Reading: 2010

When I was a much younger man, someone told me that young men read fiction and old men read history. My own experience has been a move not only to history, but also to biography and autobiography, a move very much reflected in my reading during this year. For example, for the second or third year now, I've continued working my way through Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, the current choice of my Latin reading group at work. Where once we read Virgil, Ovid, and Catullus, more recently we've turned to Cicero and Livy!

And looking back over my reading for the year I find more evidence of my growing interest in biography. Starting back in January I picked up a copy at the library and began reading Michael Scammell's big life of Arthur Koestler Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, definitely one of the best books of the year. Koestler was a giant of the 20th Century who seemed to know everyone and to be involved with every important historical moment from the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War, and Scammell does a great job of putting Koestler in context, both personal and historical. Realizing I was going to want my own copy, I bought one for myself using a Barnes & Noble Christmas gift card.

After Koestler, I picked up another library book, Carol Sklenicka's Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, which was my February reading. Carver's life was the raw material for his stories, and it was frequently both very raw and rather sad as well as a source for humor and pathos in his fiction. Sklenicka tells the story of the dissolution of his marriage and his late affection for Tess Gallagher in a more or less even handed fashion, but that doesn't make it any easier to take. After reading this one I returned with pleasure to the stories, which were now much richer and readily available in the Library of America edition.

A little later, in March I think, I decided to read Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe in Greenwich Village in the late sixties and seventies. Another book that brought back memories of an earlier time. I confess I've never been a fan of Patti Smith's music, nor am I now, but I did enjoy her fresh, plain, and yet poetic prose style. Somehow it comes across as more innocence than pretension. But maybe I just fell under her spell without realizing it.

Perhaps inspired by those memories of the sixties and seventies stirred up by Patti Smith, I decided to read the new biography Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin -- another library book. It was very entertaining, and did bring back many memories, all from Paul's perspective, of course. Not an entirely uncritical version of Paul's life, although very gently delivered.

When I finished the McCartney bio toward the end of March, I started looking for something different, and came upon a copy of V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, a book I'd been intending to read since its appearance early in the 1990s. I was struck by how timely this traveler's memoir had remained. Naipaul saw things very clearly, and put his finger right on a number of the most defining characteristics of that region of the country, particularly race and religion.

After this rather heavy dose of history and biography, I picked up Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, a little fantasy about Queen Elizabeth II's peculiar reading habits and their strange effects on her staff and the kingdom.

About this same time, must have been April, I started reading Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin Kelley. This is a very long book, made longer by the detailed records of Monk's musical engagemests and recording sessions. But anyone interested in music and jazz will enjoy all of the anecdotes of Monk's personal and professional relationships. He certainly attracted a fascinating crowd of musicians and characters. And Kelley definitely makes good on his subtitle. Monk was nothing if not an original, both as man and musician. But be warned, this is a long read, and it helps if you do a little musical research and listen to some of the recordings Kelley references.

A brief hiatus followed, during which my reading was mostly catching up with TLS, then in early June I picked up another biography, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt Beyer. Hopper, who was a naval officer, eventually rising to admiral, was one of the inventors of early programming protocols and concepts that led eventually to COBOL, the first modern programming language. She understood early on that programming languages worked better when they used English words instead of numbers and machine code. This also led her to develop one of the first compilers. Beyer does a good job of telling her story and making this early history of the computer fascinating.

My summer reading was taken up mostly with the enormous new biography of Muriel Spark by Martin Stannard. What I liked about Muriel Spark: The Biography was the minute attention to her books and stories and their links to Spark's life obsessions. Stannard makes her seem both an artistic genius and a most difficult human being, much like the other authors I'd been reading about this year. I enjoyed peeking behind the scenes of some of my favorite novels to see how Spark chose her subjects and worked in her views on religion without really detracting from what I had already seen as otherwise interesting plots and characters.

After Muriel Spark, I picked up another library book, John Worthen's T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography. I liked it. I thought Worthen did a good job of focusing on Eliot's psychological and emotional problems without appearing to take sides in describing the terrible conflicts of his first marriage. I found myself sympathizing with both Eliot and Vivienne, almost equally victims of a disastrous mismatch. Worthen also gives some penetrating insights to the poetry and its relation to Eliot's biography. Despite Eliot's own demurrals, it seems clear that he was writing entirely about his own life and feelings.

As summer waned, I decided to catch up with Larry McMurtry's three recent memoirs: I read them in order of publication, beginning with Books: A Memoir, followed by Literary Life: A Second Memoir, and finally Hollywood: A Third Memoir. These are the sorts of books you can get away with when you're Larry McMurtry. They're thin, repetitious, and still very entertaining. Each focuses on a different aspect of his life: book collecting, writing fiction, and writing for the movies. Being a fan, I bought first editions of all three for my little collection.

Back at the library I picked up Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, and I have to admit that this is one of the biggest surprises of my reading year. Amidst a very talented and sometimes strange collection of writers and writers' lives, this book about Highsmith stands out. She comes across as talented, but also determined and a very difficult woman to get along with. I'd seen some of the films based on her books, Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Wim Winder's The American Friend, and the recent version (1999) of The Talented Mr. Ripley. But I'd never read any of her work. After reading this biography, I corrected that omission. Highsmith used her fiction almost like a weapon, and certainly a means of correcting life's disappointments. I have a feeling she would have consumed me in a matter of minutes, if she bothered to pay me any attention at all.

The last book I completed this year was Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go. It appeared unexpectedly as one of those advance reader's copies that my wife seems to get on a regular basis now that she's become a serious book blogger. I've already mentioned this one, I think. I was surprised to discover how entertaining Lady Antonia made this story. And here, too, I found myself returning to Pinter's plays afterward, although I have to report that I did not warm to them any more than when I originally read them. I still have not read any of Fraser's histories. Perhaps I should remedy that in the new year. Might be just the thing for my retirement.