2015 Reading Update

With a little more than three weeks to go, I've so far tallied only thirty books this year. That's not a bad total for me, although last year I managed thirty-two, and was hoping to better that mark at least by a book or two. But while my reading has gone fairly well, and has included some rather lengthy non-fiction, I have also come up short a couple of times. I made another stab at Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and just could not make it through to the end. Finally, I just had to accept that I don't get it. Pynchon's style and particular brand of humor or satire or whatever it is just doesn't resonate for me. I also finally exhausted my newly discovered fondness for Anne Tyler. After reading ten of her novels, even I had to accept that the sameness was beginning to get to me. Still I love her stories and her characters, and after a suitable interval I will probably return to read more of her work.

I believe the last book I mentioned here was Brian Turner's My Life as a Foreign Country (2014), which was one of my Men's Book Club selections. After finishing that one, I launched into Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: The Enigma, originally published in 1983, and given new life when it became the basis for the movie, The Imitation Game, released in 2014. This was another of my book club assignments, and it was tough going in places, with a good deal of mathematical theory and technical detail often presented with little to aid the math or physics illiterate. But as biography it was fascinating, and gave a great deal more information than the movie, which I thought was not a very faithful representation either of Turing or of the work done at Bletchley Park, but then one doesn't expect movies to present factually correct history. Still, I would have to allow that Andrew Hodges's book is not for everyone, as became clear from our book club's discussion.

Once I'd completed the Turing book, I decided to read something lighter just for fun. So I turned to a digital copy I had of Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel (1878-79). Although it did not measure up to The Woman in White (1860) or The Moonstone (1868), I enjoyed reading it. Wilkie Collins was a master story teller, and his novels and novellas always keep the reader engaged. But again once I finished The Haunted Hotel, I started scanning other things on my Kindle (actually the Kindle app on my iPad) and settled on William Shirer's Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (1941). This is another of those books that has been a revelation to me. Shirer's journal is a daily record of his reactions and thoughts as he observed and reported on Europe's descent into World War II, mostly from Berlin, but also Paris, Geneva, and other European cities. His journal entries are fascinating as living history. It's the closest thing to time travel I've ever experienced. Shirer brings to life past moments of history and the emotions they stirred, complete with the lack of knowledge he had at the time regarding eventual outcomes. His fears and predictions sometimes prove accurate, sometimes not, but his insights are always fascinating. I've been struck repeatedly by how similar to our present moment some of the things the world was experiencing in the 1930s and 1940s seem. It's not a comforting feeling, except for the knowledge that this too eventually will pass. Hopefully we will not have to repeat all of the mistakes of the last century.

Although I've nearly finished Berlin Diary, I'm not sure I'll add anything to my reading list for 2015. If I do, I suspect I will likely return to Christopher Isherwood's diaries from the 1940s and 1950s. I seem to have discovered a considerable attraction in diaries and journals written during that time, even though I am not sure exactly what that attraction is. Perhaps, as one of my favorite fictional characters once observed, I miss the clarity.