Reading Update

In the first six weeks of this year, I've finished five books. I'm also including in my list one book that I'm pretty sure I read in the last week of 2021, but didn't add to my list yet.

Book 1 of 2022 was Kate Bowler's book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved. Bowler did an academic study of the prosperity gospel movement in American Christianity, that idea that God blesses people who follow Him with material prosperity. After her diagnosis as a young woman with stage IV colon cancer, she had to confront the ideas she'd learned about and the way they differed from her own experience. In this memoir, she examines "Everything happens for a reason" and other clichés that people like to say when you're going through suffering. 

Book 2 was a reread, Out of Africa, by Karen Blixen. On the one hand, this is a story of colonialism and entitlement and cringey attitudes about race. But on the other, it's a story of going to a new place and making a home. It's as the second that I read it. There's this passage, quoted in the movie in Meryl Streep's Danish accent, "If I know a song of Africa, -- I thought, -- of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?" Blixen famously went to Africa with all her silver and china, and set up a beautiful home there where people loved to come visit. "To the great wanderers amongst my friends," she writes, "the farm owed its charm, I believe, to the fact that it was stationary and remained the same whenever they came to it. They had been over vast countries and had raised and broken their tents in many places, now they were pleased to round my drive that was steadfast as the orbit of a star. ... I had been on the farm longing to get away, and they came back to it longing for books and linen sheets and the cool atmosphere in a big shuttered room; by their campfires they had been meditating upon the joys of farm life." The downside, of course, of making such a haven is that eventually one has to pack it up. Blixen writes affectingly of selling her furniture, sitting in her nearly empty house on her crates of books, and saying goodbye to her property with her friend Ingrid: "We walked together from the one thing on the farm to the other, naming them as we passed them, one by one, as if we were taking mental stock of my loss, or as if Ingrid were, on my behalf, collecting material for a book of complaints to be laid before destiny." She adds, "by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all, for fate to get rid of." 

Book 3 was New Boy, by Tracy Chevalier. I am a big Chevalier fan, loving her books based on works of art, but I didn't much like this one, which is a retelling of Shakespeare's Othello, set in a sixth grade class. 

Book 4 was the latest Elizabeth George book, Something to Hide. This is the twenty-first Inspector Lynley novel, and as always my favorite part is the relationships of the police. I will always read a book in this series.

Book 5 was Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, by Tom Vanderbilt. I picked this because my OLW for the year is "BEGINNER." Vanderbilt argues convincingly for the merits of learning new things, even if you never get very good at them. "What I hope to encourage throughout this book," he writes, "is the preservation, even cultivation, of that spirit of the novice: the naïve optimism, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions -- the unencumbered beginner's mind." Be a dilettante, he encourages his readers: that word is "derived from the Italian dilettare, which means 'to delight.'" He studies the mechanisms of learning (including infants learning to walk), the effects of learning on the aging brain, the role of feedback, how metacognition develops in the learner and whether it's better to learn on your own or with a teacher. Along the way, he becomes a beginning singer, surfer, swimmer, drawer, jeweler, and chess-player. I really loved this book! 

 

Book 6 is the one I think I read in December of last year, The Cat Man of Aleppo, by Irene Latham and Karim Shamsi-Basha. This beautiful book, which won a Caldecott Honor last year, is the story of Alaa, who watches his city of Aleppo, Syria, falling apart, and still has the energy and verve to take care of the cats who roam the war-destroyed landscape. It's not a matter of people or cats in this true story; showing love has a ripple effect, sending goodness out through Aleppo to those who have suffered unspeakably.