On Reading | Looking Back and Looking Ahead.

Back in October, shortly after finishing book #75, I shared an update on my 2017 reading. I was still working on the 2017 Read Harder challenge and planned to finish the year on a high note with more diversity in author (gender, nationality, POC) and genre. I finished the year with 93 books, but I did not finish the Read Harder challenge, nor did I end on a "diversity high note".

2017 books read shelved here

On a  positive note, two of my favorite books of the year were ones I finished in November - Mary Oliver's Blue Horses and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1.

2017 Favorites shelved here

Overall, these dozen books represent great reading ... and I think they're pretty diverse in terms of authors, topics and genres. I'm happy with that!

In terms of the goals I set for the year - 30% non-fiction and 50% borrowed - I didn't do so well:

...and then there's the Read Harder challenge. Short stories and comics are just not my thing. I finished Ms. Marvel ("comic with a female superhero") on Monday (yep, already a day late for 2017) and I gave it one star. Here's my review:

"I'm done with comics. I just don't enjoy them. I love the illustrations in children's books, but for anything else, I want my stories with words, not pictures."

The 2018 Read Harder challenge has two more comics. On Monday, I decided not to participate. Yesterday, I finished What She Left Behind, the first selection for this year's neighborhood bookclub. I gave it two stars. Gah, this is not a good start! Hopefully, the other books I'm currently reading will get me back on track

I've decided my only goal for 2018 is to buy fewer books. I have more than a year's worth shelved already and my library is getting better about new releases. (thankfully, both Ms. Marvel and She Left Behind were borrowed.)

And because I'm curious, I'm also going to track book format (audio vs kindle vs real book).

We'll still have Book Bingo this summer (with no squares for comics or short stores 😉). More on all of that come spring.

....whew another very long post. If you're still reading, thank you for sticking with me! And do you have any recommendations on a book that would get me out of my early 2018 slump? please share!

On Reading | 2017 (so far).

Last December, I wrote a post about my reading plans for 2017. In a nutshell, I wanted to continue reading more diversely in terms of genre (30% non-fiction) and author gender and nationality and I wanted to make better use of the library (50% borrowed). I didn't plan on setting a goal for how many books I'd read, but Goodreads is a tough master and I eventually caved; I set a goal of 75 books.

I finished #75 last week and thought it would be a good time check-in.

details on Goodreads here

This morning I updated my tracking spreadsheet to add two charts - which show that I'm behind on both the goals I set!

Only 16 of the 75 books have been non-fiction (which includes biographies and memoirs) - but of those 16, a whopping six are on my 5-star list. ...and that's why I'm going to continue to push myself to read non-fiction.

31 books have come from the library, Overdrive or friends. Only three of my 5-star books were borrowed. What I realized is that I like to buy books I really love - not so much to re-read them, but to be able to share them with others. I also buy the books I read with my small group because we typically read slowly and I like to make notes and highlight. Further - I didn't track this, but I suspect it's true - many of the "owned" books were previous year purchases. In other words, I'm reading through stash 😉 (and that doesn't count, right?!) Overall, I feel pretty good about what I'm borrowing vs. buying. Next year, I'll track "new" vs. "shelved", too.

As points of interest, I also tracked a few more things about the authors:

Gender - 39 female (52%)
Person of Color - 13 (17%)
Nationality - 50 United States (a whopping 67%! and I could count on one hand how many were non-US and non-British)

Whoa, that's certainly not as diverse as I'd like.

But when it comes down to it - I choose most of the books I read because I think I'll love them (or one of my neighbors chose it for bookclub). A few I choose because I think they'll make me a better person or educate me about something I need to know about. But mostly, it's just for fun. And I am OK with that.

That said, I am still working on this year's Read Harder Challenge. I have a ways to go (11 more books!), but I own eight of them already and one I'm getting from Overdrive - A Wrinkle in Time (can you believe I've never read it?!) - is ready to borrow. I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect the author diversity stats will look a lot better once I finish those 11 books. We'll see!

When I wrote that December post, I asked if you were setting any reading goals for 2017. If you did, have those goals affected how you read this year?

So whew, another longer-than-I-intended post! Thank you for sticking with me!

Book Bingo 2017 | Mid-summer Update.

you can see all these books on my Summer Bingo 2017 shelf on Goodreads

Hello, readers! Do y'all feel like it's "mid-summer" already? School starts around here in just three weeks (yep, August 7 ... crazy, huh?!) so for a lot of folks, summer is winding down. Same with my bingo card.

Friday morning I finished Hallelujah Anyway for a fourth bingo. I also finished South of Broad (upper right corner); it was even better than I expected, which is saying a lot! I gave it five stars, bringing my summer reading total to five five-star books. I've already raved here about Jimmy Carter's A Full Life, but I haven't shared much at all about the other four. Here are the short reviews I posted on Goodreads.

South of Broad by Pat Conroy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Book Bingo - An author who died last year.

Pat Conroy can tell a story beautifully and this is one of his best. Beach Music has been on my all-time favorites shelf for years; this one goes there, too. It has all the things I love about a book - an epic story, family secrets, interesting characters, great settings (Charleston and San Francisco) a little mystery and a little love.

As I was reading this - and raving about how good it was - a few friends said they'd read The Prince of Tides and wasn't Conroy a really dark author. I replied that Beach Music was different - all the great things, and yes, a little dark, but the overall feeling is that the book is just.plain.good. South of Broad is like that, too.

Note - I listened to parts and read parts. The audio was decent. The southern accent wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible; and the male narrator did a fine job with both male and female characters.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Book Bingo - Set in a place I'd like to vacation.

An hour into the book, I wasn't sure I'd chosen the right square for this book; the cold, hard frontier of 1920's Alaska is certainly not a place I'd like to vacation! But as I got deeper into the book, I saw love and friendship and wild beauty and I decided it was OK.

I love everything about this book. It's magical, heartbreaking and beautifully written.

Sigh, I can't wait for Ivey's next book!

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddartha Mukherjee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Summer Bingo - Non-fiction about science. I'm adding this book to my "everyone should read" shelf (along with Gawade's Being Mortal, Mukherjee's previous book The Emperor of All Maladies and Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong) and recommending it to nearly everyone.

My friend Bonny wrote a wonderful review.

I'll just add this:
Fascinating material, beautifully presented, ultimately approachable and such important information for everyone to understand. The moral and ethical problems we're facing now around genetic testing and gene therapy give me pause. Where we could be in another five or ten years, well ...

The genome is only a mirror for the breadth or narrowness of human imagination. It is Narcissus reflected.

It is nonsense to speak about nature or nurture in absolutes or abstracts. Whether nature, that is the gene, or nurture, that is the environment, dominates in the development of a feature or function depends acutely on the individual feature and the context.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Summer Bingo - Translation. Wow. I LOVED this book on audio. Listening to it - hearing the names just roll off easily, the inflection that helped me see the really funny parts (seriously, I laughed out loud many times) and the sad parts. I am so glad I gave the book another chance - a big thank you to all my friends on Goodreads who kept telling me how wonderful it was!!

notes from my 2008 reading: it was ok, but honestly, after so loving love in the time of cholera, i was disappointed. it may be a while before i attempt another of his books.

That's right, back in 2008, I read the book and gave it two stars ... just goes to show that time of life - and book format! - can make a huge difference in how we perceive books.

I then spent most of the rest of Friday (hence, no blog post 😉) sorting through my to-read shelves to come up with a plan for the remaining six squares. I started LaRose (An author of color) and A Piece of the World (About art) and committed to three others (Strangers on a Train, The History of Love and The Memoir Project).

That leaves just the Free Square undecided. I've only purchased two books this summer - The Memoir Project and Hillbilly Elegy (which I was going to read for Bingo, but decided I'm just not in the mood); there's room in the budget for a third (and I have audible credits). I'm hoping y'all can help me choose something good. Recommendations welcome!!

Once I finish this card, I'll get back to the Read Harder Challenge. I still have a ways to go ... but there are several titles (including Beartown, Their Eyes Were Watching God and One Man's Meat) I've been looking forward to for months!

It's been a wonderful summer - and honestly a pretty good year - of reading so far. I hope you can say the same!

Found in Translation.

Back in March, as part of this year's Read Harder challenge (specifically, a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love), I found Osip Mandelstam. Along the way, not only did I develop a love and deep appreciation for his poems, I discovered how important a role the translator plays...in something other than the Bible. In my Bible study, I am continually struck by the subtleties of meaning among the different translations, but I hadn't considered it in other literature. After recently re-reading and completely loving One Hundred Years of Solitude, another translation, I decided to revisit those Mandelstam poems and share some of my discoveries with you.

My local library has a decent collection of Mandelstam's poems in translation. The Brown & Merwin (B&W) translation came highly recommended and I chose Wiman's Stolen Air because it was new (published in 2012). I honestly don't remember why I chose the McDuff, but it turned out that having all three volumes to compare and contrast was helpful. (but Goodreads makes it hard - the B&W and McDuff volumes are both listed as "different editions" of the same book. hummmm)

Both the B&W and McDuff start with the "same" poem:

The shy speechless sound
of a fruit falling from its tree,
and around it the silent music
of the forest, unbroken . . . 

The careful and hollow sound
of a fruit snapped from a tree
amidst the neverending song
of the deep forest silence . . .

I was captivated! There wasn't as much overlap across the three volumes as that first poem led me to believe. But two more examples - these both from B&W and Stolen Air - made me wish there were.

From the Voronezh notebooks, March 15, 1937

Maybe this is the beginning of madness.
Maybe it's your conscience:
a knot of life in which we are seized and known
and untied for existence. 

So in cathedrals of crystals not found on earth
the prudent spider of light
draws the ribs apart and gathers them again
into one bundle. 

And gathered together by one thin beam
the bundles of pure lines give thanks.
One day they will meet, they will assemble
like guests with the visors up, 

and her on earth, not in heaven,
as in a house filled with music,
if only we don't offend them, or frighten them away.
How good to live to see it! 

Forgive me for what I am saying.
Read it to me quietly, quietly.

Maybe madness too has making here.
Maybe conscience, knotted like a cyst,
Knowing and being known by sun and air --
Maybe life unties and we exist. 

Bring to mind the mindless spider, its care
For the pillared invisible, little crystal temple,
All air and otherness: 

As if a form could thank its maker,
As if every line of light back to one source were drawn,
As if, deep in wilderness
A raftered hall rose around the risen guests,
All pains purged from their faces . . . 

As it is on earth, Lord, not in heaven.
On earth, and in a house whose walls are song.
Even the birds, even the littlest, fearless.
O Lord, to live so long . . . 

Forgive me this, forgive what I am saying.
Whisper it, less than whisper, like someone praying.

The second example is from Tristia, one of Mandelstam's best known works; I'm not sure why McDuff didn't include it (or maybe he did and the translation is just so different, I couldn't see it!) It's four stanzas, but I'm only sharing part of the first; I think you'll get the gist:

I have studied the science of good-byes,
the bare-headed laments of night.
The waiting lengthens as the oxen chew.
In the town the last hour of the watch.

There is, I know, a science of separation
In night's disheveled elegies, stifled laments,
The clockwork oxen jaws, the tense anticipation
As the city's vigil nears its sun and end.

In their introduction, Brown & Merwin say "Reading literature in translation, in a different language, in a different culture, often means that one is reading a complete invention, distant from the original, a myth." (so true!)

and later, "By trying to bring something alien into English, we change English and broaden our own tradition. That is why reading works in translation is so important to us, why our language, since Geoffrey Chaucer, has thrived on translations, why ... every new great age of English poetry is also a great age of translation."

Wiman has included an end note, "Secret Hearing, on Translating Osip Mandelstam", in which he says "...I've been careful to call [these] versions and not translations, hoping to skip over the abyss of argument that opens underneath that distinction."

For myself, I have no desire to learn Russian in order to read the poems as Mandelstam intended. I am happy to have access to these beautiful words and images ... found in translation.

If you've read this far, thank you! Have you read Mandelstam (in translation)? is one a favorite? After today's revisit, can you guess with of the three books I intend to add to my collection?

On Reading | Looking Back and Looking Ahead.

I'm glad I can say 2016 was a good year...for reading! Way back in January, I set a goal to read 60 books. I did that...and a few more.

Even discounting Fox's Socks (the one I shelved "with Charlie"), that total surprised me. It certainly didn't feel like I was finishing two books a week, but that's what the numbers say I averaged. The Read Harder Challenge and Summer Bingo certainly helped the total (those two challenges each contributed 24 books) and definitely contributed to the overall quality of what I read:

click here to see more details

I rated 19 books five stars and a whopping 56 with four. And I felt like I was being a hard grader this year (I also had less patience for books I didn't like - I recorded four "not gonna finish" and 3 with only two stars). Overall, I listened to 51 books (less than half) and borrowed 36 (not even a third - I need to work on this, too).

Those 19 five star books were all so good, it's hard to pick favorites. But I think these 13 stand out.

And these two - An Altar in the World and Invisible Man - made it to my all-time favorites list.

I have high hopes for 2017, too. There's a third Read Harder Challenge - I'm excited about what I'm planning

shelved here

...except maybe for that first category about sports. In the spirit of "reading harder" I'm not going to re-read The Art of Fielding or Last Days of Summer. Sara suggested something nonfiction about the Olympics. Other suggestions? I'm open!

Thinking more broadly about 2017, I have a number of unread books hanging around my audible, kindle and real life bookshelves. Those were all books I bought intending to read; and next year, I will (at least make a dent in the pile 😉)! I'm definitely planning another Summer Bingo (more to come on that - not sure if we'll be able to use the Books on the Nightstand card generator) and I challenge myself to read from my shelves then. But y'all know it's hard - buying books is one of my favorite things to do (along with buying yarn - topic for another post, but I intend to take a similar approach with my stash next year).

I started working through the list ... and came up with 55 titles (Read Harder is 23 of them, so 32 more) I'd like to read next year. There are a couple that I plan to buy, but most I either own or will borrow (my library is getting on board with Overdrive in a big way now, so borrowing is a lot easier). Rather than set a goal for how many books I read next year, I'm thinking more about what I read and from where. I've used Goodreads exclusively to track my reading since I joined (back in 2007?) but I'm going to start also using a spreadsheet too (like this one). I'm only setting two goals for next year:

Non-fiction - 30%
Borrow - 50%

I'm curious to see what genres, genders and nationalities I read. I'll bet it's not nearly as diverse as I would like. And given how much I read, I'd like to change that. ...more to come.

Whew - I didn't set out to write such a long post, but I really wanted to get everything in one place so it would be easy (for me!) to check in next year. If you did read this far, thank you for sticking with me! And I'd love to know - are you setting reading goal(s) for yourself next year? if so, what?

Summer Reading Recap.

Here's the short version:

I read 39 books.

I did not cover my Bingo card.

my final card - nine Bingos!

If you'd asked me back on May 25 what I thought this summer's reading might bring, I wouldn't have guessed either of those. I came really close on Bingo, but couldn't manage to read a literary journal cover to cover. As recently as last Friday, I was seriously thinking about spending a few hours with one, just to do it. But then I thought more about the breadth and quality of the rest of my summer reading and decided to finish up two books for the Read Harder challenge instead.

Here's the longer version of what I read:

24 books for Bingo (if you click on the image, it will take you to my Goodreads shelf where you can see more about the titles, how they fit the squares, and what I thought about them).

sorted by rating, date finished (most recent 5 star book is top left)

13 books for Read Harder (ditto about the image) and finished all the reading for that challenge (I still need to watch a movie based on one of the books to compare/contrast; that won't happen until Sara visits later this year). The image below is all 24 books I read for the challenge.

sorted by rating, date finished

Two other books - which turned out to be my least favorite books so far this year. I'm done talking about those!

Nine books landed on my 2016 Favorites shelf and one (Invisible Man) also on my All-time Favorites. I counted nine books as 5-stars, a whopping 24 as 4-stars, four as 3-stars and those two duds. I listened to 19 of the books and and read 20. 26 were fiction and 13 were non-fiction.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• The next book I'm going to choose for bookclub - The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.
• The book that rocked my world - Redefining Realness.
• The most beautifully written book about racism in America - Citizen: An American Lyric.
• The high-school classic I'm glad I finally read - The Outsiders (and of course Invisible Man).
• The best more recent book I'm glad I finally read - The Shipping News.
• The best geek-out book ever - A Short History of Nearly Everything.
• The book that made me wish I were traveling to Great Britain - The Road to Little Dribbling.
• ...and to Paris - Paris in Love.
• ...but not North Korea - This is Paradise!
• The book that made me want to read Shakespeare (and also very glad I'm not in 7th grade) - The Wednesday Wars.
• The best "real" book to share with a friend - Pax.

I'm grateful to all of you, many of whom are also my Goodreads friends, for your recommendations. It was a great summer of reading!

One final note about Bingo - if you played along (no matter how many Bingos you got), please be sure to share a blog post or a photo on Instagram (and tag me @mere2007).  I'm going to do a wrap up and draw for a prize later this month.