with a menu of photography, books, jazz, poetry, and other items occasionally

Sunday, January 08, 2017

Reading in 2016



During 2016, I managed to read twenty-two books. For several years now, I have been keeping a somewhat accurate record of how many books that I have read in a year’s time. Some people can read as many books as there are weeks in a year. My number of books read during a year’s time seems to stay fairly consistent—roughly twenty books but sometimes a little more or a little less.

Having downloaded the Kindle app to my Android phone, I now am able to read samples of books that interest me before I add them to my Wish List at Amazon. That's how I discovered Edward Humes’ Door to Door: The Magnificent Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, a book that contains frightening statistics and makes one a more conscious, and more careful, driver. I discovered Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields, and the Dinner Table from reading a sample as well. Her book has made me more reluctant to buy much produce at Walmart, except for bananas and apples occasionally, and to avoid restaurants like Applebee’s. I have not yet purchased some of the other books whose samples I have read, such as Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA and Elliot West’s collection of historical essays. Sometimes I am lucky to find what I want at a secondhand bookstore, such as Half-Price Books and the Dusty Bookshelf in Lawrence. I am not including these samples among my list of books read.

My only digital book is The Book of Women, a chapbook of poems by Dorianne Laux, which, unfortunately, is no longer available in any other format.


There are other books of poems that I dip into occasionally but have not read completely. I am still working my way through Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems. Several of the poems in my copy of his book are bookmarked. I actually have many of the books that make up his collected poems except for Monolithos, which I originally read as an undergraduate. During the past year, I also picked up Ruth Stone’s Second-Hand Coat: New and Selected Poems, Kim Addonizio’s What Is This Thing Called Love, Sharon Olds’ Odes, Dorianne Laux’s Facts About the Moon, Adrian C. Louis’ Random Exorcisms, and Michael Heffernan’s The Night-Watchman’s Daughter. None of these books have been finished as of yet. It is difficult for me to actually say at what point I have read any one book of poems because I return to the poems often and keep the book on my nightstand or on a nearby dresser. These books of poems are not included in my list for 2016.

Only two works of fiction are included among my list. Sometime during the summer, my wife lent me her copy of Richard Moran’s Earth Winter, something that she picked up at one of the library sales. She thought I would at least enjoy the romance between two of the main characters and find the pages devoted to a Russian submarine interesting, knowing my fondness for submarine movies. (At one point last summer when I was re-watching U-571 for about the third or fourth time, a movie about a young officer learning to take command, I felt as if my father, who had died eight years ago and who made a career of the Navy, was sitting next to me and listening to me comment on the movie as we watched it together.)  I also read James Howard Kunstler’s The Harrows of Spring, the fourth and final book in his series World Made by Hand.  Some of the characters in the fictional Union Grove, New York are adjusting to their lives, after having seen their country destroyed by nuclear detonations, having lost loved ones in a flu pandemic, and having seen the conveniences that once made up modern life disappear.

The great majority of the other books read during 2016 can be classified as history, such as The Heart of Everything That Is, Prairie Indian Raiders, Apache Wars, A Terrible Glory, and Last Stand. I also read Trails: Toward a New Western History, a collection of essays addressing what was once considered the New Western History in the 1990’s and which provided a point of view to re-examine the history of the American West. These essays have provided a number of examples of good narrative history that I have neglected to read, such as Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a number of years. Trails is a much better book than Old West/New West, another collection of critical essays that I read this last year but one that, although largely positive, presents a less accepting view of the New West, with Gene M. Gressley saying in the Prologue that the new history typically contains “an absence of archival research” and a “one-dimensional underside view of western history.” It’s those neglected elements of western history, no matter how critical of our past by revealing flaws, mistakes, and misshapen attitudes, that need to be examined more thoroughly.

Also included among the books read this last year are two collections of essays, Barry Lopez’ detailed descriptions and observations in About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory and David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. It’s unfortunate that David Foster Wallace ended his own life in 2008 because I would have liked seeing how marriage and parenthood, for example, would have changed his world view and would have altered his sense of humor when observing something like a state fair.

My LibraryThing account now says that I possess 905 books, the majority of which serve as remnants of the journey, and all of which are crammed into two rooms of my house. I added thirty-six books to my collection during the previous year and will be reading the ones that I have not yet gotten to. Although I try to limit the number of books purchased during any given year, I find it difficult to resist adding more books to my collection, already having added three more books so far this year.

For Christmas, my wife gave me a floor lamp with an adjustable neck to make reading in bed easier. It wasn’t until I assembled the lamp that I discovered that the bulb is not replaceable although the company assures me that it will last for 50,000 hours. More than five and a half years of reading await me, the company says.