Sluuuumped

   SO, I have not been reading very much so far this month, mostly due to a habit of starting a zillion books at once, taken in conjunction with what I will call "life distractions". So my "currently-reading" list on Goodreads is six books deep but I have added a mere two books to my "read" list since June, and one of them was a comic and one was an audiobook. Ach.

   And so, a list of the books I am currently in the middle of:

• Bad Feminist / Roxane Gay. I know, I know, how is it possible that I haven't read this yet, how is it possible that I didn't finish it in a maximum of three sittings. I myself am unsure, and have laid the blame directly on the copy I had being an ebook, my kobo dying, and the ebook expiring because it had to go back to the library. BUT I can confidently say that when it's my turn with this book again I will DEVOUR it and will probably read the essay on being friends with women at least eight times. 
• Bleak House / Charles Dickens. So good, so damn long. I read this on my phone as my "wth why don't I have a book with me" book, so it's taking forever but that don't mean it ain't delightful. I've watched the BBC adaption of Bleak House a couple times and it has been helpful in keeping characters and events straight in my mind. Also: hands up if you love Gillian Anderson. 
  
• Resurrection / Leo Tolstoy. I don't know what made Tolstoy want to write this book with such short chapters, but am I ever glad he did. I can read two or three chapters and feel very accomplished, even though they are rarely more than four pages long. My complaint about the Russians remains: why so many names for one person.
• Cold Mountain / Charles Frazier. I have been slowly plodding through this book since December. IT'S JULY. 
• The Photographer / Emmanuel Guibert. This is one of the books mentioned in The Initiates, and it is really, really, really good. Taking a strangely long time to read, for a comic book. It's about Didier Lefevre and the work he did as a photographer with MSF/DWB in Afghanistan in 1986. How much do I know about 1986 Afghanistan? Basically nothing. This has been eye-opening. 
• South / Ernest Shackleton. I love Antarctic exploration. I was so thoroughly invested in this book (which I had from the library as an audiobook) that I had to take an anxiety-induced break when the Endurance started to be crushed by the ice and as a result didn't finish the book before the file expired but DON'T WORRY, I'll be back to it soon. If you haven't read this, read it. Even if you've read about the Endurance expedition before; it is a whole different ballgame hearing it in Shackleton and his men's own words. 

   Here's hoping that the rest of July will be a bit more productive, reading-wise. Play us out, Arnold.

best of 2014: books

this gif has nothing to do with this post but I couldn't resist it

   Oh, the difficulty of picking out a mere few books from a year that had a spate of good reads. I read quite a bit this year and I'd probably recommend all of it (but not necessarily to everyone). And so: four stand-out numbers from the year:

• Homage to Catalonia / George Orwell
• Neverhome / Laird Hunt
• Antarctica / Gabrielle Walker
• No Country For Old Men / Cormac McCarthy

   Homage to Catalonia was by turns hilarious, heart-breaking, poignant, confusing, gentle, and passionate. I recommend it to one and all. If you read my post about Neverhome you know how I feel about it already, and I take none of it back. So good. I didn't write about Antarctica because most of the people I know are probably sick of hearing about my deep and abiding love for our southernmost continent and my ongoing desire to winter over at the South Pole despite my struggles with a lack of vitamin D. BUT if you want to read an excellent tome about past and present life in Antarctica with quite a bit of awesome science thrown in, read Gabrielle Walker's book. Sometimes I forget that I love Cormac McCarthy, until I pick up one of his books and say "WHAAAAAAAAT, this is amazing" and then proceed to speak in staccato sentences for the duration of my reading time. Go forth and read these books, but maybe skip the McCarthy if you are sensitive to violence.

   OKAY, here it is, the LIST. What I read in 2014, in the order I read them, sans comment because uuuugh that would take forevvvver and this post would be roughly 18 million words long. An * means it is a re-read, italics means non-fiction, underlined means comics.

1. Jerusalem / Guy Delisle
2. *Hunger Games / Suzanne Collins
3. Fatale v. 1-3 / Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips
4. The Girls of Murder City / Douglas Perry
5. *Catching Fire / Suzanne Collins
6. A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting / Guy Delisle
7. Book of a Thousand Days / Shannon Hale
8. Rabid / Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
9. The Rook / Daniel O'Malley
10. Three Cups of Deceit / John Krakauer
11. X-Files Season 10 v. 1 / Joe Harris
12. Attachments / Rainbow Rowell
13. Locke and Key v. 6 / Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez
14. I Am Legend / Richard Matheson
15. How to Lie With Statistics / Darrell Huff
16. *Siddhartha / Herman Hesse
17. The Haunting of Hill House / Shirley Jackson
18. The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides 
19. At The Mountains of Madness / HP Lovecraft
20. The Never List / Koethi Zan
21. Shadows / Robin McKinley
22. A Life in Stitches / Rachael Herron
23. And Then There Were None / Agatha Christie
24. Anne of Windy Poplars / LM Montgomery
25. Fully Present / Sue Smalley, Diana Winston
26. Batman: The Dark KNight Returns / Frank Miller, et al
27. In The After / Demitria Lunetta
28. Fun Home / Alison Bechdel
29. Boxers and Saints / Gene Luen Yang
30. The Madman's Daughter / Megan Shepherd
31. The Bear / Claire Cameron
32. Never Let Me Go / Kazuo Ishiguro
33. The Diary of Edward the Hamster, 1990-1990 / Miriam Elia, Ezra Elia
34. Redefining Girly / Melissa Atkins Wardy
35. David and Goliath / Malcolm Gladwell
36. The Rose That Grew From Concrete / Tupac Shakur
37. The Old Man and the Sea / Ernest Hemingway
38. The Talented Mr Ripley / Patricia Highsmith
39. Drive / James Sallis
40. No Country for Old Men / Cormac McCarthy
41. Good Bones / Margaret Atwood
42. The Spire / William Golding
43. The Diet Trap / Jason Lillis
44. Steppenwolf / Herman Hesse
45. Foundation and Empire / Isaac Asimov
46. The Remains of the Day / Kazuo Ishiguro
47. *Perelandra / CS Lewis
48. The Turn of the Screw / Henry James
49. The Practice of the Presence of God / Brother Lawrence
50. The Case for the Psalms / NT Wright
51. Antarctica / Gabrielle Walker
52. I Capture the Castle / Dodie Smith
53. Invasion of the Body Snatchers / Jack Finney
54. True Grit / Charles Portis
55. Neverhome / Laird Hunt
56. The Shining / Stephen King
57. Any Empire / Nate Powell
58. Love Does / Bob Goff
59. Relish / Lucy Knisley
60. What Every Body is Saying / Joe Navarro
61. Lexicon / Max Barry
62. Homage to Catalonia / George Orwell
63. The Pearl / John Steinbeck
64. The Imperfect Board Member / Jim Brown
65. Herland / Charlotte Perkins Gilman
66. *Inkheart / Cornelia Funke
67. *Beauty / Robin McKinley
68. The Ocean at the End of the Lane / Neil Gaiman
69. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less / Sarah Glidden 

   And there you have it! My initial goal for the year was to read at least 52 books, and I am pleased to say that I exceeded it by 17 books. This is the most books I've ever read in one year; I'm excited to see what 2015 brings.

   Some notable bookish things from 2014:

• "Discovered" Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeffery Eugenides, finally finally. 
• Kept up with reading nonfiction
• Read more about the American Civil War era than I ever have in my life (???)
• Became more and more comfortable with tossing books I am not enjoying or getting anything out of
•  Participated in a Mini Readathon, which was delightful.
• Read a great deal about feminism and communication, in non-book form
• This isn't bookish but I finally have picked up a guitar and am more determined than ever to learn.

influence

   When I was but a young teen, I read Tarzan of the Apes / Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is slotted among my list of "life-changing books", but please, don't ask me to explain it. I don't know why it had such an effect on me, and I reckon if you read it in an effort to understand how it impacted me you would come away with a resounding "huh". So, when the game-changing novels meme goes around and people post their books and all of them make perfect sense and people say "Yes! Oh my gosh! Me too!" I list Tarzan right along with perspective altering books like Slaughterhouse-Five and A Farewell to Arms and Siddhartha. I don't talk about Tarzan very much, partially because Edgar Burroughs was a rather problematic person (ERB: super into eugenics, apparently), but mostly because its influence is confusing to me. Why was it so important? It's a mystery.

   The impact of some books is obvious (I mean, come on, the river is everywhere) and for some it isn't and I guess that's just the way things are. I think it is unreliable to judge the impact of a book directly after you read it. Right now I would put Never Let Me Go on a list of especially influential books, but that might just be because I recently finished it. And what if I go into a book expecting it to be a certain thing? For example: I haven't read East of Eden (a crime, I know, I get it) and I am anticipating my reading of it to be something like a revelation, so will that affect the way I read it? Will I pull something out of it merely because I expect to? Incidentally, I thought that Of Mice and Men was about greasy politicians (where did this idea come from????) and when it wasn't I was confused ("What's with all this ranch stuff?" "Maybe this isn't about politics." "Huh. Okay."). Even so, I found it left a lasting mark. Expectations: just as mysterious as influence.

   Even if I did sort out what exactly was so influential about Tarzan, would I be able to pinpoint exactly what "influence" or "impact" or "importance" mean? Clearly the things that are important about Tarzan aren't the same as the things that are important about, say, We Need to Talk About Kevin. I don't think about them in the same way or with equal frequency. (Do you want to be haunted by a book? Then read We Need to Talk About Kevin.) Or how can I compare Tarzan to Til We have Faces? A Farewell to Arms?

   When I worked at the Jubilee I had a similar problem. People would ask me what my favorite thing I had seen there was, and I wouldn't really be able to answer. How do I judge Tosca against Great Big Sea? Stomp against Stuart McLean? I would usually say "well it sure ain't graduation ceremonies".

   It's a mystery. 

   Anyways, here's some novels my mom thinks everyone should read (she says that if you don't feel like you could re-read a novel, it hasn't achieved greatness):

• Pilgrim's Progress / John Bunyan
• Carry on Mr Bowditch / Jean Lee Latham
• Sign of the Beaver / Elizabeth George Speare
• Pride and Prejudice / Jane Austen 
• Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte
• That Printer Udell's / Harold Bell Wright
• Ishmael / E. D. E. N Southworth

   My dad says you should read The Lord of the Rings, and my mom says "I haven't read that."

1001

   As you may know I have little resistance power when it comes to lists and "how many of these have you read/seen/etc" and "compare with your friends" and "if you've read more than them you are the winner" type things, so when I came across a "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" list I immediately grabbed a pencil and a piece of scrap paper and started tallying up. Also involved is the 1% Well Read challenge, in which people have to read 1% of this list of 1001 books. I was all "gurl, I have got this in the bag" only to find out that I have read a mere 45 of the 1001 books (which I realize is over 1% but I was thinking I'd be around 10% and so: disappointment).

   Actually, the number could vary anywhere between 45-48ish books because I don't know how many Jane Austen books I have read because they all blend together in my mind and here is one of the kickers of this post: WTH is up with Jane Austen mania? P&P is great, sure, and Northanger Abbey had me in stitches, buuuut why are there a gazillion of her books on the list of 1001 books I supposedly must read but The Iliad isn't? Also no Shakespeare? Or Grimm's Fairy Tales? And I get it, you are thinking, "you only want those things on the list because, heyo: favorite things. Also Shakespeare wrote plays so maybe they don't count." But so much of our cultural canon is based on Shakespeare and Homer and fairy/folk tales that if you haven't at least sampled them you've stuffed up badly, IMHO. Also: come on, three Toni Morrison books and no Beowulf?

   Not to mention that the Bible isn't on the list. I could go on and on about the value of reading widely when it comes to sacred texts (if you don't know what you don't believe then how do you know what you do believe?) but even if you look at it in a non-religious way then it is still super valuable. Even if you just read it as a What Is Up With Israel primer, you really ought to read it. While I believe that the Bible is God-breathed and useful for teaching and correcting, I get that you might not BUT no one can deny its cultural significance.

   Almost 70 books from the 2000s and only 13 from pre-1700???? WTH????  Krup that list. Make your own dang list. Read what you want to, just read. Read widely. Read from different eras. Read to learn, read to be entertained. Read words on a page, or on an ebook reader, or listen to an audiobook, just find the stories you want to hear and knowledge you want to have and ingest it somehow. Don't give me some clap-trap about not having time because if I can have a job and do school and binge-watch Once Upon a Time and hang out with palz and still make time to read then you can too. I believe in you or w/e.