In the fall of 1969, the year we moved to Vermont, when I was in the eighth grade, 12 years old, our English teacher handed out simple mimeographed forms on which we were to record the books we read outside of the class over the course of the academic year. I dutifully did so. My choices ranged from young adult lit (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Across Five Aprils, and those Kate Seredy books set in early twentieth century Hungary that I still adore and have read, reread, and read to my children: The Good Master and The Singing Tree) to more mature choices (Profiles in Courage, Rebecca, Gone with the Wind). We did this again in ninth grade, when, although barely a teen, it appears that I fancied myself a pretty adult reader (The Good Earth; Cry, the Beloved Country; The Secret of Santa Vittoria) I even included that bestselling novella, Love Story, on my list -- it went through the girls of my set like wildfire; I can still see Janice E. holding the book under her desk, surreptitiously reading it during class.
And then, after ninth grade was over, I just kept adding to the list, until this very day.
From tenth grade until I finished my first year of college, I kept a continuous list, and then starting in the summer of 1975, I dated the list by years. Through 2005 I handwrote the lists, and since 2006 I have typed them. (I actually typed the list in 2002, but for some unknown reason reverted to longhand in 2003 and 2004.) The lists are in plastic sleeves and collected in a looseleaf notebook imprinted with Just Manufacturing Company, Stainless Steel Sinks, on the cover (absolutely no idea where that came from). They are not in a database and cannot be searched, except by manually looking through the lists book by book.
This lifelist of books is not 100% complete. It does not contain any books I read for school or any academic pursuit (that would have made a nice separate list), nor does it contain the books my husband and I read aloud to our children at bedtime over the course of many years (a list which I genuinely regret not keeping). And it is missing the names of four or five books after we suffered a computer crash in 2007 and realized one of our children had wiped out our backup. I didn't care about anything we lost except my booklist, about which I was pretty distraught. I racked my brains, searched my library checkouts and book group picks, but there remained a few missing titles. The list does, however, include books I have read for my book group since I joined in 1993, as well as audiobooks I have listened to.
Today is New Years Day, and I have just updated, printed, and filed my 2015 list in the Just Manufacturing notebook. A bird's-eye view:
Favorites: The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (can't do it justice in a parenthetical: the subtitle is A Family's Century of Art and Loss, about a wealthy European Jewish family; a collection of Japanese netsuke miniatures that miraculously survived World War II intact and is still in the family serves as an organizing principle); The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (about the Washington crew team that won the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 -- great book and great audio); the opening 75 pages of Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie, where she paints a vivid picture of life in Fairbanks in the post-gold rush early years of the last century, when mail was delivered weekly by dogsled.
Books I reread: I went on a mini-Shaker rereading binge, including June Sprigg's Shaker Gifts: A Memoir of a Shaker Village; Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede, published in 1969, about a successful businesswoman who becomes a cloistered nun; a descriptive passage about a year in the monastery told through the changing seasons is as about as lyrical a passage as I have ever read; and Love Story (see above, ninth grade) -- I found a copy at the thrift shop for a quarter or 50 cents and zipped through it in about 90 minutes; at some point I want to write about the careless and shocking sexism of the book.
Biggest disappointment: I 'm not sure I have a true disappointment, maybe the final book in Updike's Rabbit series, Rabbit Remembered, which he wrote in 2000 but I somehow didn't realize existed until this year. Is it me or did this not quite live up to the four books that preceded it?
Books I am in the process of reading: Dan and I have been reading Middlemarch aloud together since 2014. We're about halfway through. Maybe we'll finish it in 2106. In addition to Middlemarch, right now I'm listening to Jeffrey Eugenides' (of Middlesex fame) The Marriage Plot, and reading The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler for book group.
Book I meant to read in 2015: My Brilliant Friend, an English translation of the first of four volumes of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. I received the book as a birthday gift nearly a year ago from my friend Susie, whose taste in books I trust, but it seemed dauntingly dense. Over the holidays, it was again recommended to me by my cousin's son Peter, who assured me that it is not daunting but wonderful. Intriguingly, "Elena Ferrante" is a pen name and the author's true identity is not publicly known. A reading resolution for 2016, then.
