Boxing Day
Overeating: The Holidaze

A Year of Books

Here's the thing: I haven't read enough this year. Too tired, too much work, too many dogs, too many other activites, blah, blah, blah,  All legit facts, but here's the  very scary realization that I came to this week: being online so much?not only eats up hours, it has retrained my brain to digest small bits of writing that link to others and so on and so on. Is this why I am throwing down books after a few pages? Why I have so many started and none finished, and why they are piling up faster than I can read them?

I realized how addicted I've become to reading blogs instead of books when we were last on the Cape and the internet was down. I didn't think a thing of it and went to bed with one of the many books I keep there. I promptly fell asleep. .

By the next night, the internet was back on and after dinner, I pulled out the laptop and as I began to read blogs, I felt a physical relaxation course through me as if  I was a smoker lighting one up.  I'm addicted, I realized. As addicted as a pack a day smoker. And I was just as repulsed. 

I could sermonize here about the downfall of literacy in America, this generation's electronic umbilical cords, tweeting, blogging, FB'ing, but I won't. I'll just take responsiblity for myself and unplug. (Rest assured, it's not my own blogging that takes up all my time, but reading the hundreds I have bookmarked.) Time to get back to reading the old-fashioned way!

I have lined up some of my reading for 2011 and I will share it with you in the next post. I have several nonfiction genres that I am exploring and  a few novels lined up, but generally I like to discovery good novels as the year progresses and pick up whatever strikes me at the moment, so there won't be as much fiction on the list as of now.

Before I look ahead, what did I read this year? I read a lot of art books, and I listened to quite a few books. Here's a few I listened to:

Little Bee - Chris Cleave. (One of the most painful books I've ever listened to. Or read. Do not listen/read this before you have to go somewhere unless you enjoy arriving with a swollen face. It made me very angry in parts as the plot is very emotionally manipulative - seems to be a theme in what I chose this year. Warning: extraordinarily violent scenes that are not suitable for children or carpoolers that you don't know well.)

Great House - Nicole Krauss (I am currently re-listening to parts of this so I can figure out how one whole section relates to the whole. The novel is centered, very loosely, around a desk and the stories nest inside one another like Russian dolls. Unfortunately parts of stray so far from the plot line that I lost the thread of one entire section's relation to the whole. Not light holiday reading and not recommended for listening to in the car in commuter traffic.)

The Help - Katherine Stockett. (The best book of 2010 for me.)

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Aimee Bender (I love Aimee Bender. I wanted to love this book. The fantastical plot twists were intriguing, but ultimately unsatisfyingly resolved.)

The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein (This book drove me crazy. I was alternately sobbing and annoyed that it was so easy to anticipate  one of the plot devices 100 hundred pages before it developed. But the the narrator is a dog,  an omniscient dog and the plot has to twist itself to accomodate his omniscience. But a dog. A dying dog. Need I say more?)

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - Helen Simonson (Elegant, evocative writing about growing old, race relations, and contemporary life in an English village. As lovely as Pym. Looking forward to reading her next one)

The Summer We Read Gatsby - Danielle Ganek (A fun and light novel set in the Hamptons where two half-sisters come to grips with the next stages in their romantic lives. We should all have such problems that are resolved so neatly.)

My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster

Such a Pretty Fat - Jen Lancaster (These are breezy books that I find much more fun to listen to than to read.   It's like having your best friend  riding shotgun. Just watch out when you are at a light and howling and the driver next to you rolls up his window.)

The Spoken Word: The Bloomsbury Group (British Library - Sound Archive)(radio interviews with Virginia Woolf (!), Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, and other Bloomsbury illuminati. Imagine driving to court in the Bronx and being stuck on the Deegan, and listening to the actual voice of Virginia Woolf talking about writing. Worlds colliding.)

Currently listening to:

The Kitchen House - Kathleen Grissom. (Have to put this away until later in the year because it is narrated by an actress who also was a narrator for The Help, so it is too reminiscent for the time being.)

American Bloomsbury - Susan Cheever (Will start this next week when I return to commuting. )

Currently reading the old-fashioned way:

The Morville Hours - Kathleen Swift. (I've mentioned this book before and it has not failed to delight. It is not a book you plow through in one sitting or even a week. It is a book to savor, to dip into with the alignment of the seasons that she writes about in sections accorded to the prayer services of the Benedictines - vespers, lauds, etc. The perfect reading for gray, damp, and dark days between the end of this year and the next. Splendid prose about winter and the skeletons of gardesn, the roots of gardening in medieval England, the corners of her National Trust cottage, and the anticipation, always, of spring and its rebirth)

 

What are you reading on this betwist and between season, and what are your reading plans for the coming year?


 

 

 

 

 

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