My Reading Life, December 2010 (Part I)

Although I'm an English teacher and I've always been an avid reader the truth is that I have a somewhat tumultuous relationship with reading. The thing is that I love to read and yet I also find it to be a somewhat hopeless and overwhelming venture. There are SO many books and I have such a limited amount of reading time (and by reading time I don't mean the hour or two a day I read but there-are-only-so-many-hours-in-my-life).

I walk into a bookstore and hundreds of books call to me. What do I choose? The newest book from the next "it" writer? That classic that I've been meaning to read since college? A non-fiction book about the history of soccer? Sometimes the stress (yes, I said stress) of choosing the right book to read is more than I can handle. What if I make the wrong choice? What if I waste my precious reading time? The stress! The stress! I'm paralyzed by choice.


A couple of years ago I was teaching Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and I found a passage that summarized my feelings about the the overwhelming nature of reading:

One of many overflowing bookshelves in our house...

We ran into the Reardan High School Library.

Look at all these books," [Gordy] said.

There aren't that many," I said. It was a small library in a small high school in a small town.

There are three thousand four hundred and twelve books here," Gordy said. "I know that because I counted them."

Okay, now you're officially a freak," I said.

Yes, it's a small library. It's a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish."

What's your point?"

The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know."

Wow. That was a huge idea.

Any town, even one as small as Reardan, was a place of mystery. And that meant Wellpinit, the smaller, Indian town, was also a place of mystery.

Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all of the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you keep on learning so much more you need to learn."

Believe it or not, this has helped me find a little peace in my reading world. If there's always going to be more to learn, I can accept the fact that no matter how much I read I won't read it all and I'll just need to accept that.

So this brings us to last summer. I was in Portland for a training and split off from the gang to make a pilgrimage to Powell's City of Books. Believe it or not, I'd never been there. Shocking, I know. I shopped until I was weak with hunger and one of the books I came across was Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree.

The book is a compilation of monthly "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns he wrote for a magazine. At the beginning of each column he tallied books he'd read  that month against books he'd bought, then briefly reviewed the books he'd read. It didn't particularly matter if the books were hot off the press bestsellers or literary classics. He wrote about what he read. I thought this was a cool idea and have been kicking it around it my mind, especially lately (you know, New Years resolutions and all that). When I mentioned it to Shari she insisted that if I was not going to update my Goodreads I should at least post this endeavor online.

So here goes.

December 2010
Purchased:
Chaucer in His Time -Derek Brewer
The Big Sleep -Raymond Chandler
Speaking with the Angel -Nick Hornby, ed.
Agatha Christie-

My bedside table. You see why we might have a problem?

The Murder at the Vicarage (Nook)
The Body in the Library (Nook)
The Moving Finger (Nook)
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Nook)
The Secret Adversary (Nook)
And Then There Were None
Dorothy Sayers-
Murder Must Advertise
Busman's Honeymoon
Gaudy Night
Strong Poison

Read:
Speaking with the Angel -Nick Hornby, ed.*
The Portable Dorothy Parker -Dorothy Parker and Marion Meade*
Agatha Christie: 
The Murder at the Vicarage (in progress)*
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Secret Adversary
And Then There Were None
The ABC Murders (Nook)

*Sorry, Part II!

As a side note, I read a lot of books on my Nook, which is good in a few ways: I generally don't buy a book for my Nook unless I plan on reading it, there's no physical accumulation of books around the house and I can instantly (and sometimes impulsively) buy what I want. It's bad because unless you also have a Nook I can't lend you my NookBooks. Sad! Oh, and I still buy armloads of books at the bookstores. Oops.  Nook books have been noted for no particular reason except that it's of interest to me.

What I wrote about what I read
Agatha Christie
I think it is safe to say that I've been on an Agatha Christie kick for the last couple of months. This is an extension (refinement?) of the mystery kick that I've been on since last spring. For some unknown reason I've always kind of avoided Agatha Christie. I did read The Murder on the Orient Express, but it was right after I had my wisdom teeth out and there was vicodin involved so I don't think that really counts.

I started out by reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Technically I read this in November, but for awesomeness reasons I am including it here briefly to say Read. It. Agatha Christie will blow your mind and you will understand why she is the queen of mysteries. Did you know Agatha Christie is the best selling writer in France?

My next Christie novel was The ABC Murders. This one was not one of my favorites but it was, as usual, pretty tricky. Trivia fact: an ABC guide is a British train guide. I can't remember why it's called the ABC, but it's something it would have been helpful to know 20 pages earlier than when I finally googled it.

Next on the list was And Then There Were None (also known by the title Ten Little Indians). This is one of Christie's most well-known, so I'd been putting it off for awhile. "Well-known" can mean either "really awesome" or "overhyped" and I hate being let down. In this case it meant "blow your mind awesome." In the story, ten people are summoned by a mysterious host to an island. Then they begin to be murdered one by one. The eerie and tense mood Christie evokes made for some sleepless nights.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first novel published by Christie and also the first to feature Hercules Poirot, the Belgian detective that features in many of her novels (including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). There were way too many characters and plot twists for me to keep track of in this story, but nevertheless I enjoyed seeing the early Poirot.

The Secret Adversary trades the countryside of England for the hustle and bustle of post-WWI London. Tommy and Tuppence (hey, I didn't name them) decide that the best way to gain in employment is to be adventurers/detectives. They soon end up embroiled in some sort of espionage/matter of national security which, while engrossing, is also somewhat confusing. I think what I most liked about this story was the presence of a strong female character (Tuppence) and the vivid descriptions of flashy post-war/1920s London.

Okay, so it turns out that compiling that nifty little intro you read took a whole lot of my writing time. So I'm going to stop here with Agatha Christie today and come back soon to finish up December. Enjoy!