For more on why I'm now using a reading plan (what most people call a reading challenge), scroll down on this post.
Here's what I read in 2024.
At least five current (within three years) nonfiction ✅
I loved all the current nonfictions, and most of the older nonfictions, I read this year.
Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, Rachel Maddow (review)
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein (review)
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith (review)
Ducks, Kate Beaton
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, Lucy Sante
Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, David Maraniss (review)
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having -- or Being Denied -- an Abortion, Diana Greene Foster
At least five older nonfiction from my Books Universe ✅
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (2014), Annie Jacobsen (review)
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), Maggie Nelson (review)
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited (2001), Clinton Heylin
War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918 (2017), Michael Kazin
Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (2017), Nate Blakeslee (review)
Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (2016), Erik Reece
Illness as Metaphor (1978); AIDS and its Metaphors (1988), Susan Sontag
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, Jeremiah Moss
How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, P.E. Moskowitz
Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Sarah Schulman (combined review)
At least ten fiction ✅, including at least two from authors I have not previously read and have been curious about. This year's new: Ursula Le Guin, Elena Ferrante, Kevin Wilson, James Ellroy. ✅
Advance one long-term goal ✅
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (Goal: read everything Orwell published)
Read one massive book in installments ✅
Visions of Jazz, Gary Giddins (still reading!)
Also read
Several children's graphic novels
A small sampling of legal thrillers and spy thrillers by famous authors, none of which I liked
Reports (or summaries of reports) published by: the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Dying With Dignity Canada, BC Health Coalition, Amnesty International, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Athena Coalition (Amazon workers), RAVEN (Indigenous environmental action), and SAFE Supporting Abortions for Everyone
A large (digital) pile of feature-length articles and opinion pieces from The Atlantic, The New York Times, Vox, and other more occasional sources, which I save and track through Chrome's Reading List feature
16 comments:
I just finished James so went back to read your review. I agree with everything you wrote. I first re-read Huck Finn and was surprised by how much I had forgotten---especially the last section when Tom Sawyer comes along and they "free" Jim from captivity. (I found that section annoying because Tom's antics were just...annoying.) I was glad that Everett abandoned that plot line and all that followed and gave Jim/James a lot more agency. Freeing himself by escaping and by protecting others was much more heroic than the ending of Huck Finn when he is freed by the widow, which felt anticlimactic given all Huck and Jim had done to try and bring him to freedom by escaping.
And happy New Year!
One more comment---I didn't like that Everett made Jim into Huck's real father. I thought that was an unrealistic and unnecessary plot device. Huck's affection for Jim and Jim's for Huck felt genuine enough without making them father and son.
What a great idea, re-reading HF. I read it as a child, and re-read it while in library school, as part of a discussion about intellectual freedom.
More agency, yes, that was key. I felt like that must have been one of Everett's motivators. Which also would be much more historically accurate!
I plan on reading another of Everett's books this year.
How did Huck Finn relate to the issue of intellectual freedom?
I may have read everything of Orwell's. Maybe even all his published letters. Old boy had a keen mind.
Dr. Beer, that's very cool. I am only missing 2 books, plus letters and diaries.
Amy, Huck Finn is consistently "challenged" (people wanting to remove/ban it) because of the use of the word nigger.
To me it seems obvious why the book should remain accessible and read, but most of my classmates -- who were much younger than me, didn't grow up in the US, didn't receive it as a classic -- were more sympathetic to the challenges.
They didn't see the value or view HF as a classic. To them it was an out-of-date book that doesn't need to be read any more, similar to Kipling -- celebrating colonialism, portraying the colonized as simpletons or savages, the British as heroes -- or the way old westerns portrayed Native Americans.
Not that anyone wanted to actually ban it (which doesn't happen anyway), but to me the challenge seems ridiculous -- to them it did not.
My other "read everything by" goal is Dickens. I have 4 books to go. I hadn't read anything by either of them (especially Dickens) in years. That's an example of why I like the reading plan. It's helped me get back to these goals.
Thanks, Laura, for explaining. I agree with you, but also come from the same American classic bias. I actually thought Twain's message was anti-slavery although not as strong a message as that conveyed in James. For his times especially, Twain made it clear that slavery was wrong. The connection between Huck and Jim dramatically illustrated that Jim (and all the enslaved people) were human and deserved to be treated as such by all. I think his use of the N word demonstrated how dehumanizing slavery was.
Absolutely agree -- and the use of any other word would have been absurd. These folks couldn't see past the word. They have never heard it used in person, never read it, only know it as a word to never, ever use. Their feeling was, I don't care why Twain used it or what a great writer he is, this book needs to go.
Re the father twist, I don't see how it could be any other way. It isn't about Huck's feelings for Jim. Twain used the classic "two fathers, which one will the boy follow, which vision of manhood will he choose" trope -- as Russell Banks did in Rule of the Bone, which consciously echoes HF. HF is one of the works in which that trope became a classic. Everett picks up on the theme, and completes the circle in a way Twain wouldn't or couldn't.
It's also a nod to the fact that many or most people in the Southern slavery world were of mixed heritage. Certainly most poor people were. The world was not actually black/white, a fact the slavery powers ignored and denied, and the way that has been denied throughout most of US history.
It's hard to take seriously as readers, people who insist on literary purity tests or who apply anachronistic standards retrospectively or who insist that literature should actually be agitprop. One needn't agree with the world-view of a book or its author to nevertheless esteem it as art and the author as a creator.
I get the second point---that it was a way of showing the prevalence of mixed heritage and the fallacy of "race." As for the first, I still think that having Jim as his friend/father figure was more powerful in the original book than explaining Jim's affection as a matter of biology in James.
John, I couldn't agree more. It's ludicrous and so tiring. If we consume anything created by someone with loathesome opinions, not only are we "siding" with that person, but we are told we are actually doing the same thing they are doing. I.e. if I watch or read anything Harry Potter, I am now transphobic. If I enjoy a Woody Allen film, I am a rapist.
During the #metoo revelations, I wondered if people were actually keeping lists of all the actors whose films they would no longer see. I am SO DONE with this. I no longer discuss it with anyone who feels otherwise, haven't in ages, but I see it all the time in my social media feed.
This is long but still one of the better things I've written.
https://www.wmtc.ca/2014/02/dylan-farrow-and-woody-allen-feminist_74.html
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