Or, technically, read and re-read books. Mostly off my own shelf, but also borrowed and reviewed titles.
Listed in chronological order of my reading:
1. The Essential Gandhi (1983) wherein I find he’d never written “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” or something like that. Bookmark the Quote Investigator, which suggests that Gandhi may have spoken these words on multiple occasions, but didn’t use it in his published articles—none in this anthology of his writing, to be sure.
2. Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice (1993) by Mark J. Plotkin. An ethnobotanist’s sensitive journey through the Amazon to discover how the environment and cultures heal (or kill).
3. A Land of Ghosts (2007) by David G. Campbell. More botanical research in far western Amazonia. A little less culturally and environmentally sensitive than Plotkin’s book, in my opinion. Good on the history of imperial exploitation and the collapse of a resource-based economy (rubber) when synthetics are invented.
4. “What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?” (2022) by Arthur Krystal, New Yorker, January 24. Somewhat stream of consciousness reflection on our quarantine. The kind of thing I wanted to write.
5. In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (2018) by Nathaniel Philbrick. More Washington than hurricanes, and actually more about how much the French Navy helped America win independence. I love Philbrick’s writing. Will read more.
4. The only book so far that I just could not get myself to finish reading: Loon Lake (1979) by E. L. Doctorow. One of my favorite writers, and I don’t mind a fractured and confusing narrative; it was the child rapes I could not abide. Bought it at the thrift store, and it’s back in the outgoing thrift bag.
5. All’s Well That Ends Well (play) by William Shakespeare. Re-read. I get a lot of the comedies mixed up, so it’s worth a second or third or fourth indulgence. I love smart heroines like Helena the doctor’s daughter.
6. Maggot and Worm, and Eight Other Short Stories (1969) by M. M. Liberman (who shared my birthday). Stories from before he was my Grinnell professor. It can seem strange reading several first-person stories with different protagonists, and especially strange when you know (knew) the author. Literature that reminds me why I never wanted to teach (or write) literature. (I liked but didn’t love it.)
7. Great Expectations (1860) by Charles Dickens. (Re-read) How come the only thing I remembered from my initial reading decades ago is the decaying bridal gown on the jilted Miss Havisham? Anyway, a good reminder of why I love Dickens: character, language, theme, and perfect storytelling. How come I only have five Dickens books on my shelf? (GE plus Pickwick, Oliver, Two Cities, and the Carol)
8. Silent Spring, and Other Writings on the Environment (2018 Library of America Collection) by Rachel Carson. The poisoning of the baby boom. Brought back memories of the green plastic poison-injecting stick Dad had us use to treat the dandelions at one house, the mandated gypsy-moth spraying at another house, and the sweaty bandanna Dad wore up at our orchard in West Virginia, working his own poison-spraying machine. Amazed we all survived. Rachel’s own life chronology had me weeping.
9. The Editor (2019) by Steven Rowley. Novel about a writer who is blown away to meet his glamorous editor, Jacqueline Onassis. I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction (I know, I know), but I picked it up because: Jackie. A good companion to the Clint Hill memoirs of guarding the Kennedy FLOTUS.
10. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991) by Daniel Yergin. Borrowed from my brother’s bookshelf, with a boarding-pass bookmark indicating the timeliness of the book when he started reading it. I do like resource-focused histories, and this one is a good study for me in the geopolitics. More enlightening, though, is the role of energy and other resources in war. Logistics. Came up again with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as in General Grant’s memoir (see below).
11. Emperor of the Air (1989) by Ethan Canin. Short story collection. More first-person literature. Six months later I don’t remember any of the stories, but I remember enjoying the writing. When this collection came out, Canin was working on his first novel. He did a story reading at one of the long-gone bookstores in town. I miss those days. I remember telling him, as he signed my copy, that I wrote my first novel in three weeks. Obviously it never got published. (But see how long it took me to read his work.)
12. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1991) by Doris Kearns Goodwin. A more psychologically analytical critique than I was expecting in a biography. She reveals more of LBJ’s breakdown in the-end-of-presidency years than is hinted at in Robert McNamara’s memoir (see below). Note: Also on my bookshelf but not yet read is John Dickerson’s The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency, which deals extensively with Johnson but also with the most-recent one-termer. I need more time before I consider this a safe “history.”
13. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992) by Daniel J. Boorstin. I expected more art and artists in this, but “creation” includes the creation of ideas about creation itself. So: mythology, philosophy, and religion. Nonwestern thought is included, but not as extensively as Western. Not many women, but, as I noted in my notes, “Thanks for Virginia Woolf.”
14. “The New Dress” (1927) by Virginia Woolf and “The Madonna of the Future” (1887) by Henry James (both in one of my anthologies, Masters of the Modern Short Story, 1955). The stream of consciousness by Woolf apparently was revolutionary (per Boorstin, see above). James’s “madonna” was about the artist who would portray his madonna but [SPOILER ALERT] never did, so it was really an unactualized work of art. Which you could say is what the future is.
15. The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885; my cheap 2012 edition with multiple typos collects volumes 1 and 2). Describing his early years, Grant reveals a wry sense of humor but little of his personal life once he meets and marries Julia Dent. And of course he died shortly after his account of the Civil War. Since Grant had spent time as a quartermaster, much of the war strategy was about getting food and arms to the men. It was also about resources and geography. Logistics! (See The Prize, above.) If only, if only he’d been able to write about his presidency. I imagine it would resemble McNamara’s In Retrospect. Their accounts of the wars they directed were remarkably similar, high on personal responsibility, low on assigning blame.16. A Room with a View (1908) by E. M. Forster. All I remembered from the movie was Daniel Day Lewis as Cecil. [SPOILER ALERT] I didn’t really see the happily-ever-after ending coming. The novel is included in an anthology with Howard’s End and Maurice. On my list of books to clear off my shelf, but I guess I should read the other two first? The movies were really enough.
17. Art as Therapy (2013) by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong. On understanding art as a way of working out our own lives. Maybe. The lessons are well laid out, but I can’t see taking the book with me every time I go to a museum to look at art. Maybe Visual Intelligence by Amy Herman is a better choice for looking at art and seeing the world (outside of oneself, that is).
18. Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943) by Max Shulman. Midwestern American humorist (viz. “Dobie Gillis”) looks at college life and the intellectual (or anti-intellectual) influences of the day as proposed by the variety of co-eds the guileless protagonist pursues. Much of the fun is with the naming of characters, more heavy-handed than even Dickens and Wodehouse: Yetta Samovar, the communist; Alpha Cholera, the fraternity.
19. Voluntary Simplicity (1998) by Duane Elgin. Anecdotal, survey-based. The psychological impacts of changes individuals made in their lives for the sake of environmental preservation and just simpler living. I would like to have had more how-to pointers and lists. I guess that’s the magazine editor in me. From my notes: “I feel like I’m trying to read the safety instructions card while the plane is going down. It’s 2022 and here we go.”
20. A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway. One of those classics I’d never read, but what great writing! A slice of World War I (medical corps of Italian campaign) I know nothing about, mixed in with a love story. I’d read two of the other novels in this collected works (The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises) but not For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’ll have to read/re-read all eventually.
21. Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984) by Fay Weldon. Lecture-y but tender. Made me want to re-read Emma, which I have done (see below).
22. “Phaedo” in The Portable Plato. Dialogue. On the death of Socrates and the immortality of souls.
23. Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s (2010), edited by Robert W. Rydell et al. Academic companion volume to the exhibition at the National Building Museum, which was overloaded in the captioning (hence my purchase of the book). Essays are scholarly (lofty but flat), and the reproductions are crap. Interesting, nevertheless, for the art and cultural history.
24. Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare. One I’d never read or seen. How sad! The story, I mean.
25. The USS Emmons: Eyewitness Accounts from Survivors of the Battle of Okinawa (2020), transcribed by Cheri Yecke. Re-read in preparation for presenting a copy to the Navy Heritage Center (Robert Smith, archivist). I still think it’s better than a Spielberg movie.
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| with Rear Admiral Frank Thorp (ret_USN) at Navy Heritage Center |
26. Breaking New Ground: A Personal History (2013) by Lester R. Brown. The life and work of my favorite “futurist,” an environmental and agricultural researcher and policy analyst who started life as a tomato farmer. (His writings about sustainability in The Futurist had the most influence on me personally.)
27. Art of the Twentieth Century (1976) by Maurice Besset. One of my college textbooks, which I probably only dipped into at the time. Really kind of appalling how hard it is to read textbooks. I’m surprised I learned anything in college. Also appalling how few women artists are included. Love me some Paul Klee, though, and he’s treated well here. (Yes, I’ll say it: I’m a Klee-mate.)
28. “Extricating Young Gussie,” aka “The Man With Two Left Feet” (Saturday Evening Post, 1915) by P. G. Wodehouse. Noted as the first appearance of Jeeves. (I needed something to help get me through Art of the Twentieth Century.)
29. King John (play) by William Shakespeare. Another one I hadn’t read or seen before. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys right away without actors showing you. But once you get to beloved young Prince Arthur you know. And you cry your eyes out.
30. How Right You Are, Jeeves (1960) by P. G. Wodehouse. Included in a three-volume collection with Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1962) and Jeeves & the Tie That Binds (1971). There’s no point to summarizing the plot. The language is the thing.
31. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995) by Robert S. McNamara (with Brian VanDeMark). A survey of the mistakes and failures that comprised the Vietnam War. Like General Grant in the Civil War, McNamara is reluctant to blame anyone, including Johnson, for all that happened. But, he emphasizes, Johnson should have been less secretive. See Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on the subject of Johnson’s pathological need to control all information.
32. The Republic by Plato. Last of the dialogues included in The Portable Plato. Terrifyingly accurate description of the tyranny confronting us as the threatened successor of democracy (due to growing popular resentment of some people’s profligate expression of their rights and freedoms). On educating the future guardians of his ideal republic, Plato (in the character of Socrates) argues against teaching literature (fiction/poetry), such as is found in Homer where it is unauthentic (lies). I thought he was being sarcastic, since he cites Homer a lot. If Plato is the imitator of Socrates, does that mean he, too, is removed from Truth?
33. Beyond Identities: Human Becomings in Weirding Worlds (2022) by Jim Dator. Sociology, futurism, memoir, diatribe. Reviewed for Foresight Signals. Dator is one of the best known and most revered futures academics of our time. I liked the memoir and (Trump-directed) diatribe parts the best.
34. Emma (1815) by Jane Austen. Re-read because Fay Weldon seemed to admire it the most (see above). Well, yes, it is pretty perfect. None of the melodrama of scoundrels defiling maidens (Wickham, Willoughby).
35. Much Ado About Nothing (play) by William Shakespeare. Still my favorite comedy. Re-read in preparation of seeing modernized version at Shakespeare Theatre Company (Spamalot alum Rick Holmes as Benedick).
36. Wait Till Next Year (1997) by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Memoir: on being a young girl who loves baseball, specifically the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson. A detailed and moving reflection on the 1950s and its terrors, from polio to McCarthyism. DKG herself is as interesting as the subjects she writes about as a historian.
37. The Stranger (based on Stuart Gilbert’s 1946 English translation) by Albert Camus. A novel about a seemingly disengaged man who is tried for a murder but is really found guilty for not feeling sorry enough about his own mother’s death in a nursing home. His biggest emotional outburst is directed at the cleric who foists religious beliefs on him at the end. Contemporary readers either view the narrator as a monster or “diagnose” him as having Asperger’s syndrome. But is he not “existentialist” in the sense of accepting present conditions (such as his mother’s death) as they occur? His intolerance of heat and bright light suggests sensory issues, but I wouldn’t call his nonbelief in the afterlife “monstrous.”
37. The Tempest (play) by William Shakespeare. Re-read in preparation of seeing Teller’s magical interpretation at Round House Theatre. I’d forgotten how much of the play was about forgiveness. (The RHT production’s magic tricks were distracting, but I forgive it. It was a jump-to-your-feet standing ovation performance.)
38. Becket, or The Honour of God (play, 1959) by Jean Anouih. Henry II and Thomas Becket the martyr. Sorry, hated it. Henry and Thomas were both pretty despicable. I remember seeing T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral years ago, but I don’t remember disliking the story this much. Maybe someone could recommend a good history?
39. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) by John Irving. Religion, baseball, the 1950s, Vietnam. Friends and mothers. Broken people. It’s been a while since I’d read John Irving. He is masterful with the details, just as Doris Kearns Goodwin is with her own memoir of the same era and themes. The narrator (author?) is as angry with Reagan as many of us (specifically Dator, see above) have been with Trump.
*Addendum: At some point while reading the Gen. Grant memoir I took a Sunday off to re-read Othello, again in preparation for attending a related production, Red Velvet, at Shakespeare Theatre Co. Sunday afternoons have always been good Shakespeare-reading times, going back to my Shakespeare Readers days.
I find memoirs to be my favorite window on history. I loved every one I read this year, from U. S. Grant to D. K. Goodwin. As for the history plays, Shakespeare’s kings, Anouih’s martyr, I will only say my mind’s eye is an insufficient interpreter. Give me dramaturgs, directors, designers, and actors.
There was also more philosophy and religion in my readings than I even expected with my Gandhi and Plato, to wit, Camus’s Stranger and Irving’s Owen Meany. These readings are broadening my understanding of misunderstandings. And I like how Irving describes faith itself as a miracle.
Lastly, turning obsession into an art form (and trust me, the point of this was not puzzle solving. It was inspiration), a compiled layout of the privately printed Stories My Words Tell. Nobody seems to have gotten the point of it. I apologize for the "stories" not being legible. Inquire within. Love, hosaa
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| Stories My Words Tell, C. G. Wagner. Hint: open the image link in a new tab and zoom in. |
