that’s as many as four tens (plus one)

Last year I read forty-one books, which is one more than I read in 2010. This year I’ve read zero.  Oops.  Well, I’m most of the way through How Conversation Works by Ronald Wardhaugh; about halfway through Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (dull and disappointing so far!), Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor, and Ibi Kaslik’s Skinny; and I’m a dozen chapters into The Last Dinosaur Book by W. J. Thomas Mitchell.  I’ve also sort-of-read four different books on architecture this month, but I can’t count them because I didn’t read them straight through.  Perhaps my old creative writing teacher is right and I am a bit unfocused—that or I suddenly have lots of time on my hands and a whole bunch of thesisy writer’s block.

On to the list!

Things I Read for School that I Didn’t Particularly Enjoy
The Sot-weed Factor by Ebenezer Cooke
Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Israel Potter by Herman Melville
Liberia, or Mr. Peyton’s Experiments by Sarah Josepha Hale (Quick! What’s Hale famous for?  She was the first editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, she was one of the biggest influences in Thanksgiving becoming a federal holiday, and she’s the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”  What she is not, though, is a person who is able to make a hamfisted political parable pleasurable to read.)
The Wild Irish Girl by Lady Morgan, Sydney Owenson
Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination by William Covino (Enjoy, no.  Using in my thesis, yes.)
John Caldigate by Anthony Trollope
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
 

School Reads I Enjoyed
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills
The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Rhetoric of Empire by David Spurr
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte (Far, far more satisfying than her sister’s Wuthering Heights.)
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Lewis Carroll and His World by John Pudney

Things I Read on My Own Time that I Didn’t Particularly Enjoy
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Other People’s Love Letters by Bill Shapiro
Y: The Last Man, Book 2 by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

Well-Worth-It Home Reads
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lizzie Borden in Love by Juliana Baggott
Year of the Snake by Lee Ann Roripaugh
Bird by Bird by Kristin Naca
Keeping Them Alive by Christine Stewart-Nuñez
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Unmanned (Y: the Last Man, Book 1) by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban
A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Lawrence Smith
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Retro Pies by Linda Everett (I count cookbooks if I read them all the way through and learn things like what a chess pie is.  This is not a very good cookbook in that it’s poorly edited and cheaply thrown together.  But it was pretty interesting, all the same.)
The Sweet Life: Desserts from Chanterelle by Kate Zuckerman (This, in contrast, is a superb cookbook.)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
100 Things Cardinals Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die by Derrick Goold
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

And my top book of 2011 is … I don’t know.  I’ll do a top six instead: Into the Wild, Gift from the Sea, The Moonstone, This Side of Paradise, The Year of Magical Thinking, and Franny and Zooey.  Okay, now that it’s narrowed down, I think my personal favorite of these was Into the Wild, not because I didn’t find Chris McCandless’s whole schtick irritating (because I did, honestly), but because Krakauer wrote one hell of a little book.  Here’s the best line: “It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

Oh, and This Side of Paradise has officially added “Amory Blaine” to my list of Names for Future Cats, because if Amory was an animal he would so clearly be a fat old housecat.  (The list is only three names long: Amory Blaine, Misirlou, and Twelve Year a Whore.)  My cat Bob would have been a good Amory, come to think of it—though he is a very fine Bob indeed.