As
i probably moaned in previous years' posts, once upon a time i would
read one or two books a week. Then i bought my first PC. So you (or
i) can blame Windows 95 for the fact that i now average about one or
two a month. And here's what i read in 2018. Books that were new are
highlighted in red,
re-visits to old friends are in boring old black.
Jan.
5: Maureen
O'Connor Kavanaugh – Hidden History Of Downtown St Louis
Jan.
9: Jay Farrar – Falling Cars And Junkyard
Dogs: Portraits From A Musical Life
Jan.
17: Martin Amis – Einstein's Monsters
Jan.
31: E.L. Doctorow – Ragtime
Feb.
13: Anthony Burgess – MF
March
7: Caroline Moorehead – Village Of Secrets:
Defying The Nazis In Vichy France
March
23: Arthur C. Clarke – The City And The Stars
April
18: Michael Barclay – The Never-Ending
Present: The Story Of Gord Downie And The Tragically Hip
April
24: Craig Halstead – Donna Summer: For The Record
April
25: Spike Milligan – The Bedside Milligan, Or, Read Your Way To
Insomnia
May
8: Robyn Maynard – Policing Black Lives:
State Violence In Canada From Slavery To The Present
May
18: Edna Ferber – Show Boat
May
30: Martin Amis – The Rub Of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens,
Travolta, Trump: Essays And Reportage, 1994 – 2017
June
8: Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim
June
19: Walter Havighurst – Voices On The River:
The Story Of The Mississippi Waterways
June
29: Kingsley Amis – Jake's Thing
July
7: Elmore Leonard – Get Shorty
July
12: Stewart Lee Allen – The Devil's Cup: A History Of The World
According to Coffee
Aug.
5: Walter Isaacson – Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Aug.
7: Henry Freeman – American Revolution: A History From Beginning To
End
Aug.
13: Elmore Leonard – Rum Punch
Aug.
23: Jonas Jonasson – The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The
Window And Disappeared
Sept.
5: Hugh Bicheno – Rebels & Redcoats: The American Revolutionary
War
Sept.
14: Elmore Leonard – Be Cool
Sept.
21: William Hjortsberg – Falling Angel
Oct.
10: Elmore Leonard – LaBrava
Oct.
15: Lillian de la Torre – The Exploits of Dr. Sam: Johnson,
Detector
Nov.
7: Michael Palin – Erebus: The Story Of A
Ship
Dec.
26: Michelle Obama – Becoming
And
what, i hear you ask, were my favourites of the new ones? In fiction,
the Jonas Jonasson was a delight but i think the nod goes to Edna
Ferber: a wonderful portrait of a simpler time.
In
non-fiction, Jay Farrar's book definitely deserves a nod: excellent
portrait of life on the road for a working musician (he's the lead
singer in Son Volt), Robyn Maynard deserves some thanks for opening
my eyes to the extent that racism exists here in allegedly
racism-free Canada, and Michael Palin's book was fascinating –
anything to do with the Franklin Expedition interests me.
Non-fiction
book of the year, though: Michelle Obama's “Becoming.” No,
really. It's so completely different to anything i would normally
read and it was wonderful. I don't like politics, but then, neither
does she, so we got along just fine. She's an extraordinary woman.
And her husband's not a bad guy, either!
I definitely have to give a raspberry to Hugh Bicheno's book about the American Revolution, though: not only was it a disorganised mess, but he let his own prejudices show through. He loathes two of my favourite people from that era -- Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin -- but he's wrong. Jefferson did not sexually abuse his female slaves (having slaves was the norm back then, sad to say). (Jefferson didn't like the system but didn't know how to end it.) He had a long-term relationship with one of them -- Sally Heming -- and they had several children together and he would have married her if it had been allowed.
And Benjamin Franklin -- who did for electricity what Newton did for gravity -- was not a "dirty old man." He was playful and he had a lot of young female friends, but his flirting with them was never "with intent".
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