2012 Reading Review

I just finished my first book of 2013, What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha and want to talk about it with someone, but in the meantime finishing a book inspired me to look back over my reading in 2012.

Here’s a summary:
Books read:  60. More than usual, but out of those 20 were kids’ chapter books, so really about average.

Favorites: My daughter loved the Mother-Daughter Book Club books, but I preferred Emily of Deep Valley and The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Dare I admit how much I try to hide my laughter over the Diary of a Wimpy Kids books?

I sometimes wish I kept a list of picture books checked out from the library that we loved so that I could remember them later. A few standouts I still recall: a picture book biography of  J. R. R. Tolkein, the biography of Martha Graham, a photo essay on the Fibonacci sequence, an old book about a little girl living in Thailand.

14 or so books I read were non-fiction, essays or poetry.  Favorites: Sally Thomas’ book of poetry, Brief Light.   I also really liked de Boton’s The Art of Travel and Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I’m not sure where to include V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World, but it was fascinating.

As far as spiritual reading goes, I really like Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water. It’s the kind of book you dip in and out of and every time find something to chew on.  Call to Holiness was also good, but light.

From the classics:

Shakespeare: The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (should I continue to teach this or switch to Othello?)

Dickens: Great Expectations: LOVED

Bronte: Wuthering Heights: Somewhat disenchanted. Lovely writing, but honestly, I got fed up with Cathy and Heathcliff. So selfish, and eventually tiresome

Sophocles: Oedipus Rex

Also pulled out some Thoreau when my son was writing on Civil Disobedience.

FINALLY finished The Wind in the Willows, which I have started many a time and can never seem to truly love, although I love the setting and the idea.  It was a read aloud with the kids, but they frequently wandered away from my reading in boredom. Did I just put it down too much to get drawn in? Or does it jump from episode to episode to quickly to feel attached?

The rest were novels. I meant to post about my very favorite, Willa Cather’s One of Ours when I finished it, but I never had time. Every time I read a Cather book, I love her more. Is she underappreciated? I’m not sure of her contemporary reputation in academic circles, but every time I read one of her books I am surprised by the depth and eloquence of her writing. 

One of Ours is the story of Claude Wheeler, who chafes under the business acumen of his father and the religious fervor of his mother. He yearns to live a life devoted to seeking something noble and good – and his friendship with the Erhlichs in his college town, Lincoln, give him some insight about what this life looks like, but he always feels like an outsider during their intellectual, lively comversations. His father calls him home to manage the farm, and he ends up in an ill-suited marriage, mainly because the girl who would share his vision seems to be dating his mercenary older brother. It is not until he joins the Army to fight in World War I that he feels a part of something bigger than himself. In France he discovers true brotherhood, nobility, and a purpose for living. But of course, it is a war…

Some favorite quotes: One night while reading Paradise Lost aloud with his mother, he comments on how Milton needed the wicked. His mother questions him, and Claude points out how if all the sinners were taken out of the Bible, it wouldn’t be very interesting. “Except Christ” says his mother.  “I only mean that even in the Bible, the people who were merely free from blame didn’t amount to much.”   Mrs. Wheeler replies “As I get older, I leave a good deal more to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I . . . . I believe He is sometimes where we would least expect to find him, - even in proud, rebellious hearts.”

In the midst of a blizzard, Claude looks out the upstairs window “There was a solemnity about a storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity. The myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite end. A fain purity, like a fragrance almost too fine for human senses, exhaled from them as they clustered about his head and shoulders.” His mother looks out into the night and quotes “Ever thicker, thicker, thicker,/ Froze the ice on lake and river; Ever deeper, deeper, deeper, /Fell the snow o’er all the landscape.” Mrs. W feels the poetry in the moment, even if she isn’t as witty and lively as Mrs. Erhlich, (Claude’s first love?)

Feeling ever more discouraged with farm life when his brother Ralph comes home at Christmas throwing money around, Claude reflects on what prosperity has done with the community. Preceding Wendell Berry by sometime, he remarks that for the wheat, corn and pigs, things with intrinsic value, that a farmer takes to market he gets manufactured gods with poor quality and big machinery that is goes to pieces, 3-1, outlived by the horses. Even the neighborhood has changed: “Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the neighbors were poor, their houses and farms had more individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being cut down and grubbed up. Joust why nobody knew…. with prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. .. . It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it.” 

But Claude sees little chance of escape from this life.  He is a farmer with little love for the job. He often suffers failures. He has security, but “Sometimes he thought this security was what was the matter with everybody; that only perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in people and develop the mean ones. . . . but if you went to bed defeated every night, and dreaded to wake in the morning, then clearly it was too good a life for you. To be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep, was like being assured of a decent burial.  Safety, security; if you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to them."

But Claude does not despair completely: “Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain, -- the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!” 

Well worth reading for the characterizations, the writing, the history, the effect…

  

I also really liked Oscar Hijuelos’ Mr. Ives’ Christmas, although it leaves something to be desired as an uplifting Christmas book since it is about how Mr. Ives marks time after his son’s murder a couple days before Christmas.  He doesn’t mark it well for a number of years. He and his wife had been artistic idealists, living in a rough part of New York as a sign of their open-mindedness. But Mr. Ives had settled into life as an art director in advertizing, and his wife became an art teacher; their son shares their idealism, but had wanted to become a priest. After he is shot by a Puerto Rican, Mr. Ives must confront some latent racism in himself, as well as feelings of betrayal. He and his wife drift apart, but manage to stay together. Eventually, a generation later, Mr. Ives finally meets the man who shot his son.  Hijuelos’ writing is matter of fact, without many embellishments, but he creates a complex portrait of a man who deals with disappointment and survives.

Other favorites: The River Ki, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Mr. Pip.

Worst book of the year: A Confederacy of Dunces. Yuck. Pass. And I like New Orleans and odd characters, but I regret wasting time on this, despite Walker Percy’s intro.