I’m glaring at you Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer and The Rest is Noise).
Hedgehog made its way into my library at the recommendation of a friend and that title! As it happens, the book is lovely and worth the read; it goes quickly, but not passively.
Also, I’d really like some madeleines, now.
It’s very pretty,” a statement that is to art as using “bring” when you mean “take” is to the beauty of language.
Renée, p. 199 The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
Hee.
Progress: 14 down, 1 abandoned, 6 to go (list)
Which: The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp
I figured out a long time ago that I like to do the groundwork. Or anyway, I recognize the need and importance of it, so doing it doesn’t annoy me. Not a huge surprise, then, that Habit makes buckets of sense to me. I think my favorite bit is what she calls scratching: gathering up all the things you can to get you on your way for a new project. I’m pretty sure this just earned itself a spot among my reference books.
Progress: 13 down, 1 abandoned, 7 to go (list)
Which: Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Cloud Atlas is my yardstick for disparate-but-connected stories: Spin is not Cloud Atlas. But it is pretty good, the great world mostly contained in the boroughs with the timeline only pretending to be linear.
Part of me didn’t want to like it, its award-winning and top-pick status splashed all over the cover. By the end, though, I did like it—somehow the characters more than McCann’s storytelling, which seems maybe backwards, but there it is.
Progress: 12 down, 2 abandoned, 7 to go (list) ¹
Which: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
Um: zzzzzz.
I held on as long as I could (80 pages), but…no. Most of the sea monster business doesn’t feel too shoe-horned in, which is pretty good, but the overall effect is squishy, slimy, and plodding. Pass.
¹ Agh! Stupid book! You weren’t even on the list! Honestly.
Progress: 12 down, 1 abandoned, 8 to go (list)
Which: The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes
I like this sort of storytelling: regularly deep-diving into this or that topic with historical-context mile-markers. It was interesting to realize Darwin’s Origin alone didn’t knock out the six-days story, but that John Banks & co. had been delivering a series of nice stunners for decades beforehand.
Humphry Davy’s uh experimenting with nitrous oxide had me rolling. Scientifically dissecting getting high. It’s not like he (and his subjects) knew that’s what would follow, but still.
Progress: 11 down, 1 abandoned, 9 to go (list)
Which: Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan
I really need to check these historical books’ bibliography and notes sections; I thought I had another 70 pages to go—oh. Hmph.
“Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye, is the greatest invention of the world.” (Feb, 1859) Lincoln was a writer almost before anything else and that along with his need to be precise guarantees my affection.
Not that Kaplan made it easy to read. It’s possibly just me, but much of this read like a textbook, making it hard to really dig into. That the pace is noticeably faster during his presidency can’t be helped, but still: the rest didn’t have to drag so much, did it?
The explicit and implicit messages, though, occupied the slippery slope between realpolitik and genocide. [Lincoln] had recently shown that as the vehicle of his people he was pledged to affirm the national will by military force.
p. 344, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan
- I like the look of the word “realpolitik”
- The wildly different perception and proposed treatment of slaves vs. Indians (put down mostly to Lincoln’s personal/familial history and participation in wars with the Indians) is the most frustrating thing about this book (and era).
Blah blah modern-sensibility-cakes, but come on! It’s gross.
Sunday, reading.
Wednesday night, post-farmer’s market dinner (& ice cream!). (wallpaper, if you like it)
Progress: 9 down, 1 abandoned, 11 to go (list)
Which: The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell
Sarah Vowell cracks me up and makes me want to read more (e.g. returning to Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer). I listened to the Assassination Vacation audiobook before I read anything else by her, so reading Patriot, she narrated instead of my inner reading voice.
(Work was pretty slow; this was a nice way to spend the afternoon.)
