The Books I've Read

1/3/2010

Since this is the beginning of a new year, I thought I'd take mental inventory of what I've been reading. An article in today's New York Times called How to Train the Aging Brain discussed the transience of information in which we read, then forget things we've read almost immediately. The key, the author says, is to access that information by connecting it to something else. This will help improve memory.

This idea of reading something, then almost immediately forgetting it got me thinking. I read a whole slew of books over the summer, but did I remember any of them? Here's a little list of some books I've read lately, and what I can remember of them.

Out Stealing Horses


I do remember this novel, it's spare yet evocative descriptions, chronicling the remembrances of an old man about his boyhood in post-war Norway. The relationships between the protagonist, Trond, and his father fits like a transparency over the relationship between Trond and his own child, completely diagramming the two pairs. I liked this idea of solitude, being alone with your interior life. And I wanted to get a cabin and live there, in solitude.

OK, so far so good.



The Year of Living Biblically

This book was kind of funny, in a "look-at-me-I'm-a-funny-yuppie" kind of way. Short on depth, but long on research, Jacobs did try to show varied slices of what passes for religion these days. The end was no surprise, as are all books whose focused-inward characters receive no epiphanies. Look outside yourselves, I wanted to say.


Tracing Paradise: A Year in Harmony With Milton

I started this in the summer, and spent many July mornings on the front porch, sipping coffee in the sun, reading of Dawn Potter's life in Maine. A lot of this book I forgot, but it's handy- always near my journal- so I can revisit this book often.

I guess this is where I can say the disconnect comes in- if a book is very dense, or meaningful, I tend to re-read it several times. I'm on the third of fourth go-round of this one.

There were new poets I discovered this year, too. C.P. Cavafy. Denver Buston. Lucille Clifton. I read books by all of them. I'm finding the difference between "collected works" and "complete works" is sometimes a big deal. I suppose this means I am even a bigger nerd than before.

Alas, my downfall this year was Mrs. Dalloway. I did not finish the book by year's end as I had vowed to do. I am nearing the end, and I'm wishing I could take some sort of public transportation to my job, just so I could finish up the novel. What will happen to Septimus and Reza? Will Elizabeth really see through Miss Kilman? Will Clarissa have to invite Ellie?

I wish I could have all my students read this book, too. I think it's a good exercize in literature. But more of them would probably just use the Sparknotes, to pass, rather than allow themselves to be carried away on the richness of another era.