Reading Goal Progress--July Update
I’ve not been paying a lot of attention to this book goal
for the year for the past few months. I just decided I’d read whatever came to
mind and that likely, when I checked back in on this, I’d have covered quite a
bit of it. I guess that’s how it’s gone. I’m a little over half-way through the
year, and I’ve covered 20 of the categories, with some of the others already in
progress. Here’s the update at the end of July:
1. Trashy Romance - This novel could count in several of my categories, but I think I'm going to list it as my trashy romance. I finally got around to reading Gone With the Wind. I found the first half of the book extremely entertaining and could see how the novel got the following that it has. It reads really well, with some fairly complex and interesting characters. The scenes with Rhett really do pop off of the page. The second half of the book, however, was nowhere near the same quality. This was both as a matter of politics (even forgiving Mitchell a little bit for expressing the views of her time, the racial politics of this part of the novel are offensive, as are the negative stereotypes assigned to northernors) and plot. On the whole, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but I was a lot more disturbed by the book than I thought I was going to be, too.
2. Graphic Novel/Comics - I used to read and enjoy the Ducktales comics when I was young, and I didn't realize until recently that the original Ducktales comics, authored by Carl Barks, are considered classics. I requested a copy of them, both for the sake of nostalgia and because I was interested if I would still like some of them. It turns out that they were quite funny and well-drawn, though I did probably enjoy them more as a kid.
3. Contemporary Children's Novel - Stephanie and I read Kate DiCamillo's The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane together. It's a fable--much in the mold of The Velveteen Rabbit or The Mouse and His Child--about a porcelain rabbit learning to love. DiCamillo is one of the best children's writers around (though it's sometimes debatable whether or not her books would always be enjoyable by children), and this was another well-written fantasy.
4. Poetry - I enjoyed Kathleen Norris's memoir The Cloister Walk back in college, and I've encountered some of her poetry in anthologies, so I've wanted to read one of her books of poetry for quite a while now. I happened across a signed copy of Little Girls in Church one day in a used book story for $1 and have now tried it out. Though Norris can, just on occasion, be a little abstract and over-allusive (is that a word?) for my taste, a lot of the poems--many of them centered around women in history and the Bible--were very striking and thought-provoking. I enjoyed it and will keep it on my shelf.
5. Mystery - I read an Agatha Christie--The Hallowe'en Party--just because I was needing something light and short after Gone With the Wind, and she typically does the trick. This one was one of her final novel--and so one of the lesser ones, since her talent dropped off a bit toward the end of her life. That's not to say, though, that I didn't enjoy it. I just enjoyed it while recognizing it as a middling effort of a very fine writer.
6. Current Bestseller - For a current bestselling novel, I read Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, a novel set in Alaska about a lonely middle-aged couple who forms a child from the snow...who comes alive. It was decent, but it read like a first novel.
7. Thriller - I've been on a big Graham Greene kick for the last few months, and so I decided to read one of his more obscure (though also least popular) novels Orient Express. About halfway through, I thought that I would never be able to consider it as a thriller, despite it being advertised as such, because even though it was well-written, it was just about the sundry relationships developed amongst the travelers on a train. By the end, however, it became a thriller of sorts. And I decided that it was one of Greene's most underrated novels.
8. Popular History Book - I read A Land So Strange by Andres Resendez, about the journey of Cabeza de Vaca through the American Southwest after the Spanish expedition he was on ended in tragedy. It was a pretty fascinating account of a part of history which I, as a Texan, have long been interested in.
9. Pulitzer Prize Winner – I read House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday. I’d tried to read it several years ago and had failed to make it through because, to be frank, it was boring. Upon reading it and finally finishing it…I still found it to be really, really boring. It’s one of the two or three shortest Pulitzer’s, but you’d never know it by reading it.
10. A Vampire Book – What I read isn’t exactly a Vampire book, I guess. It’s a rabbit-headed zombie book, but Kalyn and Stephanie both agreed that it was close enough. The book is It Happened in Del Rio by Stephen Graham Jones—who was a very popular professor at TTU when I was there. I’d always wanted to read something by Jones, and this seemed like a decent and representative work. It was too weird and too illogically plotted for me, though.
11. Newbery Prize Winner – I’ve actually read about four of these so far this year, but my representative choice will be the current year’s Newbery—The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. It’s about an ape who’s kept isolated in a mall until the public begins to notice his mistreatment. It’s based on a true story and is written in short, poetic vignettes from Ivan’s perspective and is pretty fantastically done.
I’ve also ended up reading Shadow of a Bull by Maia
Wojciechowska, A Gathering of Days by Joan Blos, and Out of the Dust by Karen
Hesse. Shadow of a Bull was about a young boy whose family is pushing him to
become a bullfighter, against his wishes. A Gathering of Days is the journal of
a girl in New Hampshire in the early 19th century, and Out of the
Dust is a series of poems detailing a family’s difficult life in the Dust Bowl
in Oklahoma. All of them were strong books, but among these, A Gathering of
Days was written with very special beauty and intelligence.
12. A book that has or is being made into a movie – We’ve actually gotten a little men’s book club started at Centennial, and the first book we’re going to do is Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. It’s a good, but pretty devastating story, about a young girl who’s trying to take care of her family. Her father, who makes meth, has to show up to his court hearing or the family loses their house (which he’d put up for bail). Unfortunately, the man’s gone missing in the Missouri backwoods.
13. A Shakespeare Play – I’ve now read three Shakespeare’s this year: Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Of course, all three were fantastic, and I especially enjoyed seeing a performance of Taming of the Shrew soon after reading it. Two Gentlemen of Verona—Shakespeare’s first play and not typically considered among his best—was a very enjoyable surprise.
14. Biography/Memoir – I’ve read several that would fit into this category, but one recent one that I especially enjoyed was Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Eleanor Pruitt Stewart. The book consists of letters that Stewart wrote when she moved to Wyoming in the very early 20th century to claim her own land and to run her own farm. The letters are funny, adventurous, and real, and Stewart writes with a voice full of courage, good humor, kindness, and gratitude. I have trouble figuring out why this isn’t a widely known classic.
15. Comedy – I read I an Claudie by Dillon Anderson while I was reading through some Texas literature that’d interested me, but I’ll count it here because I don’t really think I’ll read anything funnier this year. The book contains a series of stories about a kind con-man and his dim-witted helper as they travel across Texas in the early 20th century. Usually, they end up conning themselves. Each story is gentle, hilarious, and occasionally profound, and this is another book that I can’t, for the life of me, see why it’s been forgotten.
16. British Classic – Kalyn, Stephanie, and I had all never before read Northanger Abbey, even though we’d all read just about everything else by Jane Austen. We decided to read it together and then to hold a very nerdy book-club discussion over coffee…which we did. It was a surprisingly fun book (if not as well-plotted as later books would be), and we had a very fun discussion about it.
17. Sir Walter Scott -
18. Texas Books – I’ve been reading quite a few Texas novels and memoirs over the last year, and this has really been a very rich experience. For whatever reason, Texas literature isn’t always that well respected. Perhaps I’m biased toward Texas, or perhaps just growing up in rural Texas has meant that novels dealing with that experience speaks to me in a special way, but whatever the reason, I’ve read some great Texas books that strike me as world class literature. I think the mediocre reputation of Texas literature has a lot more to do with narrow literary fashions in academia and with the New York-centered shape of the publishing world than it does with any merited criteria. I’ll be short on this, but these are four Texas reads from the year that I very strongly recommend:
12. A book that has or is being made into a movie – We’ve actually gotten a little men’s book club started at Centennial, and the first book we’re going to do is Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. It’s a good, but pretty devastating story, about a young girl who’s trying to take care of her family. Her father, who makes meth, has to show up to his court hearing or the family loses their house (which he’d put up for bail). Unfortunately, the man’s gone missing in the Missouri backwoods.
13. A Shakespeare Play – I’ve now read three Shakespeare’s this year: Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Of course, all three were fantastic, and I especially enjoyed seeing a performance of Taming of the Shrew soon after reading it. Two Gentlemen of Verona—Shakespeare’s first play and not typically considered among his best—was a very enjoyable surprise.
14. Biography/Memoir – I’ve read several that would fit into this category, but one recent one that I especially enjoyed was Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Eleanor Pruitt Stewart. The book consists of letters that Stewart wrote when she moved to Wyoming in the very early 20th century to claim her own land and to run her own farm. The letters are funny, adventurous, and real, and Stewart writes with a voice full of courage, good humor, kindness, and gratitude. I have trouble figuring out why this isn’t a widely known classic.
15. Comedy – I read I an Claudie by Dillon Anderson while I was reading through some Texas literature that’d interested me, but I’ll count it here because I don’t really think I’ll read anything funnier this year. The book contains a series of stories about a kind con-man and his dim-witted helper as they travel across Texas in the early 20th century. Usually, they end up conning themselves. Each story is gentle, hilarious, and occasionally profound, and this is another book that I can’t, for the life of me, see why it’s been forgotten.
16. British Classic – Kalyn, Stephanie, and I had all never before read Northanger Abbey, even though we’d all read just about everything else by Jane Austen. We decided to read it together and then to hold a very nerdy book-club discussion over coffee…which we did. It was a surprisingly fun book (if not as well-plotted as later books would be), and we had a very fun discussion about it.
17. Sir Walter Scott -
18. Texas Books – I’ve been reading quite a few Texas novels and memoirs over the last year, and this has really been a very rich experience. For whatever reason, Texas literature isn’t always that well respected. Perhaps I’m biased toward Texas, or perhaps just growing up in rural Texas has meant that novels dealing with that experience speaks to me in a special way, but whatever the reason, I’ve read some great Texas books that strike me as world class literature. I think the mediocre reputation of Texas literature has a lot more to do with narrow literary fashions in academia and with the New York-centered shape of the publishing world than it does with any merited criteria. I’ll be short on this, but these are four Texas reads from the year that I very strongly recommend:
The Vigil by Clay Reynolds
Goodbye to a River by John Graves
…and the earth did not devour him by Tomas Rivera
I and Claudie by Dillon Anderson
19. Swashbuckler -
20. The Bible -
21. SciFi or Fantasy – I’ve not read George R.R. Moore’s Game of Thrones, the first volume of the famous series. It was pretty fantastic, one of the very best fantasy novels I’ve read, and I’m not quite anxious—in both senses of the word—to go on with the series.
22. Theology -
23. Modern Library 100 Novel – I’ve now read two of these for the year—James Dickey’s Deliverance and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Deliverance is the famous book about a group of city men, wanting to play out their fantasies of primal manhood, who take off on a disastrous (to say the least) canoe trip in Georgia. It’s a really fantastic novel—poetic, thoughtful, and suspenseful. Portnoy’s Complaint is about a young Jewish man, recounting his life to his therapist, who has mommy-issues and something of a sex addiction. It’s a much less enjoyable book than the first (and not as funny as advertised), though it is one that you can admire, as it offers some very interesting things to think about in our society.
24. Christmas Book -
25. Education Book – I’ve read a dozen or so of these, now that I’ve completed three graduate courses and the study for my comps exams. The best education books I’ve read were by E.D. Hirsch—especially The Knowledge Deficit, which explains how a lack of vocabulary and background knowledge is hurting students’ abilities to read and to think.
19. Swashbuckler -
20. The Bible -
21. SciFi or Fantasy – I’ve not read George R.R. Moore’s Game of Thrones, the first volume of the famous series. It was pretty fantastic, one of the very best fantasy novels I’ve read, and I’m not quite anxious—in both senses of the word—to go on with the series.
22. Theology -
23. Modern Library 100 Novel – I’ve now read two of these for the year—James Dickey’s Deliverance and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Deliverance is the famous book about a group of city men, wanting to play out their fantasies of primal manhood, who take off on a disastrous (to say the least) canoe trip in Georgia. It’s a really fantastic novel—poetic, thoughtful, and suspenseful. Portnoy’s Complaint is about a young Jewish man, recounting his life to his therapist, who has mommy-issues and something of a sex addiction. It’s a much less enjoyable book than the first (and not as funny as advertised), though it is one that you can admire, as it offers some very interesting things to think about in our society.
24. Christmas Book -
25. Education Book – I’ve read a dozen or so of these, now that I’ve completed three graduate courses and the study for my comps exams. The best education books I’ve read were by E.D. Hirsch—especially The Knowledge Deficit, which explains how a lack of vocabulary and background knowledge is hurting students’ abilities to read and to think.
posted by John Pierce @ 5:53 PM
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