My year in reading

So it's probably a good thing I'm about to embark on library school, since my need to keep statistics on my reading is a growing obsession. Librarians, in case you didn't know, are very into stats -- we keep numbers on everything, from how many people come through the door to how many people use the public access computers and of course how many books of what type get checked out. Last year, as I reported in this post, I read 62 books. That was a big jump over the year before and, I'm pleased to report, my reading rate keeps accelerating (although that is unlikely to continue what with that library school thing). There are a couple reasons for this big jump, which I may go into in another post. The short version is that a lot of what I read is what a lot of people would call junk.

In 2009, I read 80 books (or, to be scrupously honest, 79 3/4 -- one of them, "Mistress Shakespeare" by Karen Harper, I wound up skimming because it just didn't grab me but I had spent enough time on it that I felt it was OK to include on my list). The vast majority, 67, were fiction. I started working at the public library in late May; 35 of the books I read came from there. Ten, plus two interlibrary loan books, came from the college library, where I worked until May.

The first book I finished in 2009 was "The Private Patient," a novel by P.D. James. The last was "Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife," a work of nonfiction by Francine Prose. Both books came from the public library. This year was a big year for series for me. I read a couple in the Aubrey-Maturin series -- I'm up to 14 now -- and all five published so far in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik -- the Napoleonic wars in an alternate history approach -- with dragons! I also started the Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell and have so far read four of them. I read all three in the Mistress of the Art of Death series by Arianna Franklin and the first three in Tasha Alexander's series about Lady Emily Ashton. The fourth is sitting on my desk, courtesy of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program and I really need to get to it.

I also read quite a few kids' books, one of the benefits of working at the public library. I re-read all of Lloyd Alexander's Taran series and found, yes, they do hold up. I read the first two in Linda Buckley-Archer's Gideon the Cutpurse series and like them a lot.

The best novel I read all year was probably "A Place of Greater Safety" by Hilary Mantel -- which is one reason I'm very psyched to have "Wolf Hall" at the top of my current reading pile. A close second would be "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman, an especially fun read for anyone who loved the Narnia books and Harry Potter, too.

For the best nonfiction book I read last year I'm going to declare a tie between "The Lost City of Z" by David Grann, a book I reviewed for the Miami Herald about Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett, and "Something from the Oven" by Laura Shapiro about women and cooking and society in the 1950s -- it's social and cultural history for laypeople, done really well (and how psyched was I when a paperback copy of "The Can-Opener Cookbook" by Poppy Cannon appeared in the library -- Cannon is a major figure in Shapiro's book and one with whom I can identify).

What am I reading now? I just noticed "Remarkable Creatures," the new Tracy Chevalier novel about fossil hunters in early 19th century Britain, come into the library and snapped it up. I like Chevalier a lot and this subject has interested me since I read Deborah Cadbury's excellent history "The Dinosaur Hunters." I've also started "Wolf Hall," Mantel's Booker-winning latest, which I'm especially excited about because of my longstanding Tudorphilia. I started that just as I was mainlining season 3 of "The Tudors" on DVD; gotta say I'm looking forward to Mantel as a useful corrective -- "The Tudors" is fun in a silly, soapy way but Jonathan Rhys-Meyers has to be the most preposterous Henry VIII ever, especially as he is supposed to be getting older. I'm dipping in and out of "Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading" by Lizzie Skurnick (with contributors including Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman and Jennifer Weiner) and finding it fun. And soon, very soon, my primary reading will be "Foundations of Library and Information Science" by Richard E. Rubin. Doesn't THAT sound like fun?

An accounting, and a warning

I wish my obsessive-compulsive tendencies were in the housecleaning vein, but unfortunately they are limited to useless tasks like carefully keeping track of what I have read. And why? Am I supposed to be earning gold stars from someone? I don't know why I do this. But I do -- and this year, I kept more careful track than ever, with each book noted by fiction vs. nonfiction, if it came from a library, whether I read it for review, etc. etc. I can only blame this on working in a library, where our job is to keep track of things, and classify them. It turns out I like cataloging. The good news: I read almost twice as much this year as last. That, too, is probably due to my new job. Not that I read on the job -- a common but mistaken belief about working in a library -- but being surrounded by books all day and learning about lots of newly published books probably inspired me. Not to mention having a job that truly is limited to 40 hours a week most of the time, unlike any job in journalism.

I read 62 books in 2008, compared to 34 in 2007. Twenty-nine of this year's were nonfiction; I didn't deliberately set out for an even split but it's interesting it turned out that way. Thirteen were from the collection of the Monroe County Public Library. Thirty-three were from the Florida Keys Community College Library (like I said, access helps). Seven were via interlibrary loan, six of those from FKCC and one from MCPL. I keep meaning to write an ode to ILL, a wondrous service I have often heard praised but never, until this year, took advantage of.

Fifteen were by writers coming to the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar -- starting with The Name of War by Jill Lepore in February and winding up in the week between Christmas and New Year with Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and ... Jill Lepore. Very different books (one nonfiction, one fiction and different in other ways, too) but both excellent and highly recommended especially for those who are interested in Colonial New England and our nation's foundations. For the Seminar I read some old favorites, like Andrea Barrett, and made some new discoveries, like John Wray, Samantha Hunt and Calvin Baker.

I reviewed 10 books for publication, three in The Miami Herald and the rest in Solares Hill.

I read five books that you would call graphic novels, although three were actually nonfiction -- and one of those was one of the best books I read all year, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. It's harrowing, for sure, but extraordinarily well done in every aspect.

I "read" one audiobook, Lady Macbeth, which was OK and meant to read more but then this David Baldacci thriller got stuck in my car's CD player and now I'm afraid to put anything else in there. The new year will have at least one audiobook, as March by KWLS keynoter Geraldine Brooks is currently keeping me sane through a painting project.

I found myself reading a lot of historical fiction even by writers who are not going to be at the Seminar -- most notably Dennis Lehane's latest and, I suspect, best so far, The Given Day. I've always liked historical fiction -- who doesn't? -- but now I'd have to classify it as a minor addiction. I finally read a couple of Swedish mysteries (Sun Storm by Asa Larsson and The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksen) and I suspect I'll read more of those in the near future.

Very few of the books I read this year were chores to get through -- I think I'm pretty good at choosing my books, because once I start I tend to finish though I'm thinking more and more about Nancy Pearl's counsel on this subject (her rule: give every book 50 pages except when you're more than 50 years old, then you subtract your age from 100 and that's the number of pages you're required to give it). My rule has always been: I'm not going to let some crappy book defeat me, even if it is torture to finish. The worst this year was probably The Linguist and The Emperor, a slim nonfiction volume that took forever because it was my lunchtime reading at work (OK OK I read at work but only in the half hour when I'm NOT BEING PAID) and because it was terrible. It jumped all over the place, AND it was badly written. A bad combo. Too bad because the premise was interesting. (Napoleon's forays into Egypt and the guy who figured out the Rosetta Stone.)

So that's my year in reading, my accounting. What's the warning? Just this -- on the odd chance there are any regular readers of this blog I must warn you that it is about to get even more irregular. I'll keep it up because 1) I never know when I feel like publicly spouting off 2) it's free and 3) I like the list of links I've assembled and being able to access it from anywhere. For people looking for a more reliable resource on books and reading, I can recommend Literary License and Philobiblos, both excellent blogs listed in the blogroll to your right, both of which I found via the excellent LibraryThing, another fine source for books, especially in its discussion groups and reader reviews. You can find me there, by the way, as Keywestnan. Literary License has more general fiction and links to news about the publishing industry, Philobiblos focuses on history as well as including excellent links to news reports about the rare book and historic document trade. And while I like to think of myself as an avid and relatively fast reader, both of these bloggers put me to shame -- and inspire me to spend less time on Facebook and more time with real books.

Thanks for those of you who do read -- this blog and more importantly books. And remember, support your local library and your local independent bookstore!

Surfacing

I reviewed a couple of diving books -- Titanic's Last Secrets and Diving Into Darkness -- for the Miami Herald and the review ran on Sunday. Since one of them was about the two guys from Shadow Divers, I felt compelled to read that first. And watch the two-hour Nova special on their quest to identify the German U-Boat. All of which means -- even though these were all pretty good reads, I'm glad to be reading something different. Lately I've been exploiting my position at the library to read some really good new releases as they come in (mostly, these days, through our lease service, called McNaughton -- they're the ones with the green labels). The first was a graphic novel called American Widow by Alissa Torres. Though it's really not a novel; it's a graphic memoir, I guess, about a woman whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's heartbreaking but, for me, suffered a little because I had so recently read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home -- hands down, the best graphic novel/memoir/anything I've ever read and one of the best memoirs I've read, period. Plus Bechdel does her own artwork. Another recent McNaughton I read was The Heretic's Daughter, an engrossing novel about the Salem witch trials and, just this weekend, When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson, the third in her series sort of centering on soldier-turned-cop-turned-private-eye-turned-rich-guy Jackson Brodie. Like the previous two, it was terrific. And yesterday I zipped through the excellently named Pagan Kennedy's collection of mostly profiles, The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex, which I snagged through Library Thing's Early Reviewers program. (Having access to review copies when I was a newspaper editor may have ruined me -- when the mailman delivered a package on Saturday, my husband just handed it to me, saying "You are such a book whore." I took it as a compliment. I'm pretty sure he meant it that way.)

September has been a big reading month so far -- it's good to cancel the cable! But I've got a couple doorstops on the horizon -- the new Dennis Lehane, The Given Day, arrived at the library today and I've got Tom Gjelten's book on the Bacardis at home, waiting for a review read.

By the way, Happy Banned Books Week! In the event that Sarah Palin does not impose her personal view of appropriate reading material on the nation, we should be able to keep celebrating the freedom to read: we at FKCC are celebrating; you can read about it on our blog.

You can go home again -- but should you?

I'm home again -- in western Massachusetts, where I grew up -- and I recently went home to the Miami Herald, with a book review in Sunday's paper. The book, called The Lizard King, is a great read -- lots of South Florida weirdness, in a telling that's appreciative without being over the top. It's the same kind of stuff that Carl Hiaasen and many others write about in fiction; I find it more compelling when you realize these people are real and these crazy capers actually happened. The book got a good review from Janet Maslin in today's New York Times, too. BTW, the famous Tom Wolfe phrase from the subject line of this blog post? Turns out he didn't make it up -- he got it from Lincoln Steffens' widow, to whom he was describing his novel in progress. But he asked her permission to use it, so we'll keep him off the list of literary no-goods for now. I learned that from an interesting book we recently added to the collection at the FKCC library -- called "Nice Guys Finish Seventh," about quotes and phrases that have been misquoted through history. The title of that is closer to the original of Leo Durocher's actual phrase, which was apparently "The nice guys are all over there -- in seventh place." Which I think is better than "nice guys finish last" but admittedly not as pithy.

I'm back!

Yes, this blog hit a sophomore slump for awhile there. But I have been reading and even reviewing, if not writing about it in this forum. My latest was a book called "Literary Seductions" by Frances Wilson -- I saw it referred to somewhere, looked it up in our catalogue at work and got it through interlibrary loan. Last weekend, I read it. It was OK though not to my standard of high-end literary gossip/lives for regular readers ("Parallel Lives" by Phyllis Rose being my high watermark in the genre). It was kind of a hybrid between academic treatise and layperson read. Maybe that's how they do it in the UK. Anyway a decent read. But not as good as the previous one, "Wild Nights!" by Joyce Carol Oates, which I have reviewed for an upcoming edition of Solares Hill. I know, I know, JCO's prodigious output can be intimidating. And I even made sure to write this review without using the word "prolific." But this is a good one, maybe because it's also on the literary lives vein -- but with the Oatesean twists of eerieness and weirdness pushed a few shoves beyond comfort level.

The stories are all very different from one another, which is good, and makes it difficult to choose a favorite. I might have liked the first one the least, perhaps because of all the writers I've read the least Poe, perhaps because the 19th century diary style was a tad offputting. The Emily Dickinson robot story is savagely funny, the Hemingway story full of pathos. And, in an additional Key West link, the book is dedicated to Joyce and Seward Johnson, of sculpture and Key West Literary Seminar scholarship fame.

I also read "The Princess of Burundi," another Swedish mystery, this one by Kjell Eriksson (and from the FKCC collection). I thought it was a better read than "Sun Storm," and I enjoyed a little brain candy. But I think I'm done with the Swedish mystery genre for the moment -- my list of other reading, for review and for the upcoming seminar, is just too long. Fortunately the next is a combo: Tony Horwitz's new book, "A Voyage Long and Strange," about European interactions in the New World between Columbus and the Pilgrims. "Confederates in the Attic" is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books, so I'm hoping Horwitz is on form with this one.