Here’s the essay I wrote for this past year of reading. . . .
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When people congratulate me on “doing what you love,”
they’re usually talking about the acting and modeling career that has reared
its unlikely head over the past several years. But I’d rather be reading. You
might say I’ve arranged my professional and private life largely to accommodate
my pleasure reading.
I would imagine a majority of the folks who post big numbers
in the reading contest are either in school or retired. At 53, I’m a long way
from either end of that spectrum, making less income than I have in years, yet
happy in my reading habits. I started stage acting in Portland in earnest in
2005, and went free-lance as an actor and wordsmith (writing, editing,
proofreading) in the summer of 2009. But I still probably spend more time
reading. Everything else is little more than an excuse for that.
Since we haven’t owned a car in more than a decade, my wife
and I do a lot of reading on the Portland Streetcar, MAX, and TriMet buses. She
doesn’t read while walking across town the way I do, however; I’ve read while
walking all over Portland (and in the other cities I’ve lived, from Coos Bay
and Roseburg to Boston and Hanau, Germany).
I read while riding or walking to auditions, and on my way home afterwards. I read to kill time waiting for a movie or play to start, and
during the intermissions. I read walking to and from the Multnomah County
Central Branch library almost every day (which is only three blocks from our
apartment, I’m delighted to say). I read every night while flossing and
brushing my teeth.
I think I missed the first year or two of the Steve Duin
reading contest. Ever since, the good reading years have run between 95 and 120
books, or 32,000 to 40,000 pages. A little extra bulk comes from the plays I
read for or during auditions and staged readings, and stories and book excerpts
I read to small audiences in my monthly “Story Time for Grownups” series at
Grendel’s Coffee House at East 8th and Burnside.
My book and page totals have typically placed me between
12th and 20th place in the contest. Not one of the top generators, perhaps, but
I suspect my list may be among the most catholic of all of them. Each year I
start out aiming for an average of 10 books a month, or roughly 100 pages a
day, and have usually managed to keep up that pace until somewhere between
April and August.
2012 turned out to be a record year, though I didn’t realize
it could be until late autumn. The unusually dry and sunny months of July,
August, and September had encouraged me to sit on the second-floor courtyard of our apartment building and read for a
few hours in the afternoons (and make up for it by doing my free-lance writing
and editing jobs late into the night).
The record year was partly attributable to the fact that
I’ve plunged heavily into police procedurals and mystery series, which make for
fast – and, on the average, shorter – books. Nicolas Freeling’s Van Der Valk
series, starring a sophisticated Dutch detective in the 1960s and 1970s, and
Arnaldur Indriðason’s Detective
Erlandur books set in Iceland, were both highly rewarding: leaner and more
compelling than Henning Mankell’s at-times too-leisurely Kurt Wallanders.
I also discovered
the Norwegian Jo Nesbø (a very gripping storyteller) whose hero
is (for Americans) the awkwardly named Harry Hole. Also two series with Irish
settings: Bartholomew Gill’s McGarr series and John Brady’s books about
Inspector Matthew Minogue. The Dutch writer A.C. Baantjer was a highly prolific
mystery novelist whose books go way back (many of the 40-odd DeKok novels published
between 1963 and 1992 haven’t even been translated into English) and will
provide plenty of enjoyment in the months to come. (Baantjer has been compared
to Simenon, whose books I have yet to try.) A trilogy by Tom Rob Smith, Child
44, The Secret Speech, and Agent 6, were particularly bracing.
It’s hard to beat late Stalinist Russia for a high-paranoia noir setting!
After hearing about Ed McBain’s 87th
Precinct series for so many years, I gave them a try and was very happily
surprised at how well they hold up, even if the mid 1950s and early 1960s
settings of the first books are inevitably dated at times. So far I’ve read
ten, and look forward to the remaining 44. When I started reading them early in
2012, the Multnomah County Library had less than a third of the series on hand
– most of them from recent decades. Since few of the early books were in the
collection, I had to start by ordering them through interlibrary loan. Fortunately, a Vegas
publisher named Thomas & Mercer began issuing a shiny new paperback edition
in 2011, and our library has gotten them in, which makes life much easier.
Another contributing factor was that this
was the first full year I participated in three different book discussion
groups. My all-men’s group was in its eleventh year of existence; in 2011, I had joined two others (mainly because both conveniently meet in my apartment
building). Their memberships have been all-female except for me, which has been interesting.
Occasional surveys of American reading habits claim that our
fellow citizens average six or eight books a year. Today I read more than four
times that many each year that I haven’t even chosen for myself! Somewhere
between a fifth to a quarter of the books I read in 2012 were “assigned
reading” . . . and I admit I didn’t finish some of them in time or found myself manically whipping through the final pages on the afternoon before the meeting.
But what were the best books I read this year? Nietzsche
wrote — I think in Ecce
Homo — that most people only
read what they already know. Some of the better books I read this year mostly
confirmed my beliefs and prejudices, so they were interesting and reassuring
but not really startlingly memorable. Sarah Bakewell’s charming portrait of
Montaigne and his writings, How to Live, and Alain De Botton’s
urbane, charming Religion for Atheists were examples of this type. David
Finkel’s depiction of a U.S. Army battalion in the 2007 Iraq surge, The
Good Soldiers, as beautifully and honestly as it is written, told me
nothing about the war that I couldn’t have predicted when I marched the streets of downtown Portland against our entering it, back in early 2003. There was hardly
anything surprising in Rachel Maddow’s excellent dissection of U.S. military
power, Drift. The same is true of Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian’s
exposé of political operatives, We’re With Nobody.
Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: why
violence has declined was excellent but not particularly memorable in
the opposite way. It set out to contest a popular assumption I shared with
almost everyone else (that ours has been an increasingly violent age). While it
managed to dispel this apparent myth quite easily and convincingly, in my opinion,
it got bogged down in too much data and details. Jonathan Haidt’s The
Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion
was not exactly eye-opening for me, but it gives an excellent explanation why
people’s strong opinions remain mostly impervious to reason or facts. It should
be required reading for everyone.
A new 800-plus-page bio of Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh and
Gregory White Smith gave me a new appreciation for both the spirituality and
the desperation of the artist’s life, with a special treat at the end: the
authors mount a fairly persuasive case for contending that Van Gogh was not a
suicide but died from a tragic accident that was covered up.
One rarely expects
much of celebrity memoirs, so I was not disappointed by the decent ones I read
this year, by Diane Keaton, Rob Lowe, and Martin Sheen/Emilio Estevez. D.T.
Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,
is very much a first bio – sketchy, lightly critical, somewhat pasted together
from interviews and news reports – but I still appreciated it, and it gave me
the necessary background and courage to tackle DFW’s Infinite Jest, which is
my first major reading project of 2013.
Books I should have read long ago and finally got around to
included Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart, Barbara
Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon – all
tremendously worthwhile. Biggest disappointments were Umberto Eco’s The
Prague Cemetery (unengaging novel about anti-Semitism and the creation
of the bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion), Avidor, Bremer & Young’s The
Madness of Michele Bachmann (recycled and disorganized collection of
blog posts), Giroux and Pollock’s The Mouse That Roared (overly
academic dissection of the massive and dire influence of the Walt Disney
Corp.), Chelsea Handler’s My Horizontal Life (often funny but
uneven humor pieces), and various enticing little books for young, hip adults
in the style of glossy magazine stories (e.g., Murnighan and Kelly’s Much
Ado About Loving, and Arianne Cohen’s The Sex Diaries Project).
I would say the most memorable books I read this year were
Neil McGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, Errol Morris’s Believing
is Seeing: observations on the mysteries of photography, and Mark
Sundeen’s The Man Who Quit Money. In a book accompaniment to a BBC
radio(!) series, McGregor chooses objects in the British Museum from throughout
human history and describes them, their meaning, their place in human lives at
the time, the state of the world then, and so on. The subject matter bridges
aesthetics, religion, power, economics, war, artistic techniques, social mores,
and just about everything else about human culture. Among many other things
that struck me was how many societies and civilizations I had known absolutely
nothing about, had not even heard of, that had had a major heyday (often lasting longer than the
United States, so far), but that had disappeared almost completely.
Looking at historic photos between the time of the Crimean
War (and the site of the supposed Valley of the Shadow of Death from the 23rd
Psalm) and Abu Ghraib, Morris discusses perception, history, truth, and myth in
often startling ways. His book reminded me of Ernst Gombrich’s equally
arresting Art and Illusion, which made a big impression on me back in
college. “It is often said that seeing is believing,” Morris writes. “But we do
not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is often
determined by our beliefs. Believing is seeing, not the other way around.”
The Man Who Quit Money relates the life (so far) and thoughts
of Daniel Suelo, (née Shellabarger), who has lived entirely off the money grid
for more than a decade. He has not taken a dollar for his labor or paid a cent
for food or shelter. He also got rid of his passport and driver’s license.
Living in a cave on public land in Utah, hitchhiking across the country and
staying with friends, dumpster diving, maintaining a blog on computers at
public libraries, Suelo must have the smallest carbon footprint of any
American. And he’s not some simple crackpot; he thinks hard about everything he
chooses to do and not to do. Suelo grew up a fundamentalist Christian,
discovered he was gay and had to make peace with his family over that, and
traveled to India and Tibet to study Buddhism – among many other adventures. I
could never live like Suelo, but his life presents a fascinating perspective on
the things we do and take for granted: the values in which we are enmeshed
almost without noticing, let alone questioning them.
The author of the book, a journalist and longtime Suelo
acquaintance, has done a lot of homework about U.S. consumption and economics;
his book turned me on to William Greider’s mammoth history of the Federal
Reserve, Secrets of the Temple, which I read next (bit of a slog, too,
but very well written and interesting – I read it partly because I’d seen signs
at the Occupy Portland camp last year execrating the Fed, which is also –
intriguingly – a favorite kicking-boy of many on the American right).
I doubt my totals for the reading contest a year from now
will be as high as they were for 2012. But my approach to reading will not
change. (People often opine that I must be a “fast” reader, but I respond that
I am a “persistent” reader.) I will not get an e-reader; I will continue to
check out dozens of books from the library at a time; and I will undoubtedly
spend far more hours with my nose in a book than watching TV, viewing movies or
plays, and driving an automotive vehicle, altogether.
* * * * *
Another piece that appeared in The Oregonian, about how my men’s book group chooses what to read
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