Brian Utley | 52 Books : 52 Weeks : ‘09

I’m really tired but also a little anxious and quite a bit relieved. Reggie and Bob weren’t doing it for me either. A commenter posited that it was so hard to find a book because #52 was supposed to mean something more, something to speak for the previous 51 books, to represent. And yes, I agree. I couldn’t choose a book that seemed appropriate for the final book.

I was avoiding reading In Our Strange Gardens because of it’s length. It’s only 80 pages when translated from French. How could I end the resolution with an 80 page book? But all day today I was telling myself that the resolution was over, that 51 had to be where it ended. I even got into bed telling myself it was over, you can relax now, it’s done and 51 is just fine. I hadn’t completed a book in almost a month.

Then I looked over at the book that my sister let me borrow and I just started reading. She really beamed up when she loaned it to me, and I still hear those words that I so often say to other people, “I can’t tell you why I loved it, I just did”. I guess that stuck with me.

So, resigned to failure I started reading the book and a few hours later I had it finished, and yes, it is a wonderful book. So simple and true, and much more full of life than other books with a higher page count with more to say that is quickly forgotten. But not here, not with these characters and these sacrifices and how the story is told, with the end at the beginning, the beginning in the middle, and the end back where you started the whole thing. And through this whole circuitous read you are totally engaged, and time fades away, and before I knew it, I had my 52 books.

Book Thoughts

HR22DEEV8PYK

Book Thoughts

So now all I have to do is read it and I’m done. It’s about baseball and that might just help me get it done in time.

Wish me luck. 288 pgs in 3 days.

Book Thoughts

I just can’t decided what to read. Having this problem in July or April or October would be ok, but now, 3 days before 2010, with book #52? VERY nice.

I’m beginning to tell myself, “hey, 51 isn’t too shabby”.

Book Thoughts

…haven’t read word in a very long time. Technically I don’t even have book #52 picked out, ever since I bailed on the dullness of Einstein. 6 days to pick a book and complete.

I think I’ve done that before.

Book Thoughts

I’m supposed to be reading the last book of the year. I just remembered that.

A week ago I completely lost interest in Einstein. After 200 pages of this very well written biography the mythos of Einstein quickly dissolved. And I was no longer interested. I put the book down and haven’t read anything sine.

So I have about 10 days to find a book and complete it. And do all the other necessary things a 35 y/o old father of 4 is also supposed to do.

So I’m cutting it closer than I thought I would be. I thought for sure I would be finished before December but I’ve been so wrapped up in business that reading for fun quickly dropped in priority. I still have hope though.

So, I borrowed this book from my sister, it’s called In Our Strange Gardens. We’ll see if I can get through it in 9 days or less.

I do have a good book from my sister that she loaned me last that looks like a winner.

Book Thoughts

So it took me longer than usual to finish Ghost. It wasn’t that it wasn’t enjoyable, because it was. It was everything that I thought it would be. I just got busy, as people do. While I was in the middle I did pick up a book about baseball. Sometimes that just happens. I read a collection of essays by the late Yale President and Baseball Commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti called A Great and Glorious Game. I started that book on 11/21 and finished it on 11/24. I started Ghost on 11/16 and finished on 12/02. It wasn’t until today, 4 days later, that I decided on what book to finish the year with.

I’m gonna challenge myself a bit and end strong. Right now I’m not really feeling the joy of reading as much as I usually do. Reading is tough work sometimes and lately other things have just taken priority over it. So I’m ending the year with the largest book I’ve read this year, a biography of Einstein. Hopefully by undertaking this large of a book I’ll get the drive back. I’ve been wanting to read an Einstein biography for a long time and I’ve heard great things about this particular one. And this biography is relatively new.

So, 704 pages in 25 days. Only two books this year, NurtureShock and The Fountainhead, have taken me longer than 20 days. The Fountainhead took the longest to read at exactly…25 days. For the first 51 books it took me, on average, 6.8 days per book. Wish me luck, I’ll need it for this one.

Book Thoughts

Take my word for it, Einstein’s Dreams is one of the coolest books on the planet. If you don’t believe me, read it. If you read and don’t like it, well I guess that’s ok.

I don’t always keep up with the latest books from my favorite authors. There are many favorite authors. Alan Lightman sneaked one past me called Ghost. And it’s already in paperback so I’ve been clueless for quite some time.

So it’s fitting that BIG #50 is a book by one of my favorite authors. Fifty is important, especially with several weeks left in the year. And as always I’m pondering what’s next. I haven’t come to any sort of conclusion for ‘10 but I’ll think of something. Or not.

Book Thoughts Alan Lightman, Einsteins Dreams, Ghost

It’s not often that I post something that has nothing to do with my resolution but lately I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts and one in particular I look forward to everyday. This was a poem that was read by Garrison Keiller that I really liked. I’m not a poetry guy, I don’t read poetry at all actually. But that may change.

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she’d worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything—
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief—
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.

Heard on The Writers Almanac, Garrison Keiller. A fantastic 5-minute podcast.

Book Thoughts Garrison Keiller, Norah Pollard, She Dreamed Of Cows, The Writers Almanac

Howdy folks. I haven’t checked in for awhile so here is a quick update.

Finished Bounce, then Strengths Finder. Both were ok.

I was in San Francisco last week and during my trip I went to visit MOMA to see the Richard Avedon exhibit. He is one of my favorite portrait photographers. It was awesome. I first went on a Wednesday but learned that the museum is closed on Wednesdays. But the museum store was open so I went in to take a look at a few books. I found and purchased an interesting book called Accidental Masterpiece: On The Art of Life and Vice Versa. I then finished that book in a few days. The author is the chief art critic for the NY Times. There is a great video with him talking about art here. I saw the Avedon exhibit the next day.

So I finished that and now I’m continuing on with Choice Theory which is moving slowly but I’m picking up the pace now and am finding the whole theory really interesting. Once I finish it, which should be by the end of the weekend, I’ll just have books #50, #51, and #52 left with 7 weeks to go in the year. This resolution is looking solid.

Book Thoughts Choice Theory, Michael Kimmelman, Richard Avedon, SF MOMA

I’m good at reading.

On to #48.

Book Thoughts

Early early this morning I completed Indignation. It was so-so. Today I start Bounce, by Keith McFarland. I expect it to be so-so as well, but I’m going to start reading it anyway.

Book Thoughts

So I had a plan. And the best laid plans… well you know. This was the entry I prepared en route to Paris last week.

I finished Gilead in good time. During this time while not reading, I thought of Hemingway. A biography of him and the complete collection of his short stories are next on the list and tonight, high above the Atlantic, I begin the first of the two.

Both books are 500+ pgs so in the space of the next 14 days I have over a thousand pages to read, which is something that I have yet to do in so little time. Of course, I’m not bound to the 14 days, but with it being so late in the year I feel like I don’t have much breathing room as I did earlier in the year.

I’m excited for Paris and wasn’t planning on going until the last moment. I went from a job interview straight to the airport and when I return I’ll only have 24 hours before I get back on a plane bound for San Francisco where I will again attend meetings and answer questions. And then I’ll have some decisions to make and I’m grateful for them.

A highlight of the trip will undoubtedly be the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore where I hope to pick up a used copy of Death In The Afternoon or Ulysses, the latter I’ll probably never read but even for the non-religious an unread Old Testament bought In Jerusalem is better to have than an unread Bible from America. And Ulysses, an American novel of Parisian origin, was published by the then-owner of Shakespeare & Co.

There will be a view of the Eiffel Tower from our hotel so I imagine I will enjoy that for several seconds before I set off and look at books both new and used from the oldest bookstore I will have ever entered and in which Hemingway perused regularly. A Movable Feast is very geographically detailed so walking the steps of Hemingway, if I’m inclined to, will be an easy task.

I never made it to the bookstore. The problem was that the more I read about Hemingway, the less I liked him. I read almost 200 pages of his biography and decided I had had enough. The curtain had been pulled back and there was no mysticism anymore. And I no longer had an interest in continuing on.
So I left that book unread, as well as the book of short stories that I will also skip for now and jumped from Gilead straight to Accidental Billionaires. This was a surprisingly enjoyable book and I recommend it to any geek or enthusiast of “TheFacebook”. I finished that in a couple days then picked up my first Philip Roth book, Indignation. I’ll finish that book by Wednesday and then I’ll be a full 3 weeks ahead again with 7 books to go.

So, no. We didn’t see the bookstore but we saw a lot of the Eiffel Tower, The Seine, Notre Dame, Louvre, and all kinds of other fun stuff.

I had low expectation of France and I shouldn’t have. The people there are nice the food is great, and getting around is easy. It was an amazing 3 day trip with Sen, and 2 of our 4 kids.

Book Thoughts Gilead, Hemingway, indignation, philip roth

I finished last night’s book in that single sitting, something I attribute to the setting. I don’t think I need to go into too much detail about reading A Movable Feast and how much pleasure it gave me. I sat in the front room and for five hours lived in Paris and experienced what Hemingway was experiencing. Not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald. I may be in Paris, for real, a week from today. We’ll see.

Part of the fun was that I was reading an actual book, with pages and a cover and everything. I wasn’t reading the Kindle. There is a stark difference, maybe not too stark as I didn’t fully recognize it before (although I’ve spoken of “the feeling” before), but when you are reading a bound book you always have a sense of physical depth. You know without even looking how far you are into the book. You know how much you have left to read, and you know in rough approximation what should be happening so that the book ends nice and tidy. Of course, this was a memoir so the ending wasn’t one of resolution. But that is something, one of many things, that you miss when you read from the Kindle.

I love the turning of the page, the imperceptible thinning of the book you hold on the right side and growth of the book on the left. You turn the page and the thickness in your hands doesn’t seem to change, though you know it has. The weight of the book shifts a hundredth of an ounce at a time until you’ve moved the entire book without a thought of it.

I woke up this morning with nothing but my Kindle and nothing to read. When I don’t have something to read I get anxious, and I had no desire to read from my Kindle. So I went down to my library and tried to see something that I may have overlooked and had put aside for a different time. Not all books are meant for all times.

I came across a book that I’ve had for a few years but have never opened. It even had a book plate in it with my name in what appears to be my sister’s handwriting. I don’t recall when I received the book, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It was awarded the Pulitzer in 2004 so I received it around that time and in hardcover. It’s a first edition but I don’t know if that means anything since I imagine after the award several thousand more were sent to press.

I’m well into the book now, reading it in bits and pieces throughout today as I go about being a Dad, and I’ve meant to email my sister to thank her for the book (as upon further thought I only have one sister that gives books such as this).

While I feel I can write reasonably well I’m not a prolific emailer. In fact, I loathe email, the informal nature and the instant regret I feel when sending something that wasn’t properly thought out. And of course you can’t be too formal in an email, it throws the conversational nature of the medium off-kilter. So without being able to be formal, and a distaste for correspondence that is loose-tongued, I’m stuck, and emails seem to fly around with me tagging along as a CC participant and while I rarely jump in, I do enjoy reading them. So Sis, thanks for the book, and for your ability to write great emails that everyone enjoys.

Now begins Gilead, book #43.

Book Thoughts, Book Updates A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Book Thoughts A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway