The Reading Life--'07

One of the joys of being a bookseller in retirement, as I have been for more than six years, is seeing and handling new books just as they are released. I read reviews often and get a lot out of them. But the actual experience of manipulating and even smelling the ink of a new book is much more visceral.

I don't read books in order to enhance my work at the bookstore. I read books because it is a long-established habit, put in place when I was a child due to parents who saw to it that I visited regularly the weekly bookmobile that parked in the nearby strip mall. Books have always represented journeys into other worlds--whether the worlds of others' imaginations or the actual worlds of far-off lands or times.

So what was I reading in '07? I thought that I would post a few comments on my own book log for last year. Maybe you will find something of interest.

One cluster of books that I explored focused on the Middle East. The involvement of the U.S.A. in that part of the world has demonstrated to me how little I know about Islam, Middle Eastern cultures or history. I began the year by reading President Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. Carter provides a narrative of recent Palestinian and Israeli history. He advocates an even-handed approach to Palestinian issues, advocating both Israel's right to exist and the urgent need to address Palestinian grievances. Another book that took me to an unknown place was Libyan author Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. With shimmering, beautiful prose Matar follows the life of a nine-year old Libyan boy, Suleiman, as he is being raised in the family of opponents to the dictator Quadaffi. More than anything else, I think that this is a novel of a boy's loss of innocence. I had resisted reading a book that I thought might be a book produced for women readers mainly: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Nafisi, a literature professor in Tehran just as the Revolution is getting under way, details her experience of bringing together select women English literature students to discuss Austen, Elliot, Fitzgerald, Nabokov and others at her apartment. She toggles back and forth between the broad Iranian cultural and political setting, the individuals' personal lives and interactions with the great authors and texts. The power of this book--definitely a book for men as well as women--lies in the quiet act of resistance that the reading group's very existence represented. Having read a review of Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua in the Financial Times, I decided to find the book and read it. Kashua is a Palestinian Israeli. The novel details the events over several days when young Palestinian Israeli's home village passes from Israeli control to the control of the Palestinian authority. The confusion in the village, including violence among neighbors, is vividly described. The protagonist's own perplexity and near immobility is highlighted.

Two journalistic accounts of the occupation of Iraq caught my attention. One was The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart. During the first year of occupation, Stewart was appointed deputy governor of amara and then Nasiriyah provinces in Iraq. In this diary he recounts the incredible confusion, cultural insensitivity and mostly groundless hopes of the occupiers as they attempted to impose Western notions on an ancient society. Sometimes the book is funny but mostly it points to how outrageous much of the behavior of the occupiers was. A similar book was Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Here Chandrasekaran discusses the near impermeable bubble that houses American diplomats and other non-military personnel trying to "help" Iraq. What is revealed is incredible naivete, corruption and a sense of being out of touch with day-to-day life surrounding the bubble, sometimes just yards away from the check points. The New York Times listed this volume on its list of the 10 best books of 2007.

Most of the rest of my reading in '07 was more by personal impulse rather than by theme. Since I had visited Mt. Vernon in '06 and had read with appreciation other works by eminent historian Joseph J. Ellis, I enjoyed reading His Excellency: George Washington. The fortunate aspect of this book is that Ellis recognizes Washington's greatness while at the same time calling attention to his weaknesses such as vanity and posturing. Another book that I almost closed before getting very far into it was Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. This book describes the attempted destruction of Native American cultures in the Far West, especially the Navajo, through the lens of Kit Carson. I wasn't sure that I wanted to read about Kit Carson. But Sides spins a wonderful tale. What occured to me was how similar the bias of those Americans occupying the Far West were to the occupiers of the Middle East today.

What else? I dabbled in the classics just a little. Robert Fagles' translation of Virgil's Aeneid caught my attention and I read it with much pleasure. Also, I picked up Seamus Heaney's bilingual translation of Beowolf and read it on one sitting on my trip to Brazil. What I really liked about this book was the interfacing of the modern English text with the old English text. This very interface teaches a lot about how our language has developed in the last thousand years.

I love memoirs. Calvin Trillin wrote About Alice, a slim volume describing his long and fulfilling marriage to his wife. This was an uplifting book and reminds me that long term intimacy also exists even in a time when writes have more fun describing disfunctional families. Another memoir was by novelist Mary Gordon titled Circling My Mother. In this clear eyed book, Gordon recognizes the many contradictions in her mother--her obsessive Catholic faith and her drinking. But her love for her mother is evident. I learned from this book a lot about how in-grown immigrant and post immigrant Roman Catholic culture was up until the late sixties and seventies.

Finally, I want to mention three works of a broadlytheological nature. For many years I had wanted to just pick up and read Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. This book, based on the author time in WWII concentration camps describes how survivors of the camps were often persons who were able to find meaning through work, the inner creative life or in suffering itself. A very different volume was An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Wetern World's Most Austere Monastic Order by Nancy Klein Maguire. The author describes the experiences of five men in the world's most austere Roman Catholic order, the Carthusians. This order sort of constitutes the boot camp of all orders and seemed to practice a kind of spiritual flagelation that is very strange to me. But Maguire shows that even those monks who finally give up and leave still maintain an appreciation for Carthusian practice. Alan Jones is Dean of Grace (Episcopal) Cathedral in San Francisco. He wrote Common Prayer on Common Ground: A Vision of Anglican Orthodoxy. Jones believes that the genius of Anglicanism is its sense of healthy agnosticism and its ability to allow more than one interpretation or belief. He asserts that this ability to listen to more than one side to a question without needing to take a stance is, in fact, the orthodoxy of Anglicanism.

Where did I get the time to do this reading? It helps to be dependent largely on public transportation where otherwise boring trips can be broken by good reading. Even I am surprised that I was able to do this reading--and I know that I have forgotten to mention several books.

So I wish you good reading in '08. If you want to comment, why don't you tell Blue Ogee readers what you want to read in the year ahead or what you found interesting in '07?