• ANOTHER COUNTRY
• by James Baldwin
• [rated by PBS readers as #90]
• 436 pages

Well, to say that after the Count, I’m going another way with this one is pure understatement! Where Cristo was a streamlined narrative, Mr. Baldwin speaks with poetic imaging, exquisite detail and fabulous rhythm.

I don’t know if I’ve ever read a James Baldwin book before, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t. Both because I don’t remember ever having done so and because as I start to read his words, I know I would have remembered.

Baldwin’s phrases are huge word stews, replete with gorgeous images. They remind me of two things. The first is a Dylan Thomas poem, that can patter on but doesn’t leave you behind amidst a city of strangers. And the second is one of those wonderful impressionist paintings that show a crowd of people and emotion, sometimes capturing a face in the crowd with only two brush strokes. Every word is chosen with deliberate mastery.

I’m 30 pages in and Baldwin already has me underlining the way he captures images…

…Ladies from the big apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, vaguely and desperately elegant…

…And he had fled, so he had thought, from the beat of Harlem, which was simply the beat of his own heart…

I’m really glad I started this on my week off. It will give me a bit of time to get used to this dense language before I go back to being interrupted by life too many times!

11/4/19, The Very Next Day, About 50 pages in…

Man, this is a lovely change up, I must say.

What I’m going to say next is going to sound stupid. But if you’ve read with me for a while, you can testify that I must not be afraid of that!

James Baldwin and his rise to the top of the literary world was just a bit before my time. So my knowledge of him is really in an historical context, rather than literary. I had always seen him as a revolutionary, opening people’s eyes to lives that they didn’t know and speaking often to the fate of our ignorant culture. And he was all of those things, at a time where his voice was desperately needed.

But I had no idea what kind of lyrical writer he was. I saw him to be an eye opener and a critic of the culture and he was those things, but now I see, never at the expense of the literature he was creating.

In this way, he is the inadvertent solution to my favorite whipping boy, Gulliver’s Travels. In the three or four parts of his book, Swift tells a marginal little tale and then interrupts himself to make and belabor his points about the culture ad nauseum.

Baldwin begins to tell the story and what a narrative it is. I’m never sure what part of the story we are in but it all contributes to the storytelling as a whole so it is obviously where it should be. Then the images that he is capable of conjuring!

Five words in Baldwin’s hands and you’ve got a Universe.

And then – and only then – does the commentary on the culture come in. But never at the expense of the truth of his tale.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this story is going to keep going down and down just as Rufus, the lead character does. But I’m game. The language and storytelling make it irresistibly compelling.

Loving this choice after the Count. Man, there are so many ways to write!

12/16/19

Finished it.

I probably should have figured out – and it wouldn’t take that much to do this if my curiosity gets the better of me – how long each of these books have taken me to read.

This one might be the longest, well over a month. But, unlike Little Women or Gulliver, it was for all the right reasons.

From the first page to the last, I was in the hands of a master writer. And not a master by reputation, not a master because he said what he said the way he said it earlier than everybody else, leaving only copiers in his wake, although his reputation and his brave and original point of view could not and would not be denied.

Baldwin is a master because every sentence screams his talent out. He is a maestro – conducting words, images, points of view and style without ceasing. I realized today that I was proud to walk into restaurants to read with his book out, whereas many of my mysteries have sort of left themselves in my purse till I needed them.

I was proud of myself for staying with this. Several times, I opened it and saw the dense prose and thought how long it had been since I had read anything matching this.

Relentlessly hitting the bulls eye of pain located in each of his characters, I do confess that I took a momentary diversion this last week. I was doing a big production with my choir and I needed to read something else for a couple of days. A friend of mine, Larry Peck, gave me a 1920’s book version of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and I read about half of it for a diversion.

But I really did that to stay with this opus. Baldwin is one of the greatest writers I have ever read. So I returned to it and just finished it.

Though hard going at times and damaging – he is a little too good at sharpening his pencil on all of us and our truths!, still Baldwin should be read. I don’t know what they are reading in schools today, but I hope they haven’t abandoned reading this amazing writer.

I imagine that I will return to Baldwin after this project. That makes me wonder if I would be up for reading another one of each of the writers. Probably, but far more eagerly, I would want to reunite with this level of writing.

I won’t forget these characters. Even more, I won’t stop thinking about them. They live, from Baldwin’s keen observation, through his heart and soul and empathy, into his pen and into this reader’s life. And I am grateful to him for having had that experience.

He may not be everyone’s thing, but in a weird way, I think everyone who ever reads him is elevated as a reader and strengthened in their humanity by seeing the world through his eyes. Bravo.

• THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
• by Alexandre Dumas
• [rated by PBS readers as #41]
• 591 pages!!

8/29/19

There is an outside chance that I will finish this book in a week.

Over 100 pages in, I am almost timid to jinx this by saying anything. It still has around 500 pages to do me wrong. But right now, the Count just might be that find I have been looking for.

Starting with an extensive introduction almost 20 pages long, this one was actually fascinating. Maybe the best extensive intro I have ever read. Truly put you in the mind of the book, along with incredibly interesting tidbits about Dumas and his life.

Credit where credit is due. This is from a series of classics reprinted by Barnes & Noble. And the intro on this alone will make me keep my eyes open for more in this series.

So I was already in good humor from the intro. Then the book starts. Reading that it started as a newspaper serial had left me shuddering. My recent foray with another initial newspaper serial turned book, Gullivers Travels, did not exactly endear me to that genre.

But boy oh boy. This one works!

From the first chapter, after that intro, I was hooked.

A great story that still reads great. There are so many books (and movies, for that matter) that have been appreciated for their breaking of ground, though since that time, one has to admit that same ground has been righteously improved on.

Not the Count! His is a great story that has all the components of being a page turner throughout. The story telling itself is so visually drenched, even for a less visual person like me that one can forgive the act of making it into several movies. But you know? They didn’t hold up. This is partly why my love of the Count feels so surprising, after the movies made of it that I saw and that left me flat. I think this plot is so strong that a book is the only way to go.

I read a reader’s review on Amazon that said that after the first 100 pages, you won’t be able to put it down. If that’s true, watch out, cuz I couldn’t put it down through the first 100 pages!

The Count is a juicy, suspenseful ride of a story. We’ll see how it holds up, but so far…

This is everything I could ask for from a book.

Fingers crossed!

11/3/19 – FINISHED!!

COUNT OH COUNT,

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!!?!?!?!?

This was the shit. All I can say!

It really is strange that I think I’ve seen two Monte Cristo movies and they were completely marginal. Of course, having said that, I also remember at least one of them as having a bunch of swashbuckling fights in it, something that basically never appears in the book! So liberties were indeed taken and not for the better.

I don’t know what I expected out of these 100 books but it would seem like I got the one thing I knew I was hoping for – a great story and one that I’m sure I’ll return to again.

600 pages and it never lets up. Never lets down either. I loved it. A wonderful detailed story, like Lonesome Dove was and will hopefully be again.

Funny, isn’t it? A terrible book – you could describe and write about for ages. A great book leaves you speechless. A great book like this has both majesty and magic.

I have had a few wonderful surprises so far on this journey, mostly in the teens category. But the Count was a major high point so far.

It’s funny. It is such a big book that I didn’t bring it with me to lunch too often, as it was a little hard to carry with other stuff. But whenever I did and someone saw it and recognized it, their eyes would open wide and they would exclaim, “The Count of Monte Cristo? Wow! I remember loving that book!”

Well, love it again. Funny, how two different books could start as serials in papers, then become books, then end up on this list and then have me read them. One – Gulliver’s Travels – bloated, windbaggy, endless, awful. The other – The Count of Monte Cristo – from page one all the way through, a treasured book for my lifetime!

Wow. Don’t know what is going to follow that.

Additional Note: As I walked away from writing this, I realized that another gift I got – that I didn’t dare hope for – was that a classic like Cristo would read this contemporary! I just pictured myself slogging through antiquated language and trying to enjoy the story. But no!

Another gift beyond measure.

Still a year behind myself, but catching up! And here we go….

I had the Dorian Gray slip in front of me and picked three others. One of them was The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. This was one of the eight books that I voted for throughout that summer on PBS and my feelings about it are still quite strong.

The first time I met up with and read this book was in school. What writing was all about was forever changed. Of course, you have to factor in that I read it following a required book by Faulkner. Now I don’t want to be caddy. But then again, it is most likely way too late for that.

Okay, here’s the deal. I hate Faulkner. Well true, I don’t know him. And he’s been dead way too long for me to rectify that situation. But his writing is a whole lot of things I hate!

A Faulkner book, for instance, will start with one sentence about a cowboy walking into the bar and sitting down. And then we jump to…

But first! Let’s spend 80 pages taking you all the way back to how his grandparents got to this country, their bout with cholera, their bitter children, cowboy dude wasn’t wanted, him growing up, coming out west…

Then a dusty whore sits down across from him and asks him why he’s in town.

But first! And there we go again with her entire history.

Mr. Exposition and me don’t get along all that well. Mr. Exposition and William Faulkner drink together till they get silly and cough up a book.

But then I read Hemingway. The entire roof flew off the dump. I didn’t know anyone could write with that much economy. There were no extra words, much less extra scenes. I specifically remember pages of dialogue emanating from a table of expats and you knew who was speaking without Ernest having to hand out a crib sheet.

I’m saying all of this because I picked it, my second title I am reading again. I’m not as scared that the bloom will be off the rose with this one, as I am with some of my other favorites. I know this will be good. And the main reason I grabbed it is because I really need a good read.

Let’s hope I am remembering all of this correctly. I really hope I’m remembering it right. That’d be swell.

• THE SUN ALSO RISES
• by Ernest Hemingway
• [rated by PBS readers as #65]
• [one of 8 I voted for in the list]
• 250 pages

8/27/19 – FINISHED IT

It took me a while to read this – not due to the book, but due to my life – and truth be told, I’m a little amazed that my first entry about it is when I am done. I had just taken the time to finish some other books and then poured into this one.

I know I wrote of its huge influence on me. And it was a book that I was bittersweet about reading. I had loved it so. With a poignancy as I turned each page, I realized that I had remembered it differently than it now read.

But not beyond hope.

Initially remembering its brevity, it was wordier than I expected. But still the journalistic way Hemingway writes feels heady to me. He says stuff like “the sand was yellow.” No more than that. He challenges himself and you – to limit any description, supposing that a longer one would be weaker. I tend to agree.

I love the house of cards quality to his work. Say that you loved a passage or a paragraph where he has visually put you right in the middle of this place. You don’t quite know how you got there. You try to go back and analyze why it worked, and guess what? It vanishes! You can’t find how he put you there. You are just instantly there. A transparent line of almost subliminal connected images have taken you exactly where he wants you to go. Truly amazing.

Easily the most shocking thing about this book, that I expected would hold few to no surprises for me, turned out to be a big one. Remember those scenes that I mentioned that I have tried to model some of my writing after? Where the expats are sitting around a table and the dialogue is flowing and you know who is saying what without even being told? Those changed my life. I will never forget those scenes and the way they were written…

Except that they don’t exist.

They are not there. No way, no how. A complete figment of my imagination. Wow! I see where the kernels of that kind of insouciant banter came from. The book is full of that. But that huge, visceral memory… Wow. How did I go there? Was I thinking of another book? Who knows? Way too long ago to sort.

Anyway, it was a great read. Couldn’t be more right that it is on this list. I loved it and treasured it all over again. And though I experienced it a little differently now, I will always be grateful, as a writer, that this man’s work began to show me the way.

Tough reading act to follow, but I will!

Okay, so I picked a couple of titles. One was Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, which I have read and bought to read again. But with our country’s ridiculously explosive political situation, it seemed to be too much for now. I also picked some other post apocalyptic title and wasn’t feeling that either.

But the other two titles felt okay. One is The Count of Monte Cristo, which just seemed endless. Kind of funny too, cuz there are all these disclaimers in the front of it explaining that, due to modern concerns, it had been reduced from its original 3-volume set to just the 600 pages that it is now. Ouch! Hope I like it!

My thought is that I’ve now read 13 of the list’s books in the first year. So this might be the right time to do a longer one. Don’t want to start a year off with something that is endless and then spend the rest of the year catching up to my 10 book self-imposed quota (well, really, 100 books in 10 years – kind of see how this has to go!).

I also picked Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I ordered it. I might be totally entertained by Monte Cristo and not need a diversion, but it seemed like a good idea to have something set aside to go to in the middle of this somewhere, if need be. But that is for a bit later, when it comes.

Be sweet and not too long winded to me, Count!

• GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
• by Jonathan Swift
• [rated by PBS readers as #75]
• 286 pages

[ NOTE TO ALL OF YOU FROM CYNTHIA – I’m so sorry that I have dropped the ball so badly and waiting so long between postings. I have continued to read but the shelter in place has allowed me to let some things fall between the cracks.

But I want to fix that. Hopefully, you will get more of these from me and faster. That way I can hopefully keep you on this journey with me and we will journey forward together, in real time. That’s the plan anyway.

This way, even if I don’t know where I am in my journey, you’ll be there with me! Cheers! And now, back to Gulliver.]

===============================================================

Well, I’m  60+ pages in and  I find it a good story. I can’t help reflecting that even the author would be astonished that it has stood the test of time this long. But yet, it is interesting and well told and I’m drawn to continuing it, despite the hard going of some of the reading. And when I say hard going, it isn’t really. It’s just that if the descriptions get too long, my mind starts wandering and I have to get my book mark up, to help me stay focused.

So yeah. Hard.

Visual stuff is usually the hardest for me and I can really see this one. I’m also delighted that Lilliput is the only story I’ve ever heard about and it starts with that, which felt like a real treat, though now we are journeying off to somewhere else.

I have been through a fair amount of these books already that I continue to read despite any inclination to go to them each time. No real pull. It is more my commitment to the project than my interest in the story. But I do want to know what happens to Gulliver and I have no idea what is to come next.

I believe that this has, over time, become more of a kid’s book, though I don’t think that was Swift’s original intent. With that in mind, though, his preoccupation with peeing and pooping are tailor made for an audience younger than me!

Still waiting on Dorian Gray and looking forward to it, but this is an entertainment in the interim.

7/29/19 – OVER HALF WAY THROUGH…

WHY OH FUCKING WHY CAN I NOT SKIM?

I’ve never been able to. It is purely irrational, but I always think I’m going to miss something deeply important. Even in the last five minutes of the worst film you have ever seen. There I am till the end. Sad.

This started out perky enough. I was glad that he started with the little people story and as I wrote before, it was quite visual and entertaining. Then the big people came. That was visual and entertaining too. But how to follow that up? The third idea was creative, I guess, but at this point, I had ceased to care.

Okay, for one thing, each Gulliver voyage and subsequent enslavement comes with a tiny little story and then BIG CHUNKY sections of Swift’s diatribe about what was wrong with this nation and how these idiots in whatever land couldn’t see how crazy their thinking was.

Wait a minute! Could he mean OUR thinking? How dog gone sneaky was that?!

About as sneaky as cement boots.

So now I’ve dwindled down to 3 pages in a sitting. I do want to finish Gulliver’s Travels. I WILL finish Gulliver’s Travels. I’ve come all this way.

But I have ceased to care about Gulliver or any tiny detail of his travels about 50 pages ago and I have over a hundred pages to go.

You have to wonder if the people who voted for this were voting from their very distant memories. Let’s listen in to their minds…

“I loved that when I was a kid!”

“How long ago was that?”

“Gosh, I can’t remember. 50 years, maybe?”

I’m a simpleton reader. Really! I want pace. I have a million things going on in my life. I want to pick up a book and get lost in it. Pace does that. Little else comes close.

I’m lost in this one all right. Lost in the head. But I will follow each page down till I’m done because God forbid, I should miss something!

8/6/19

Sadly, with Gulliver, I am now officially in the midst of my most difficult book to date. To say I am using a bookmark is an understatement. I have been going down each page with it, line for line, forcing myself to keep reading. Oy. This thing is tough.

We are in the fourth voyage of Gulliver and everything is just wrong. Only about sixty pages left and it feels like a thousand to go.

First of all no one – of sound mind and body – by this point gives a shit about this character. He has no personality. He is constantly stuck in these cultures where he tells the head guy everything about his culture.

WHO IN THE FUCK CARES?

It might have been amusing or prescient early on, but from where I live, this opus doesn’t build to ANYTHING! Each trip is separate, he goes home, spends five minutes with the wife and kids and then sets off yet another time to see if he can get captured and imprisoned again. He says he wants to see the world. Hasn’t he gotten the point yet?

He is a loser! Yeah! I’ll say it! Gulliver is a loser!

Nothing he has done has been a winning move, so he pursues his dream of being someone’s stooge for another couple of years. But oh, just think of the hours of worthless discourse they can rattle through together…

I picture that his wife now gets the picture. When he says he is off for another adventure, she correctly interprets that to mean that he is off to become someone else’s prisoner or oddity and that, because he always ends up in captivity, he won’t be home for a couple of years. This has become oddly comforting to her so she doesn’t even look up.

“Have a good trip, dear,” she calls out with no particular inflection or intensity. “Take your time. We’ll be here.”

In our fourth thrilling Gulliver story that I’m now slogging through, our protagonist is surrounded by talking horses. Wow! Golly. Give me Mr. Ed any day of the week!

One can only hope that this horse story will take a nasty turn, Gulliver will fall in love with one and attempted intimacy will lead to his untimely death. But I have no illusions. No way am I gonna get that lucky.

To go from Hatchet, where there wasn’t an extra word in all of it, to this, where every single word is unnecessary is just dictionary depressing. Pure and simple.

Gulliver, take your tired prisoner ass and sail out of my life.

8/11/19

Mother of God, I’m finally done.. So glad that I could laugh and cry at the same time with relief, but alas. I’m still feeling the utter boredom of finishing this, so I am drained of all human emotion.

Will I look back on Gulliver later with less revulsion. Probably. I’d just about have to. Revulsion meter is spiking right about now.

I’m about to go on my writing vacation, so I’m employing the same rules as my trip to Italy – I can drink or eat sweets if I want to and I’m going to read something pulpy and fun while there.

But Dorian Gray has been staring at me ever since he arrived at my local bookstore, Damn, he looks good for his age!… So he will be in the running as soon as I start up again, along with three other mystery titles.

Till then.

• HATCHET
• by Gary Paulsen
• [rated by PBS readers as #71]
• [a series]
• 181 pages

Okay, now we’re talking. Now my page turning hands (Yes, that is still how I read and I always will, not having even the most remote interest in staring at a screen any longer than I already do in any given day. Plus, my love of handling books! Smelling a hardback book is one of life’s simple pleasures.) and my thinking heart are deeply involved in this great story!

You know, I’ve been on the radio in Sonoma for 12 years. My original radio partner, Pat Reed, was a teacher. She and her other school teacher friends had a kid lit book club.

Magnanimous as I was (not!), I really secretly put her down for that. Books for teens? Really? Is that all you guys want to read? Adult books a little too much for you?

But color me corrected. Hatchet is the second book for young adults that I have read for this project. And I have liked these two books far beyond all the others.

After the ridiculousness of planet skipping / jumping in the last book, it is very satisfying to settle into a story that reads well and has genuine suspense. After reading a few summaries about this Hatchet series in Amazon, many parents commented on reading this book to their kids and both of them getting so much out of it. They frequently mentioned not knowing what was going to happen next and that is dead on, at least after 50 pages.

Perhaps the greatest element and contribution of these books aimed at a younger audience is the alacrity with which the plot reveals itself. There is nothing extra in there, plain and simple. I love brevity when I am writing my own books and I love it here.

So here goes the initial premise. A 13-year boy is on his first plane ride ever. It is a single engine plane and he and the pilot are flying over hundred of acres of woods in Canada, to meet up with the boy’s father where he will spend the summer, when the pilot has a heart attack and dies right there in the cockpit, above endless woods.

Sound like a good beginning? You better believe it!

7/18/19

Well, it is now official. Hatchet was a stone cold winner. It was a great story that unfolded with perfect timing, a great tone and not one extra word.

This boy has to learn how to fend for himself. He isn’t schooled in that so each day and each discovery takes him a step further.

But the book’s successes are more than an obviously wonderful premise. The success lies in the way that you are completely glued to the point of view of this boy. You don’t know what you would do next, so the boy’s logic and his confusions are all yours too. I can honestly say that, like parents describing their feelings about it in the reviews I read, I had more moments having no idea what the boy would or should do than I can remember in a book in a very long time. That is writing talent right there. I might consider reading another one of this series somewhere down the road.

Absolutely successful and what a relief to read something that was nothing more than a great story told well. Bravo.

Hmmm…. Wonder what follows this. I’m okay with a bigger opus, but…still a ‘fraidy cat with this. We’ll see.

But mostly still basking in this last one. What a well-written story! I’m beaming.

================================

The selection process this time was both more labored and more interesting.

For one thing, I always pick out three titles. This is really just so that I can be sure I’m reading something that is as far away from the last book as possible.

I had no doubt that any book would be pretty darned far away from Hatchet. But for some reason, I picked four this time. One little slip caught my eye and I stuck it in my little pile.

Glad I did. Cuz two of them were not doable for me right now. 1984 and Handmaid’s Tale. Quite frankly, reading something about Dystopian worlds or warnings of how far down we could fall while we are laboring under the regime of Donald Trump was just too much. Not even not entertaining, but downright self abuse!

So that left the other two titles – The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gulliver’s Travels. I called my little bookstore. Sadly, as usual, they didn’t have either of them. I called the library though and they had both.

Last night, the one I was leaning toward was Dorian Gray but I got them both. When I picked them up, Dorian Gray was this paperback with a super crappy cover – which I’m not into! Then, during a break in work, I started it. I immediately knew that I wanted to underline stuff. Really fun and glib writing, so I needed to buy my own copy and called the bookstore to order it for me.

In the meantime, I will dig into Gulliver’s Travels and who knows? It could be my first dual read. Certainly the two books are different enough…

I’ve read ten books for this project now. I had always planned to look back after each ten, kind of estimating how they are still sitting with me after all this time.

When I used to review films, it seemed an important inclusion for me to comment, from time to time, on how well or unwell a film finished for me, days later. It was always interesting. A film could seem great at first, but by the next day, it was gone, seemingly in a puff of smoke! Or the opposite, something that didn’t seem to have the dynamics right afterward, could then seem to grow as time went on.

So I would like to do that briefly with these books as well. Not a summary, just thoughts…

OUTLANDER. I still have vivid memories of this and in retrospect, the story telling was quite strong. Not my vision of romance, so I didn’t think then or now that I would read all of them. But I don’t know. Maybe later, I might try the second one. Doesn’t seem like I would do it but not impossible. Seems to me that this author’s greatest strength is in depicting scenes with the same kinds of danger and plot twists over and over and making them seem consistently entertaining. A fun read and I know why many women swoon over it. Not a full swooner for this huckleberry, but great characters and story telling.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. This guy, Junot Diaz, writes like a bat out of hell and that’s what I will always remember about the book. Breaks the fourth wall, explains a ton of the action in footnotes. But his greatest gift is in his choice of protagonist – Oscar, a largely ignored and completely forgotten kid of color in a harsh world that basically pays no attention to him. This undoubtedly felt liberating to many who read it and thought that no one would ever write their life story. That doesn’t include me and yet it did. I wouldn’t be led to read another by him, but I’m glad I partook of this one.

SIRENS OF TITAN. Sigh. I have to talk about this one and HITCHHIKER’S at the same time. I’m sure it is the worst insult I could ever make to the fans of each to say that they are more or less the same book to me. Clever, zany, SIRENS was written the year I was born – in 1959! And that gives it the edge for me, as it seemed so very current. There are scads of folks who love this genre. I’m not one of them. Makes me want to read a Tom Robbins book again. For now, as zany goes, I feel like I’ve finished my quota.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. What can you say about this? Loved it. Reading this amazing writing is like eating the best dessert you could have. Gorgeous, sparse, loving and lovely point of view of Scout, a little girl we feel we all grew up with. If there is anything other than love that I felt, it was the fact that this ended up being a bit quirkier than I remembered from years ago. That felt really cool, in that it is often thought of as one of the greatest American novels of all time and yet, it didn’t fit in a simple form and that remains with me.

I, ALEX CROSS. Honestly, I remember this one the least of the ten so far. Now, mind you, that isn’t so different than a bunch of mysteries that I have read and can’t remember much about almost immediately after. So what makes this a bit different? My own sense is that mystery series’ and their fans have everything to do with how close you feel to the main character. If you have a strong sense of him or her, that will carry you through endless journeys with them. I didn’t have that about Alex, so I’m not pulled to more stories about him.

THE LOVELY BONES. Such a strange little opus. When I used to review films, I always felt that the litmus test should be whether the filmmaker made what they intended to make, not what you wanted to see. And I still feel that way. But here, I think the author made what she wanted to make and it wasn’t the book I wanted to read. This isn’t a ding in the least on the author, as the number of people who set their emotional clocks to this novel is proof positive that she made a classic. The initial premise of the dead girl narrating was shocking and great. But I started to lose it from there. Really wanted more about heaven than a whole book with her watching her family fall apart. But that’s just my two cents.

JURASSIC PARK. Like the book I read before it, this is also an explosive premise – this one eventually becoming the foundation of a billion dollar industry. I enjoyed reading it more than I thought I would. I will remember it as a classic plot format, where someone doesn’t have a clue what is coming at them, while someone else is being chomped on by a dinosaur a couple of feet away. I will also remember the skill with which those dinosaur attacks came at you so shockingly fast. There was real story telling skill here.

LITTLE WOMEN. This I will remember as something I thought I would love re-reading and instead was deeply difficult to get through. Having said that, everyone who read it as a kid remembers all four daughters by name and there is a reason for that. Very well executed characters and surprising how much poverty played a role in it, as it should have, though I hadn’t remembered that.

GHOST. Since the Hitchhiker book is really folded into the Kurt Vonnegut one, I get to end this little list with my most pleasant surprise of the first ten. Loved Ghost! The main character’s point of view was deeply refreshing. The way he internally looked at life was very effective. I particularly will remember how he could see a sight that to the reader was ghastly but he didn’t see or recount like that. So you frequently got both layers of the truth. I didn’t really know where it was going and every scene was memorable. This, my first book for young adults, turns into a series that I would continue to read later. A quick, wonderful read!

HITCHHIKER’S. See SIRENS above. Though I will say that I did love Marvin, the depressed robot! He was great. I don’t know how much of this I will remember, as I only finished it today, but I suspect very little of it. It is exactly what you would imagine it would be, so all kudos to the author and my friend Kim and people who loved it.

And now, for lucky number #11!…

• THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
• by Douglas Adams
• [rated by PBS readers as #39]
• 216 pages

Immediately, this came with an enthusiastic nod from my friend Kim, a Sci Fi fan. I asked her if she had read it. She smiled ruefully (she is very good at smiling ruefully) and said, “the appropriate question is not whether I’ve read it. The question is how many times.”

No faint praise there!

Just started and the immediate comparison is Vonnegut, but I’m sure more will come. Seems fun and absurd. Looking forward to where it will take me. After all, it is twice as high on the list as Vonnegut and Kim has read it multiple times. Here we go…

7/2/19

I hesitated in writing this but then I thought what the hell. If I’m going to keep on track for this little project then I might as well let fly!

I am pretty much not into this book at all.

It reminds me, in inventiveness and sheer absurdity, of the Vonnegut book earlier in the year. Maybe it is one too many of those absurdist yarns for this concrete blond. Wacky characters racing around the Universe – saying dopey things, having three heads – you know, that sort of thing. Hm. Don’t get me wrong! Love it for you! Not so much for me.

Also, in terms of absurdity, I grew up on Tom Robbins – Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume… I loved those books. Equally inventive and absurd to these two wacky titans but Robbins’ books had really cool stories at their core that I still remember years later. His books have it all over these books for me.

This book is clearly loved by millions. It is considered a masterpiece. To each his own.

I had a talk with Kim about it today. I wanted to see it through her eyes. After we talked, I read another 20 pages and I thought it was funnier than before.

But right now, the greatest thing in its favor is that it is short. Thank God. If this book was like…well, like this PLUS 700 pages long, it might be my first abort of the book list. But I will finish it. God.

One note – I know I started a few months early but I’m excited to hit my quota of 10 books a year after this is done – and with almost 6 months to spare! I can’t help planning for the handful in this book pile that could take me a whole year to read – War & Peace, Monte Cristo…

Okay. Enough of me taking a break and thinking happy thoughts. It’s back to planet WhatTheFuck.

7/12/19

Though it started off seeming like I should finish this deal in about 15 minutes!, I’m finally done.

I get the creativity. I get the imagination. Not my thing.

Although I did write to Kim happily, at one point, to tell her that I had finally found a character that I had really taken a shine to – Marvin, the depressed robot. I kind of loved him, especially when he would ask people, “Am I bringing you down?” Or when Marvin is face down in the mud and gets an offer to be helped up, he says something like, “Nah, this is probably where I should be.” That amused me big time. It perplexed Kim, since Marvin was the only character that she didn’t like. Ah well. Different strokes…

I also liked the relentlessly perky control board in the ship that pissed everybody off. And the doors that made a sound of satisfaction whenever they closed.

No doubt about it. Tons of creativity here. I still like Tom Robbins lunacy light years more than this, and I haven’t read one of those for half a life or more.

This was my tenth book! Cool that I’m one tenth of the way through. I will write a little review of the first ten books in a bit. But you know what I gotta do first! I have to hurry. I’m deeply late! Sheer seconds and minutes are flying by!

Gotta pick the next one!

I picked Hatchet, which is a series by Gary Paulsen. When I saw its cover on the PBS list show, I just assumed it was something scary or in the horror genre. But it is another young teens book about survival in the wilderness. I would be a bit skeptical but I loved the last young adult one! So I’m far more open. Plus the reviews on Amazon make it sound like a really good story, which I think I could use after the intergalactic silliness of Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Sorry Kim. And I’ll always have Marvin. Love Marvin.

• GHOST
• by Jason Reynolds
• [rated by PBS readers as #97]
• 180 pages

Forget what I said. I never even looked for the Baldwin book. Didn’t have to. On account of my opening the cover of Ghost (which I already had from my last pick) and reading the first two pages.

Two pages in, I was already in love. This guy’s phrasing, after a month of pouring over arcane Little Women, feels so refreshingly familiar and funny that it feels like you just bumped into your best friend and hunkered down for your best talk in years.

And remember, this is only after two pages, ya’ll.

But I was already thinking – this could be a thing!

6/11/19

Finished it! Already! And all the way through I was and am head over heels.

I had never heard of this book, Ghost, largely due to my ignorance of the young adult book market entirely. But that ended up giving me a special plus. I knew absolutely nothing of this genre, which enabled me to waltz past my fear that I would never have a sense of discovery while I was reading something on this list. Nothing would seem new. But not so with Ghost. New and new again. I felt it. I bathed in it!

In the way that so many masterpieces demonstrate, when an art form is done with greatness, it always feels new.

I loved the voice of the lead character, Ghost. At first, I thought I loved him due to sheer escape from the language of Little Women. But that would be an understatement and would sell him short. I loved Ghost throughout. I became used to him and still loved him!

He was original. He never commented on his life; he lived it. He was funny, he was heartbreaking and he was real. A young kid from a shattered childhood discovers the track team. But in author Reynolds’ hands, it is not what Ghost spends any time thinking about. He is living life, clinging to the small sense of community that he has. And if all of this sounds a bit melodramatic, it truly isn’t. This book made me feel light as a feather.

Ghost is an absolutely beautiful little gem of a tale. Not one extra word in the whole thing. All the elements are introduced as economically and straight forwardly as they can be, yet all the nuance is right there, if the reader only fills it in. I could see how completely easy to read this would be for a kid. It flows. It could teach you flow.

From the beginning of my bigger project, I have asked myself if I would go back later and follow up on any of these writers. Would I read the next Outlander? Maybe, but the 800 page length is a buzz kill for anyone not deeply in love with the whole thing. With other writers, I wouldn’t necessarily read them again just from having read this one book, unless the individual title held something for me.

But Jason Reynolds and Ghost and the series that follows, I may well go back to. I have never read a first person narrative where I enjoyed the character more.

Of course, there is a huge calling coming from this story to young, new readers. Ghost represents so many kids. So. Many. He has seen horror and he deals with it as straight on as he can.

I used to get on my soapbox and say that if I ruled the world, kids would read books that really spoke to them. If you had a kid in high school, for instance, that had a drinking problem, give him Bukowski! Better than hoping he’ll last through Beowulf!

And if I did rule that set world, Ghost would be on that reading list. As would Oscar Wao, to be fair.

This book will stay with me. I really, really loved it. The utter elegance and economy with which it was written so appealed to me.

Now I need to pick a new book – though I’m off to Italy for a week and have promised myself that I could read only fun, trashy things while I was gone.

Still. As I have now realized about myself, there is no choice in it for me. I must pick the next book of this project now, even to have it wait for me till I get back.

But, just before going, thank you again to Jason Reynolds. You are a rock star! You are my kind of writer.

6/28/19 – JUST BACK FROM ITALY

Well, I took my first reading break from this little project. As I mentioned earlier, I promised myself that on my trip to Italy, I could read anything I wanted.

And so I did. First, I read a Jack Reacher thriller. I could swear that every book of Lee Child’s Reacher series is the same book over and over but the pacing is so fast that I will always pick up another one and race through it.

I read Sheila Nevins’ (head of HBO and the most prodigious documentarian of our time) autobiographical series of short essays. Pretty darned forgettable, by the way. All about face lifts and who her son dated and their mother. Uh, kinda would have liked a bit more about what makes her special, like, notably, all her work at HBO and her documentaries? Huh? Maybe a little bit about that? Sheesh.

Then came Antoine Laurin’s Red Notebook, I love his romantic sweet Parisian fables. Loved the President’s Hat and this was sweet too.

Followed that up with one of my favorite mystery writers, Lawrence Block. Block can write absolutely anything but I particularly love his funny series about a burglar named Bernie Rhodenbarr. This one was called Burgler in the Closet and it made me laugh out loud more than once.

Now, I’m a reasonably funny person and when books have quotes on the sleeves saying they are hilarious, I am skeptical. And I’m usually right to feel skeptical. But this delivered the goods and was a fun romp.

Ended up with Death on the Riviera, an older mystery from the 50’s that was rediscovered and repackaged and that I bought a year or two ago in Santa Cruz on my annual writing week. Fun. Not unbelievable but a sweet little slice.

But I don’t want to disappoint you and make you think that I suddenly changed my ways and hadn’t picked the next book from the PBS list yet. Nah. I am a creature of habit. I had it picked out right away, that night.

Though it seemed like an amusing enough title that I picked, I elected to leave it behind. My War & Peace fears allayed with my next pick – for the time being! – this next title seemed like the perfect book to ease back into reading these higher browed books, so I was happy to think about coming home to it.

Besides, I reasoned, if I read it on the trip, then I would have to come home early just to pick the next title. And great honk, I was only gone for a week!

• LITTLE WOMEN
• by Louisa May Alcott
• [rated by PBS viewers as #8!]
• 388 pages

First things first. This is the first book my library instantly had! And as we have all gleaned from my previous patterning, I am an instant fix kind of girl!

So I have this old leather bound copy on loan, with quite lovely pictures in it. All of that is great. I like how many hands have touched it and how many people have read it.

My only problem is the antiquated printing. Blech!! Printed back when, they have used this font that is all squished together and so bunched up and wordy that it practically dares my eyes to look away! I have to use a bookmark and really concentrate, moving down every line.

I read this when I was very young and many of the elements have stayed with me. That is incredibly rare for me. I think I could have named all of the daughters, for example. I remember what was sad toward the end.

At first, trying to read it, I got a bit nervous, wondering if this might end up being the hardest one yet.

But sweetness is really a beautiful thing. You have to keep scaling back your worldly sarcastic edges, layer after layer, to accept this premise and let it in.

But once you accept these characters on their own terms, Alcott surprises us with the girls acting up a bit. I like that turnaround. Maybe I liked that dimension because I didn’t remember it. I thought they were always sweet, but no. This book didn’t stick around in every library for this long without some nice depth to the characters, story and intent.

About a hundred pages in, I’m liking the March sisters and wanting to hear more!

5/18/19

I don’t mind Little Women. Honest, I don’t! It is well written and sweet with characters that I can already prove from personal experience stay with you for a lifetime. Only one problem.

I don’t know how I’m going to get through it!

It feels endlessly long to me. Every page takes a lifetime to get through. That may be because the font is so small and squatty on the page that almost 400 pages is more like almost 800 pages!

Also, it is a different time. A perfectly written book then; now it could use a good editor. So, for instance, Jo writes a newspaper for the club that she and her sisters have. Interesting detail. But then all eight pages of the newspaper are included in there! I mean, really? Is that really necessary? Hm. The girls write notes to their mother, sending her love and missing her. Since they are pretty much all conveying the same points, must we read all of their notes?

I know that all of these points will pale to the majesty of the book in hindsight.

Just wondering if I’ll ever get there. Is there a hindsight in my future?

Well, I’m ahead of schedule with my ten books a year, but this one may edge me back a ways. But I like it! Really.

5/27/19

Okay. I’m not too proud to say it. Well, that’s sort of not true. I’m pretty sheepish to say it.

I may die before I finish reading Little Women.

Not really. I’m not dying. I’m not even sick. But I’m mighty damned sick of Little Women.

I always thought it would be War & Peace or some opus like that that would take me six months to get through. But Little Women is giving me a run for my money.

It is a perfectly fine book. The characters have stayed with most of us who read it in our youth. Stayed with us to the extent that most women my age remember all the girls names. And for its time, it is perfectly obvious how she crafted a new, original story that absolutely everyone could identify with. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but it is also a slog! I think I would still finish it if I weren’t doing this project. And I would also do that because I tend to finish books. But it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that I’d let a fun mystery creep in as I was reading it – and then another – and then another. And there it would sit.

I’m glad to be reading it. It is a fine piece of work. If it were written today, it would be whittled down by a third and I think it would be the better for it. But it is its own world and for the most part, I’m in.

The current human in me has a hard time with the part I’m in now where they are becoming wives. I know that a wife’s job back then was to clean and prepare the meals and there weren’t a whole lot of alternatives. But as a multi-decade happily married woman who doesn’t do any of that stuff – or at least doesn’t have to – it is a hard ambition to relate to.

I’m going to Italy in two weeks. I don’t want to bring a book from this project with me. I like to take a handful of paperbacks on trips. And I want to be reading nothing but fun on that trip. So I need to finish this off and know that I will.

There is heart and love and wisdom in this book and I think it belongs on the list. And I will survive it!

6/3/19

Well, it had to happen some time. Had to. A little less than a month in, I finished Little Women.

The last hundred pages or so read a bit faster than the rest. Maybe it felt a bit more relatable when everyone started getting a bit older and wiser. It was definitely refreshing after that first blush of romance when they learned to submit to their husbands, allowing their men to set them straight. That was incredibly hard, especially for this old married woman!

Kudos are due to Alcott for making a very smooth transition in that sense. She was able to keep growing up with her characters, with one exception. She made the little kids sound like mongoloid idiots. Every time they spoke, it was to say “me want poopy” or some stupid shit like that, to which everyone there would smile or laugh. Jesus. Give that a rest.

But I am fond of the book. I like it more in my rearview mirror – much as I have with some of the others. I sort of long for a book that I don’t want to put down. And I was only too happy to put this down. I put this bad boy down a lot.

Maybe I’m older and I will always put them down a lot. But a girl can hope.

I’m going to pick something else now, but with one caveat this time.

As I believe I mentioned, I’m off to Italy in two weeks and I decided to allow myself a vacation from this project on that week long trip.

I have long treasured the practice of bringing paperbacks that, when finished, I leave for someone else to read wherever I can. I love that practice. When the umpteenth person tried to persuade me to get a kindle (somehow they don’t understand that a) I don’t want to look at a screen more than I already do and b) I love books way too much to have them hide out in electronics), they often sight trips as the main reason to have one. I tell them of my practice of dropping off my read books.

Having said that, I now realize, 8 books (is it?) into this project, that I am biologically incapable of not picking the next book right now! So I will pick it and perhaps leave it behind for my trip and then bring it back. I’ll especially do that if it is a huge one. I like to be able to read at least the greater portion of a whole book while flying to Europe. Wish me luck!

I picked two titles, along with keeping Ghost on the list from the last pick. I had sort of thought I would just start with Little Women, out of that pick, and then follow it up with Ghost.

The two titles I picked were The Help, which I have read before and it didn’t seem the right time for. But the other one was James Baldwin’s Another Country, which does intrigue me.

Ghost would be fine – plus it is quite short so I could easily finish it before my trip. But I’ll decide, after I go through the drill of seeing if I can find the Baldwin one nearby. If so, I’ll pick then.

3/18/20

TWO ADDITIONAL NOTES ADDED LATER TO THIS BOOK READ:

#1 – I feel that I want to clarify how far behind I am with these. I read this book months back. Now we are all isolated in our homes, due to the pandemic.

Just thought I’d add this, as I got a little queasy re-reading the part about touching the old book and loving all the other people who touched it. Boy, times have sure changed! Hopefully not for good. I, for one, have always enjoyed human touch and hope I will get the chance to enjoy it once again!

#2 – Saw Greta Gerwig’s film of Little Women a month or two back. I felt a secret thrill, that I was uniquely qualified to judge it having so very recently read the book.

I think she did an astonishing job! Beautifully done. The times she took a little license all made sense to me. And she much more than honored the spirit of the story.

One funny exception to me was when she cast the part of the sort of tubby, losing-his-hair tutor that Meg falls in love with, though he is penniless and the family isn’t initially thrilled? She cast it with the guy from Granchester! I mean, give me a break! Who wouldn’t be penniless with him?!

I’ve kept you long enough! Toodles!

• JURASSIC PARK
• by Michael Crichton
• [rated by PBS readers as #52]
• 448 pages
• (yours truly not a huge fan of the movie, but here we go!)

4/18/19

Okay, I have the book but I haven’t even opened it yet. I have to share a new fear first.

While I was at the Barnes & Noble in Santa Rosa picking this book up, I was wandering around, as I have want to do in just about any bookstore. And, for the first time I can ever remember, I wandered over to the sci-fi section. I knew I had to get a couple of books from those shelves for this list, so I was a intrigued to peruse an area I had never hung out in.

I knew I wouldn’t remember most of the titles but I certainly knew Chronicles of Narnia. I thought I was picking up the top book in a stack and then I found out that one book WAS the stack. Makes me realize that I have to keep on trucking, in case I pull a book that takes me a year! Dune was on a shelf nearby and plenty thick too, but this thing was as wide as a piano!

Ah well. I really expect them all to be good books and good writers so I’m game. Well, with the exception of Fifty Shades of Grey, which has to be just about the most confusing title on this list. The only thing I will gain when I read that is shelf space. My sister loaned it to me years ago and there it sits.

But, as usual, I digress!

4/25/19

I don’t want to jinx this book, but I’m about a week in and almost half way through. I am really liking it. Not a page turner yet, but sort of terminally curiosity producing! And even then, I am just entering the page turner phase right now, so I expect to move through it pretty fast.

Wow. For a gal who has no curiosity about dinosaurs, I’m surprised and pleased with how much I’m into this.

One odd side effect – the occasional dinosaur will show up in my dreams at night. And not because it fits in the theme of the dream at all! Just because all of a sudden, there’s a dinosaur!

Definitely great writing, especially considering all the crap he needs to put in there to set it up and move the story and none of that is boring! It is precisely the stuff that doesn’t make it into a movie and it is probably why I didn’t like the movie as much.

I am a bit lost as to who is who in the control booth right now.There a few too many grizzly doubters who think Hammond is over the top. One can easily lose who is who. I also find it fairly far fetched in the plot that hundreds of people have been working on this and the secret hasn’t gotten out.

But – fairness check to stick in here. I am an unabashed Bond fan and all the evil geniuses end up having carloads of guys quietly helping them blow up the world with no questions asked. So I have to give that quibble a pass.

And these are small things. The main thrust pulls you in and slowly portends that things aren’t going to go all that well there!

I love the place being portrayed as state of the art and yet the botanist notices they have mistakenly decorated with poisonous ferns! Great stuff…

4/29/19

Feel like I need to put this one little thought in, not related specifically to Jurassic.

Jurassic is going great, by the way. I am having fun with turning pages and absorbing it all while the dinosaurs slowly eat up the cast of characters.

But my side point is that, in turning 60, I wonder if books can be read really efficiently anymore. When you are young and it’s a good book, you read it straight through, which is precisely the way a good book is meant to be read! Now in my life, a dinosaur eats somebody and I go off to six different functions in three days and when I sit back down to read it, I feel like it’s been a year since the last smorgasbord!

No real question and no real answer. I know that, in 100 books read, I will not have the excitement of discovering something brand new. These books have all been well discovered. Maybe discovery has always been an illusion anyway… But I’d like to think that somewhere in here, I am going to let myself drop deeply into a book, with no interruptions. I drop in now, all the time.

But I’d like to drop in deeper.

5/4/19

Well, I finished it! I must say it more than kept my interest the whole way through.

Crichton has a definite and amazing set of skills. His story has great structure. You find your mind staying up with the premise and there is plenty of exposition to keep you believing at least in the concept of the thing.

I admired two things the most about his writing. I liked the way that he was able to move with ease between so many different points of view. He jumped from story to story and you quickly moved into the new person’s point of view, allowing the suspense to grow exponentially. For instance, when several people are talking together and have no idea that their brethren are out there being munched up by the dinosaurs. Great way to build the storyline – and always by those who are not the wiser yet!

I also think that he writes fabulous dinosaur attacks. I marveled at how they were all surprising, even when you were expecting one. It would literally leap off the page at you. The big scare point was always shocking.

Malcolm and his lectures on mathematics were a bit tedious. I found it crafty and a good solution to have him dying throughout, so that all the others were forced to hear his rants. But they were still rants and got a bit heavy handed, especially from someone who was supposedly getting more light headed by the minute.

All in all, a great read and I’m the richer for having read it. Now if I could just move on from the dinosaurs! So now I will pick.

I picked an interesting bunch. The three titles I came up with are two for younger readers – Ghost & Little Women, while Coldest Winter Ever is a whole other thing! I have decided that I would like to read them all next, so once again tomorrow, I will set off on finding out what my local bookstore has and then the Barnes & Nobel a bit farther away. I’ll get whatever I can and decide then.