A year in books

One thing that I have always wanted to do is submit something to Steve Duin’s reading contest. I knew that I could never win for most pages read, because some people are obviously much faster readers, or have more time, or something, and I just can’t compete on that level. However, it occurred to me that I might have a chance at most interesting essay.

I have never gotten around to it. After all, I am a procrastinator, and my reading can end up being kind of random, where forming a cohesive essay might be unlikely. Still, with Goodreads I can easily look over my reading for the year. I am still not entering, but I can totally do a blog post.

My first book of 2012 was the last book of my 2011 Black History Month reading: Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (by Brian Urqhart). I started my 2011 Native American Heritage reading right away, and I remember starting Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian on the plane back from Mexico, and starting to cry almost immediately.

Of course I blogged about both of those history months, and the 2012 Black History month at the time, and shortly after I started my comic book reading, which led to many blog posts, but what you may not know is that in between there were some books on Tellington Touch and dog obedience training, as well as some true crime and a prison camp memoir. Then, there was reading about music, and finally finishing Guns, Germs and Steel.

I guess the first point to make is that if you are not friends with me on Goodreads, please consider doing so. I love book-related interaction.

Another point is how it all relates to my brain. For example, the true crime book contained issues of questionable confessions and overturned convictions after later DNA testing, which was interesting to me based on other things I had read, especially due to the continued belief by the prosecutors in the guilt of those convicted and then released. Later, when I was reading Anatomy of Injustice, by Raymond Bonner, it just reinforced it.

Thinking about music accidentally led me to thinking about feminism, but researching comics brought up issues, and certainly reading Half the Sky (by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu-Dunn) not only reinforced some point, but also brought me new thoughts on how misogyny and racism relate to fear and power, but in ways that make people sabotage their own self-interests.

Guns, Germs and Steel overturns a lot of the assumptions people have made to reinforce beliefs in racial superiority, making good arguments for why things turn out they way they do, and did, and that reading was enriched by an article I read about the One Laptop Per Child program.

Reading The Real History of the End of the World helped me understand not only why one person loaded his trailer and took it to be near the Hopi before December 21^st,  but also a very strange conclusion to the Black Stallion series. Also, reading about Emo makes my interactions on Twitter make so much more sense.

Obviously, I have written a lot about these various books, and there are other things that I know I will write more about, but it is interesting because there is so much to know, and sometimes it seems like you have to know a lot of different things for the different pieces to click.

I remember the first time that I felt like I would need to go back to a book was when I read Baa Baa Black Sheep by Pappy Boyington. He referred to a lot of things without explaining them. I looked up many, but I felt like I was still missing a lot by not knowing more about World War II, and that maybe after reading a lot more, I should go back.

That happened with many books this year. The first one that comes to mind is Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, by Jeff Chang. There was so much in there that was new, and I don’t think I took it all in. I learned a lot, but maybe not as much as I could. Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia was like that too. Maybe I will return, or maybe as I learn more I will find out that the blanks are getting filled in anyway, and that it will all go together.

Overall, though, what I find is that everything connects. It is all part of some unified whole, and maybe at some point one thing will click so awesomely that it is overwhelming, and there is a flash of light and I fall backwards, but the resulting concussion causes some memory loss and I need to keep at it. I don’t know.

Here is what I can tell you about the coming year. Over the holidays I was not thinking that messing with library requests would be productive, so I started one that had been sitting on my shelf, and it is boring, so I think it will break it up while reading other things. It is time to start requesting the Native American Heritage month 2012 reading. This will consist of Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne, The People are dancing again by Charles Wilkinson, The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara, and Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means. I will also watch Reclaiming Their Voices, by Dorothy Fadiman.

I do already have a request in for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (I am doing something with poetry right now that will be a different post), and I really need to get around to reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

Obviously, I will start Black History month late, again, but that will include Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus by Ana Maria Spagna, Mirror to America by John Hope Franklin,  Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr, and Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon. There is a related documentary that I hope to watch as well.

There are more music books and more comic books. I want to have more comics read and reviewed before Killjoys comes out (there is a promotional item coming out in May for Free Comic Book Day, and then the series proper starts in June). I have sections on autism and on affluence that I want to get to, and that may be this year and it may not. As much knowledge as I wish I already had, there is enjoyment in the process of getting it, and I don’t want to skip that.

Otherwise, when I first read Reviving Ophelia, I told myself that I should go back and read it again before I had teenage daughters. That does not seem to be happening, but nonetheless, it seems to be time to read it again.

Also, I have decided that before I hit 42, I should read the Hitchhiker’s books. I had looked into somehow incorporating Sum 41 into this birthday, and that will not be happening, but Douglas Adams is in.