Like the years 2016 and 2017, in which I read 22 books each
year, I read 22 books during 2018 as well. As I mentioned once before, I don’t
include those books of poetry that I read during the year because I don’t know
when I can say that I have fully read a book of poems. The great majority of my
reading during the year focused on nonfiction, with the exception of three
novels by Ivan Doig that I read early in the year.
As I mentioned in 2017, the historian Elliot West in his
collection of essays introduced me to some of the western writers that I had overlooked,
namely, Ivan Doig and Mary Clearman Blew. My reading Blew’s Bone Deep in Landscape
has also introduced me to novels that I have neglected by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.,
and Mildred Walker, something which I plan on correcting soon. Blew manages to mix memoir with literary criticism and
vivid descriptions of place, particularly Montana and Idaho, in not only Bone
Deep in Landscape but also in This Is Not the Ivy League and Balsamroot. Blew
in Bone Deep in Landscape recognizes that the “western landscape is permeated
with private associations contained in memory and family narrative.”
Linda Hasselstrom records her daily observations and her
memories in Gathering from the Grassland, a book that details the passing of
a year. Hasselstrom places a great deal of attention on the lives of her father
and mother, whose correspondence and journals she describes and analyzes. Tara
Westover describes her own family life in Educated, a book that has gained a
lot of attention. It surprised me how often the writer felt compelled to return
home even when she was living overseas. She was lucky to have the money to fly
from London to Idaho during Christmas break, for example. The issue of how the
writer supported herself overseas is not addressed in the book.
The remainder of my reading for the year falls into three
categories—history relating to the Native people in this country, more recent
history, and the natural world. Finding a number of references to the Nez Perce
in Blew’s memoirs and not terribly familiar with the Native people of the
Northwest, I read Daniel J. Sharfstein’s Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph,
Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War. Previously, I was aware that Chief
Joseph and about 400 members of his band were imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth in
or near the area that now contains the airport. Many places in Kansas once contained
the voices of the Native people.
My reading of Vernon R. Maddux and Albert Glenn Maddux’s In
Dull Knife’s Wake: The True Story of the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878 makes
me want to return to western Kansas to see the remnants of the Battle of
Punished Woman's Fork. I had overlooked that area when I was visiting Scott
County Lake and Monument Rocks about ten years ago. Some of my other reading,
that is, Give me Eighty Men, Where One Hundred Soldiers Were Killed and The
Wagon Box Fight, related to the trip that my wife and made to Wyoming in 2016.
I was surprised to see the emphasis on Christianity when I
was reading Indianapolis and Killers of the Flower Moon. Many people learned of the USS Indianapolis in
the Steven Spielberg movie Jaws, when the character Quint describes his
eyewitness account of the sailors eaten by sharks during the four days that the
crew of the USS Indianapolis awaited rescue after their ship was torpedoed by a
Japanese submarine. Lynn Vincent and
Sara Vladic in Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S.
Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man provide a
history of the ship. Vincent turns over the narrative to Vladic, once the ship
has been torpedoed, and Vladic’s religious faith becomes strongly present as
Vladic describes, in detail, the appeals that the sailors made to their God. These
appeals could have easily been given less attention. Likewise, some of the coincidences
that occurred while the sailors were in the water could have not been related
to prayers; it’s the author who makes the connection between a fortuitous event
and prayer. A similar emphasis on religious faith appears in Killers of the
Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI when David Grann, the
author, quotes a poem that “echoed Jesus’s command in the Sermon on the Mount”
when the block quote is totally unnecessary. The author provides another block
quote taken from “Dies Irae,” what the author describes as a “rhythmic
thirteenth-century hymn.” Neither quote
is essential to the narrative. While I can understand that some people are more
religious than I, I think that these authors interject too much of their
religious faith in these books. These
writers shouldn’t assume that their intended audience shares their religious
faith.
Out of the books related to nature that I read during 2018,
I most enjoyed Quakeland and The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. My students
often believe that essays derived from research should not include relevant references
to the author because of things that they learned from their high school
teachers. Both Dan Egan in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes and Kathryn
Miles in Quakeland: On the Road to American’s Next Devastating Earthquake put
themselves in their books, with Miles revealing what led to her interest and
what discoveries that she made during her research, and with Egan revealing his
observations, his experiences, and his interactions with the people interviewed for the book. Both
books are excellently written, informative, and well-researched.
Although I plan on reading and possibly obtaining either new
or used copies of Maxine Gordon’s Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of
Dexter Gordon and Leonardo Trasande’s Sicker, Fatter, Poorer during the current
year, and although I see myself discovering one or two novels by D’Arcy
McNickle, I expect to buy fewer books during 2019 and to content myself with
what I have left unread on my book shelves. I may eventually return to some of
the books that I read when I was younger, such as Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf or
Siddhartha, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Pan, Victoria, or Growth of the Soil, or
D. H. Lawrence’s Rainbow or Aaron’s Rod, to see whether they still have any
appeal to me.
