What I've been reading 'for pleasure' in 2008 (in order starting in January):
Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life, by Henri J. M. Nouwen, 1974.
In the midst of the presidential primary campaigns, here is a report on the favorite books of the various candidates.
Genesis: The Movie, by Robert Farrar Capon, 2003.
The Golem: A New Translation of the Classic Play and Selected Short Stories, tr. by J. Neugroschel, 2006. (Legendary accounts of the exploits of the golem, an artificial man created by Rabbi Lowe in the sixteenth century to protect Jews in the ghetto of Prague.)
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin, 2007.
Literature from the 'Axis of Evil': Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations, 2006.
The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus's Birth, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, 2007.
Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia, by Michal Viewegh, tr. A. G. Brain, 1994/1996.
Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation, by Beverly Daniel Tatum, 2007.
Letters to Scattered Pilgrims, by Elizabeth O'Connor, 1979.
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West, by Benazir Bhutto, 2008.
Diary of a Bad Year, by J. M. Coetzee, 2007.
Colored People: A Memoir, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1994.
In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, by Henri J. M. Nouwen, 1989.
To Rise Above Principle: Memoirs of an Unreconstructed Dean, by Josef Martin (pseudonym for Henry Bauer), 1988. (Bauer was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech in the 1980s.)
Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp: An Interview-Novel, by Bohumil Hrabal, tr. D. Short, 1990/2008.
Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, by Cait Murphy, 2007 ('08: 1908, that is.)
The Poetics of Music: in the Form of Six Lessons, by Igor Stravinsky, tr. A. Knodel and I. Dahl, 1942.
Here is New York, by E. B. White, 1949.
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.
Ocracokers, by Alton Balance, 1989.
Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, by J. Esposito and D. Mogahed, 2008.
Portsmouth Island: Short Stories and History, by Ben B. Salter, 1972.
The Economists' Voice: Top Economists Take on Today's Problems, edited by J. Stiglitz, A. Edlin, and J. B. DeLong, 2007.
Becoming the Authentic Church: From Principle to Practice, by N. Gordon Cosby and Kayla McClurg, 2004.
Moyers on Democracy, by Bill Moyers, 2008.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely, 2008.
Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, by Philip C. Salzman, 2008.
Just Who Will You Be? by Maria Shriver, 2008.
Ghost Riders, by Sharyn McCrumb, 2003.
What I read 'for pleasure' in 2007 (in order from January to December):
The
On Truth, by Harry Frankfurt, 2006. (Follow-up from the author of On Bullshit.)
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by
Becoming a Student, by
Rebekah Nathan, 2005. (Actually a pseudonym, as she wrote it anonymously. Helps
me see where students are coming from.)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera, tr. A. Asher, 1978/1996.
The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's
Final Week in
Listening Essays, by Bob Tschannen-Moran, 2004. (An e-book by a close friend, running buddy, and professional life-coach.)
Why I Write, by George Orwell, 2005.
Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life, by Marshall Rosenberg, 2003. (An audio-book.)
Aeneid, by Virgil, tr. R. Fagles, 2006. (I'd never read it, and was waiting for Fagles's translation.)
Songbook, by Nick Hornby, 2003. (A collection of essays about how he relates, and we relate, to certain songs.)
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, by Robert Bly, 1988.
War and the Iliad, by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, tr. M. McCarthy, 2005.
How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care), by Ross Duffin, 2006. (His website has some illustrations of the differences between temperaments, which are very subtle as far as I can tell.)
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis, 2003.
Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama, 1995. (My man for president!)
A Man without a Country, by Kurt Vonnegut, 2005.
The Little Book of Plagiarism, by Richard A. Posner, 2007. (I would have thought it should be titled on Plagiarism, or about Plagiarism. As it is, it sounds like the book is itself plagiarized.)
So Many Books:
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, by Alissa Quart, 2003. (This is the Virginia Tech 'Common Book' for 2005-2007. It was probably chosen by a nagging mother-at least that is the feeling I get from reading it. I find it hard to imagine college students enjoying reading it. Previous VT common books have been Einstein's Dream, and The Life of Pi. I thought the latter was a good choice, but by the time I was ready to use it in a class, they had moved on to a new book.)
Emperor and Galilean: A World Historical Drama, by Henrik Ibsen, tr. B. Johnston, 1873/1999.
On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, by Gustavo Gutierrez, tr. M. O'Connell, 1987.
Ulysses, by James Joyce, 1922/1934. (I don't recommend it unless you really feel you 'should' read it.)
James Joyce's Ulysses,
by Stuart Gilbert, 1930/1952. (Only somewhat helpful.)
Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, 2007.
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes, by T. Cathcart and D. Klein, 2007.
The Visible World, by Mark Slouka, 2007.
My Father Before Me: How Fathers and Sons Influence Each Other Throughout Their Lives, by Michael J. Diamond, 2007. (Read as my son graduates from college.)
The College Administrator's Survival Guide, by C. Gunsalus, 2006.
The Making of an Economist: Redux, by David Colander, 2007.
Why We Run: A Natural History, by Bernd Heinrich, 2001. (The second time I've read this fascinating book.)
The Castle, by Franz Kafka, tr. M. Harman, 1926/1998.
To the Castle and Back, by Vaclav Havel, tr. P. Wilson, 2007. (British edition subtitled: 'Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero'.)
The Zuerau Aphorisms, by Franz Kafka, tr. M Hofmann, 2006.
A Term at the Fed: An Insider's View, The People and Policies of the World's Most Powerful Institution, by Laurence H. Meyer, 2004. (Since Nick will be working there.)
Slow Man, by J. M. Coetzee, 2005. (I found the ending very disappointing.)
All Day Permanent Red:
The First
And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey, by Studs Terkel, 2005.
The One Minute Manager, by K. Blanchard and S. Johnson, 1982.
The Meaning of Life, by Terry Eagleton, 2007.
The Dubliners, by James Joyce, 1914. (His best writing IMO.)
The Gospel in Brief, by Leo Tolstoy, tr. I. Hapgood, 1910/1997.
Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, by F. R. Leavis, 1962. (A devastating critique of Snow.)
Misreadings, by Umberto Eco, tr. W. Weaver, 1963/1993.
How to Have that Difficult Conversation You've Been Avoiding, by H. Cloud and J. Townsend, 2003/2005.
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, tr. A. Briggs, 1869/2006. (Read it first about 15 years ago.)
Tolstoy, by Theodore Redpath, 1960. (A former student of Wittgenstein's during the 1930's.)
Search for Silence, by Elizabeth O'Conner, 1972. (Offers a very practical spiritual discipline, which I have been working at.)
The Cossacks, by Leo Tolstoy, tr. P. Constantine, 1862/2004.
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, by Gregory Clark, 2007.
Where Have All the Prophets Gone?: Reclaiming Prophetic Preaching in America, by Marvin McMickle, 2006.
In-House Weddings, by Bohumil Hrabal, tr. T. Liman, 1987/2007.
Carrying Jackie's Torch: The Players Who Integrated Baseball and America, by Steve Jacobson, 2007.
Dylan Redeemed: From Highway 61 to Saved, by Stephen H. Webb, 2006.
A Philosophical Testament, by Marjorie Grene, 1994. (The philosophical equivalent of a Nobel Prize winner: She was the first woman to be honored with a volume in the Library of Living Philosophers.)
Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk, tr. by M. Freely, 2003/2005.
The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod): a Play, by Elie Wiesel, tr. M. Wiesel, 1979/1995.
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, by Alan Greenspan, 2007.
Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insight of Certain of the Negro Spirituals, by Howard Thurman, 1945/1955.
The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, by Henri J. M. Nouwen, 1992. (Reflections on the parable and the painting by Rembrandt.)
Proof: A Play, by David Auburn, 2001.
Beowulf, tr. by S. Heaney, 2000.
Mere Anarchy, by Woody Allen, 2007.
Grand Obsession: Harvey Butchart and the Exploration of Grand Canyon, by E. Butler and T. Myers, 2007.
The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, tr. E. Osers and G. Gibian, 1986.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brian, by Oliver Sacks, 2007.
Escape from Indian Captivity: The Story of Mary Draper Ingles and son Thomas Ingles, as told by John Ingles, Sr., written before 1836, published 1969. (This happened right on what is now the Virginia Tech campus.)
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer, 1948.
R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country, by Stephen Calt, David Jasen, R. Crumb, and Terry Zwigoff, 2006.
Prague Tales, by Jan Neruda, tr. M Heim, 1878/1993.
Acting: The First Six Lessons, by Richard Boleslavsky, 1933.
Welcome to Doomsday, by Bill Moyers, 2005.
Galileo: A Play, by Bertolt Brecht, English version by Charles Laughton, 1940/1952.
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, by Frans de Waal (and with commentary by some philosophers), 2006.
Reflections on a second year of reading: I seem to have read
even more than last year-sped up by a sabbatical in the Spring,
but then slowed down by becoming an administrator in the Fall. This year I read
73 books. The ones I enjoyed the most were the Czech books-Neruda's tales,
Seifert's poetry, and Hrabal's ramblings. I got the
least out of Ulysses. I note that in
the last 2 years (140 books), only 13 books were by
women and 11 by minorities (less than 10% each). That was less than I would
have guessed. Also, in the last 2 years, about 30% of my reading has been
fiction (well, 30% of the books, but probably a much larger proportion of the
pages!). I again ran a gamut from the very long (War and Peace, Ulysses, The Aeneid) to
the very brief (Moyers' pamphlet-I'll read anything by him!).
What I read 'for pleasure' in 2006 (in order from January to December):
And Then the Vulture Eats You: True Tales About Ultra-Marathons and Those Who Run Them, edited by John L. Parker, Jr., 1990. (I thought I'd better know what to expect.)
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, by Sharyn McCrumb, 1992. (Local author. I like her ballad novels.)
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, by Isabel Fonseca, 1996.
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, tr. Edith Grossman, 2003. (I've started it before, but now I finished it and loved it.)
High-Fidelity, by Nick Hornby, 1995. (Not a novel I would have chosen, but he's my daughter's favorite author, and music is very important to me. I liked it.)
Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, by Dean Karnazes, 2005. (Some good reflections near the end about why run long distances. In the fall of 2006 Karnazes completed 50 marathons over 50 consecutive days.)
Dore's Illustrations for Don Quixote, by Gustave Dore, originally published with a French translation in 1863.
Lectures on Don Quixote, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1983, originally given in 1952. (A most critical critic who is often insightful, but unable to appreciate slap-stick humor.)
Exiles, a Play in Three Acts, by James Joyce, 1914. (I'm working my way up to Ulysses.)
Commies, Crooks,
Gypsies, Spooks & Poets: Thirteen Books of
Trust Matters: Leadership for Successful Schools, by Megan Tschannen-Moran, 2004. (Written by a dear long-time friend to help public schools. I hope it also works for university philosophy departments!)
The Future of the Race, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West, 1996. (Their responses to DuBois's 'Talented Tenth' essay nearly 100 years later.)
Night, by Elie Wiesel, 1958, new translation 2006. (Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.)
The Gospel of Judas, translation and commentary by Ehrman, Kasser, Meyer and Wurst, 2006. (Recently discovered and published Gnostic Gospel.)
Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess, by Barrett Seaman, 2005. (I'm not worried so much about my own college-age student as I am about the students in my courses.)
Goethe's Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, tr. Walter Kaufman, 1961. (Not at all the dour, dusty tome it has a reputation for being. Almost farcical in places, and with a 'happy' ending.)
The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, by Bohumil Hrabal, tr. M. Heim, 1975. (Collection of slice-of-life short stories by the master Czech palaverer.)
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas L. Friedman, Updated and expanded edition: 2006. (I recommend this to any person who may need to look for a job or hold onto a job.)
Letters from
The Pitch that Killed: The Story of Carl Mays, Ray Chapman, and the Pennant Race of 1920, by Mike Sowell, 1989. (One of only two seasons that my hometown Cleveland Indians won the World Series.)
City Sister Silver,
by Jachym Topol, tr. A. Zucker, 1994/2000. (Street-life novel set in
Dylan's Vision of Sin, by Christopher Ricks, 2003. (Dylan's work considered as poetry by a noted literary critic. In fact, Dylan has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but never selected.)
The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, tr. V. Lange, 1774/1988.
The Annotated Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, annotations by M. Hearn, 1900/2000. (Fifteen years ago I read the original to my kids, and then followed it up with the dozens of Oz sequels. This time around Meagan got it for me for the annotations.)
Elective Affinities, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, tr. J. Ryan, 1809/1988.
The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, An Autobiography, by Richard Rodriguez, 1982. (A writer who struggles with his heritage and his opportunities, and ultimately declines to enter academia.)
Outstanding Black Sermons, v. 3, ed. M. Owens, 1982. (Including a sermon by my favorite preacher, Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr.)
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993, by Toni Morrison.
The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge: A Novel, by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. S. Mitchell,
1910/1983.
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt
Goedel, by Rebecca Goldstein, 2005.
A Heckuva Job: More
of the Bush Administration in Rhyme, by Calvin Trillin, 2006.
The Bible and African Americans: A Brief History, by Vincent L. Wimbush, 2003.
The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. R. Atwan & J. Oates, 2000. (I just finished reading this collection of 55 essays, but I'd been working at it, chunk by chunk, for almost 5 years!)
Selected Verse, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ed. and tr. D. Luke, 1964.
Santa Biblia: The
Bible Through Hispanic Eyes, by Justo Gonzalez, 1996. (Much
more Hispanic-American, than purely Latin American.)
Job:
The Magus, by John Fowles, 1965/1978. (Prefigures Bernard Williams' scenario of being told to commit an atrocity yourself to avoid a much greater atrocity being committed: pp. 393-395 of the 1965 Little, Brown and Co. edition. A psycho-drama of extensive deception without the science fiction of the Matrix.)
I just noticed this
article about what George Bush has been reading this year. What could he
have gotten out of Camus' The Stranger,
about a man who kills an Arab for no reason? Bush obviously reads faster than I
do. I also noticed this
listing by the singer Art Garfunkel, alumnus of
The Origin and History of the Mormons: with Reflections on the Beginnings of Islam and Christianity, by Eduard Meyer, 1912.
Melville: His World and Work, by Andrew Delbanco, 2005.
King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton, by Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, 1988.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886.
Confessions, by St. Augustine of Hippo, tr. H. Chadwick, 400/1991.
The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair, by Marion Roach, 2005. (The title is much better than the book itself, but I read it anyway because my wife is a red-head.)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1963. (Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.)
The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell, 1975.
Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee, 2003. (Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.)
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, 2003.
Diary of a Country Priest, by Georges Bernanos, 1938.
Dying
to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, by Robert Pape, 2006. (An empirical study of
all instances since 1980, showing that the largest determining factor by far is
large military presence in a region that has a different religion. The
clear implication is that we will be far safer from suicide attacks if we
substantially withdraw from the
The Knights, by Aristophanes, 434 B.C.
The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu, by Debra DeSalvo, 2006.
My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk, tr. E. Goknar, 1998/2001. (Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Rock 'n' Roll, by Tom Stoppard, 2006. (A play about the dynamics of dissent in Czechoslovakia, with reference to the Czech avant-garde rock group Plastic People of the Universe.)
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama, 2006. (Since December of 2004 my car has had the bumper sticker: 'Obama 08'. I'm still hoping.)
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, by Jonathan Lear, 2006. (An account and interpretation of the Crow chief, Plenty Coups, as he steered the Crow nation from nomads to the reservation.)
Jesus the Riddler: The Power of Ambiguity in the Gospels, by Tom Thatcher, 2006.
Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis, by A. Roth and M. Sotomayor, 1990. (I'm trying to keep up with my son's thesis. I skipped the proofs!)
Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharev, tr. C. Hogarth, 1858/1915.
Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, 2005.
The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, by George Bernard Shaw, 1932. (A parable and meditation about the Bible and religion.)
The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, ed. C. Hibbert, 1791/1979.
On p. 320 is recounted the
following: 'We talked of a printed letter from the Reverend Herbert Croft, to a
young gentleman who had been his pupil, in which he advised him to read to the
end of whatever books he should begin to read. JOHNSON: This is surely a
strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get
acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing;
or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all
through?'
I have to confess to
following Croft's advice. The only book I recall not finishing, several years
ago, was Salman Rushdie's book Midnight's Children. I gave up about a third of the way through,
not being able to make heads or tails out of it
Dorothy and the Lizard of Oz, by Richard Gardner, 1980. (Written by a child psychiatrist, it takes up the Oz story at the end where everyone magically lives happily ever after, and shows how illusory this is. Instead a lizard helps the characters figure out for themselves how to solve their problems and strive toward their goals-the hard way.)
The History of the Wreck of the Old 97, by G. Howard Gregory, 1992.
Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, edited by Marcus Borg, 1997.
The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward, A New Approach, by James A. Baker III, Lee H. Hamilton, et. al., 2006.
Essays and Sketches in Biography, by John Maynard Keynes, 1956.
Largo Desolato: A Play in Seven Scenes, by Vaclav Havel, English version by Tom Stoppard, 1985/1987.
Reflections on a year of
reading: For some 30 years I've wanted to keep a record of all the books I've
ever read. I never started the list because it was always too late to get all of them. So in 2006 I decided it was
better late than never. I just
started. I notice that this year I didn't read any books by my 'favorite'
authors. I read 67 books-from very short (Morrison's Nobel Lecture) to very
long (Don Quixote). 25 were fiction.
I didn't count books I read for my research in philosophy, though a few of the
books I did count were tangentially related, such as ones by Goethe. 6 books
were connected with my Czech heritage. 9 books were connected with religion.
The books I got the most out of were The
World is Flat and Dying to Win.
The books I struggled the most with were the novels by
Rilke and by Topol.