More self-documentation of my reading habits
last year. I finished only two books in
September, because of intense political activity and Jewish
holidays. But in October, book clubs
spurred me to read on.
Book 1
FIRST LESSON: The Most Beautiful of Theories
In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year
loafing aimlessly. You don’t get
anywhere by not “wasting” time—something, unfortunately, that the parents of
teenagers tend frequently to forget.
Book 2
In 1929, three decades into what were the
great years for the blue-collar town of Portsmouth, on the Ohio River, a
private swimming pool opened and they called it Dreamland. The pool was the
size of a football field.
Book 3
Chapter 1: A Good Café on the Place St.
Michel
Then there was the bad weather. It would come
in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the
night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees
in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove
the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des
Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke
inside.
Book 4
For my thirty-third birthday, I wanted
breakfast with Mark Twain.
Book 5
Part One, I: A Very Odd Sort of King
“As Jesus was going along, people kept
spreading their cloaks on the road. When he came to the descent of the Mount of
Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began to celebrate and praise God at the
tops of their voices” (Luke 19:36-37)
Book 6
Chapter 1: Where Do Old Birds Go To Die?
She lived in the graveyard like a tree. At dawn she saw the crows off and welcomed
the bats home. At dusk she did the
opposite. Between shifts she conferred
with the ghosts of vultures that loomed in her high branches.
Book 7
The Veil
This is me when I was 10 years old. This was in 1980.
And this is a class photo. I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t see
me. From left to right: Golnaz, Mahsid,
Narine, Minna.
In 1979 a revolution took place. It was later called “the Islamic Revolution.”
Then came 1980: The year it became obligatory
to wear the veil at school.
The titles and authors
Book 1
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by
Carlo Rovelli.
This very short book (96 pages) might
possibly blow your mind. The year 2017 to
me seemed like a disturbance in the universe, but consider these ideas:
Heisenberg
imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or
something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something
else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when
colliding with something else. The “quantum leaps” from one orbit to another
are the only means they have of being “real”: an electron is a set of jumps
from one interaction to another.
* * * * *
There’s a
paradox at the heart of our understanding of the physical world. The twentieth
century gave us the two gems of which I have spoken: general relativity and
quantum mechanics. From the first cosmology developed, as well as
astrophysics, the study of gravitational waves, of black holes, and much else
besides. The second provided the foundation for atomic physics, nuclear
physics, the physics of elementary particles, the physics of condensed matter,
and much, much more. Two theories, profligate in their gifts, which are
fundamental to today’s technology and have transformed the way we live. And yet
the two theories cannot both be right, at least in their current forms, because
they contradict each other.
Book 2
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quinones.
Disturbing subject matter. Somewhat repetitive – how many times do I
need to read a sentence that says “Mexicans from Nayarit delivered heroin like
pizza.” But perhaps the author needs to
make his point that this addiction is relentless and everywhere and
complicated.
Book 3
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest
Hemingway.
Published posthumously in 1964 by his fourth
wife, Mary Hemingway, 3 years after Hem’s death. The version I read was a revised edition,
published in 2009 by his grandson. This
book is a memoir written about his years as a writer in Paris in the
1920s. It includes Hemingway’s
friendships with, among others, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott
Fitzgerald. The memoir was unfinished at Hemingway’s death – he had written
neither the opening nor the conclusion, at least not in a way satisfactory to
him. I wonder if this is why the book
seems to start in the middle, or if the opening in my version is that way on
purpose. This book includes delightfully
snarky portrayals of these Americans who hung out in Europe in the 1920s. For book club.
Book 4
Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps
of Samuel Clemens, by Andrew Beahrs. (2010)
I borrowed this book from the library in
summer 2017 because the library’s “Summer Book Bingo” included a category for
books about food. But I didn’t crack it
open until I was on my way to the library to return it. I saw this epigraph:
“If I have a
talent it is for contributing valuable matter to works upon cookery.”
- Mark Twain.
And that immediately made me want to read the
book after all. This book uses some of
Twain’s remarks and experiences about food and cuisine as a springboard to
examine changes in American food production and tastes over the past 100+
years. I found it to be enjoyable and
informative.
The author ventures to eat
such things as raccoon, prairie chicken, and sheephead (a kind of fish). He also reseeds San Francisco Bay with
oysters and does some weeding at an organic cranberry farm. Did you know that the abolitionist Benjamin
Rush hoped that homemade maple sugar production would become prevalent, so that
it could replace the trade of white sugar (from sugarcane), which was part of
the slave trade?
Book 5
Simply Jesus, by N.T.
Wright. Good. But I think I need to start reading other
theologians’ thoughts.
Book 6
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by
Arundhati Roy.
This was very difficult reading. I liked the
characters – the portrayal of a hijra
community in India is fascinating – but the story line was quite complicated and hard
to follow. The violence was overwhelming
to me. We read it for book club.
Book 7
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi (graphic memoir).
This is the book that made me realize that I
am now “the print is too small” years old.
Is it possible to get a large-print version of a graphic novel? I was glad I read it, though, as the graphic
memoir format made the story of the 1979 Iranian revolution accessible. I read this for the other book club.
