During 2018, I added twenty-three books to my account at
LibraryThing, two of which I already owned but had neglected to add to my
account. These books bring the total number of books in my personal library to
993. That figure, however, isn’t an accurate representation of the total number
of books in my library because I have given about fifteen of them away to
friends and relatives or to the local library.
I read twenty-one books in 2019. I
am currently reading book number twenty-two, but I don’t anticipate finishing
that book before the year ends. I had started a couple of other books during the
year but ended up putting them aside temporarily and plan on returning to them
at some point in the future. As I have said in previous posts, I don’t include
books of poetry in my overall total because I don’t consider a book of poems
ever totally read. I usually return several times to each book of poems that I
buy. During the year 2019, I purchased five poetry collections, three by Joseph
Millar and two by Thomas Reynolds, a local poet.
The year 2019 started with me reading fiction, beginning
with Ivan Doig’s Mountain Time, Bucking the Sun, and English Creek. The
characters in these novels led me to reread Doig’s The Bartender’s Tale and Ride
with Me, Mariah Montana, not having read the novels in sequence. Through my reading of both Elliot West and Mary Clearman Blew in previous years, I discovered those novels set in the American West that I had neglected, and this realization
led to my reading Dorothy Johnson’s Buffalo Woman, more of Mildred Walker,
particularly her The Curlew’s Cry, and more of A.B. Guthrie, Jr., particularly his
Arfive, The Last Valley, and Fair Land, Fair Land, which has a particularly
tragic conclusion.
For those interested in discovering Ivan Doig’s fiction, I
recommend English Creek, which is narrated by a fifteen-year-old male during
the summer prior to the start of World War II. The same narrator, although much
older, appears in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana.
My teaching led to my reading Leonardo Trasande’s Sicker,
Fatter, Poorer, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie’s Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Elizabeth
Cline’s Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Cheap Fashion, and Kate
Grenville’s The Case Against Fragrance. My students this semester had the
option to pick their own topics for the position essay. It was difficult for many
of the students to choose an arguable topic with which they have personal
experience. Although some of them chose topics like the benefits of attending a
community college, the merits of online classes, or the disadvantages of
working while in high school, all of which they were able to support with their
own experience, some of the other students struggled with the assignment and instead
of delving into their experience, they chose topics that have been receiving attention
in the news, such as medical marijuana. As a result, I have decided during the
next semester to resurrect a fact-finding assignment in which the students will
have to choose from a list of research topics. I plan on creating research questions about fast fashion and fragrances, for example.
One book I discovered quite by chance is Bryant Simon’s The
Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives. I
was browsing through a secondhand bookstore and saw this book on display. While
describing the fire at a chicken processing plant in North Carolina in 1991, in
which 25 employees were killed and 55 injured, the book also addresses low
wages, disappearing low-skilled jobs, and processed food. The description of how
the chicken was processed would definitely make one never eat chicken nuggets
again and possibly give up eating chicken entirely. Simon’s mentioning of the
books Kitchen Literacy and Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture resulted in
my ordering a used copy of each book, and I have added these books to the other
sixty or so awaiting my attention.
A few years ago, my wife and I followed part of the Oregon
Trail as we drove through Nebraska and Wyoming. That experience was the impetus
for my reading Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail, which describes an attempt to
duplicate what the pioneers had experienced. The author bought a wagon and
mules, and, with the assistance of his brother, he followed the original trail,
beginning in St. Joseph, Missouri. The book recounts what the original travelers
experienced and describes the mishaps and the people encountered during Buck’s
trip. Much of the historical material comes from John Unruh’s The Plains Across:
The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860. I have that
book but haven’t yet read it. In addition to The Oregon Trail, I read Mary
Barmeyer O’Brien’s Heart of the Trail, which is subtitled as The Stories of
Eight Wagon Train Women. Some stories are better than others, with the weaker ones
supported by questionable sources, such as an encyclopedia and Time-Life Books.
Most recently, I read Mari Sandoz’ The Buffalo Hunters: The
Story of the Hide Men. The Buffalo Hunters describes the mass slaughter of one
species over a period of sixteen years. It was tough reading that book at first
because of the gore and the rampant shooting of so many animals. It’s
unfortunate that we had an economic system that thrived on the extermination of
the buffalo, with some hunters making thousands of dollars at one time from selling
the hides while the railroads profited from the numbers of hides, tongues, and
bones that were shipped to the east. Even though some historians consider The
Buffalo Hunters as a definitive source for its description of the elimination
of the buffalo, I wish that Sandoz had documented the information appearing in
her book. I often found myself wishing for footnotes as I was reading the book.
I mentioned last year wanting to read Maxine Gordon’s Sophisticated
Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon. That book remains on my list, and
I hope to get to it soon. I plan on returning to Ivan Doig’s Dancing at the
Rascal Fair in the new year; it’s a book I started but had discovered that it
precedes English Creek, and I wasn’t ready at the time to interact with
characters that I had not yet encountered in Doig’s other books. Otherwise, I
plan on reading some of the titles on my bookshelves that have not yet been read
and rereading other ones. I have enough books to declare a freeze on buying any
other books, but I am not sure that I can make that commitment. Ideally, it
should take me another couple of years before I can say that I have added 1,000
books to my account at LibraryThing. It is getting difficult to find any extra
space in my home office.
