Last Book of 2011
O Pathetic Being that I Am, I finish the year with just 67 books being read. !?!?!? How are the literate fallen, and the once well-read laid waste...
The breakdown is, as follows. 32 non-fiction titles (with 7 being speech/essay collections); 6 poetry or plays; 29 fiction (18 novels, 11 short story collections). Of the novels, just half were genre works; 5 mystery-ish, 4 speculative fictions.
As part of my ongoing book research, 10 of the titles were military in nature. I was also interested to see that there were 8 books that were mostly personal memoir: Frederick Douglass, George Washington Plunkitt, Mary Antin, Black Hawk, Tim O'Brien, Richard Henry Dana, Ambrose Bierce and Julius Caesar.
My last completed title for 2011 is a combined Riverside Literature Series volume of essays by James Russell Lowell, Books and Libraries; Democracy and Other Papers (RLS #39 and #123). It contains the following essays and speeches:
- Books and Libraries
- Emerson, the Lecturer
- Keats
- Don Quixote
- Democracy
- On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners
- The Study of Modern Languages
The proximate cause of my reading this volume is that I taught the Emerson essay last term, and not having read the rest of the volume, decided to finish it as soon as the term ending allowed. Lowell was a conservative old stick, though anti-slavery to the core, and I would probably find him irritating in person. But his writings have great charm, and the selection here mostly preach to the choir as I read them. The Emerson was the most interesting, because I've never been that impressed with his essays (which are often sermons, simply stating the thesis repeatedly, as if that were an argument), and Lowell makes it clear that the performance was half the candle.
The "Democracy" speech was historically important, as it was made in the Monarchy of Victorian Britain, when he was the U.S. Ambassador there. He managed to argue that American Democracy was the logical outgrowth of the British Constitution, and that Britain was headed down the same path ... and to do so without offending his hosts.
Let me end with half a paragraph from "Books and Libraries" in which he seems to discuss the problem of the Internet's effect on scholarship, only a hundred years and so before it took over the culture.
...We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago, and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterizes them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato. We spend as much time over print as they did, but instead of communing with the choice thoughts of choice spirits, and unconsciously acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves, and cover the continent with a cobweb of telegraphs to inform us, of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday, seriously damaging a valuable carryall; that a son of Mr. Brown swallowed a hickory nut on Thursday; and that a gravel bank caved in and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. Alas, it is we ourselves that are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthy impertinences!...
May the New Year not overwhelm you with its impertinences.
CBsIP: Down the Great River, Captain Willard Glazier, the Soldier-Author
Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, Charles Schulz
The Maker of Heavenly Trousers, Daniele Varè