A man’s relationship with his books tells you a lot about him

My entries dwindling to nary one a month, one might have the idea that I’ve quit the project. Not true. After Sacred Hunger I read three books, two of which I quite enjoyed. The three were Robert Stone’s Bay of Souls, Jordan Fisher Smith’s Nature Noir and E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed. I could have done without Stone’s novel that really went over the top, but Smith’s park ranger memoir was great. I marveled at his descriptions of foliage. I’ve often wished I could name flora at will and that I was better versed in Roman history and Greek mythology.

Sledge’s book was by far the best thing I’ve read this year. I’ll go over it in detail in my next entry. I don’t have it right now having lent it to my father Carlton Einar Gustafson, who fought on Okinawa at the same time as Sledge. The difference being my dad was army and Sledgehammer a marine. I hesitated giving it to my dad. He’s told me a lot about his time in the army, about joining a unit and having his foxhole mates shot the first night out. He has two Purple Hearts and Bronze Star. He’s never revealed what he got the Star for. Sledge’s account pulls no punches and I wondered if my dad wanted to revisit the horror of something he experienced over sixty years ago. But he seemed keen on reading it.

Since I finished it in August I haven’t read a book all the way through. It would be safe to say I’ve fallen in and out of depression. I’ve had trouble writing, in finishing things. I’ve still been reading, mostly journalism. I think I’m going to read Netherland next which isn’t on my list, but was a birthday present this year. Recently, I’ve gone back to reading Clive James’ Cutural Amnesia. It’s been sitting on my bedside table for over a year now and I find it incredibly inspiring since, in essence, it’s about is reading. It is a book of essays on poets and writers and rulers and entertainers. But what I really like is how an essay on Montesquieu say can spiral off into a story of how Stalin refused to believe Hitler would double-cross him and how he fainted when he could no longer refute the fact that Barbarossa was under way.

In addition, at the heart of the book is something that I often brood over, the pursuit of knowledge and the way in which knowledge and talent are drained by death. Where do memories go when the vessel that carries them ceases to be? And perhaps, more importantly, is there a responsibility in reading. Is it increasingly a revolutionary act. I just read James entry on Goebbels. It’s fascinating in that he discusses the role of Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels uniformed amanuensis and how von Oven escaped to Argentina and ended up publishing Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, a two-volume historical document of Goebbels’ insanity. James mentions how he ends up tracking down his own set fifty years on in Buenos Aires and sits down in his favorite café in San Telmo to read it.

Later, James has an incredible passage in which he notes how Goebbels threw out all the party propaganda toward the end of the war and reorganized his library (with the help of von Oven) purely according to literary standards. In the end, it’s as if Goebbels subconsciously rued the path he had taken as a man of action and not a man of learning:

“Perhaps now, with the roof falling in, he hankered for the lost past, at a level he could not examine. But the reordering of his books did the examining for him. A man’s relationship with his books tells you a lot about him, and in the case of a man like Goebbels we should pay close attention, because a crucial early choice he made was one that continually faces any of us who read at all. He chose a life of action, and his life would have been different if he had not. It could have been said that the lives of millions of innocent people would have been different too, but there we should be equally alert to the danger of optimism. The only thing different might have been that he would have had a job like von Oven’s. He might have been merely reporting on the insanity instead of helping to create it, but the insanity would have still been there. Hitler wouldn’t have needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.”

Thank you, Mr. James for this inspiration. For it is in this time, that reading is required. Not to be saved from oneself as Goebbels failed to do, but to be saved from others who denigrate learning, books, words. Just look at the McCain campaign’s assault on words (a nod to James Wood’s New Yorker piece) that somehow masks their own willingness to say anything. It could be argued that we need words, rational thought, logical arguments more than ever. Death may indeed drain us of our knowledge, but the ability to convey thoughts, to express what it is to be alive now remains invaluable to any idea of a future.

Largo al factotum

Back in June (maybe May), I told my friend Cukes about my blog and how I was having trouble reading much less writing about it. He suggested I write about all the things that are keeping me from reading and writing. So here it goes. First, there’s the problem of making a living. That always seems to get in the way of things.

Then there’s Clyde, our cat. He goes outside now thus eliminating his need to play as soon as I rise. Still, I end up leaving my hovel, my reading and writing hovel (it is kinda dark in here) to check up on him. And occasionally he comes back in looking for me and asking why I’m not out playing with him. Yes, he talks.

Guitar. I took up the guitar just a few years ago. My teacher says I don’t have to play more than five minutes a day. Sometimes I play no minutes a day. You see the pattern here. Set goals. Fail to live up to goals. Go to sleep. Wake up and start anew. I get the bug to play sometimes but it’s not the first thing I do in morning. Maybe it should be.

Exercise. I noticed I was in much better shape this year at the beach than last. This could possibly be due to the fact that I find time to work out four to five times a week. You’d think if I spend a half hour at the gym twice a week and toddle on down to the beach for a run or two that I could write (or read) for at least a half hour a day. I usually read but I don’t write every day. Why?

Then there’s this internet thing. “Yeah, it’s the inner netting they invented to line swim trunks . . .” Ode to Carl Carlson. I’m on the web all day. The most egregious use of such time is when I follow Yankee games online at ESPN or MLB.com. It’s worse than hearing a game being recreated like Ron Reagan did back in the day because you don’t hear anything. I like ESPN though because when a ball is hit in play they try to simulate the trajectory of the ball and the scoreboard moves like a pinball machine. Can anyone tell me this isn’t a colossal waste of time? Especially with the season the Yanks are having. I go into convulsions whenever Edwin Ramirez materializes on screen as the new Yankees pitcher.

Drinking. So far I have not had a drink for two days this week. That’s a rarity but much needed after a week at the beach in which days were capped by returning to the condo to fix a margarita, G&T or colada. Dark and Stormys are always good for the beach but I ran out of Goslings and couldn’t find a place in San Clemente that sold it. I was also into making Spiced Rum Coladas using this fine NY Times recipe but I didn’t have Coco Lopez and had to use Mr. T’s. Ugh. So I started drinking Cap’n and Cokes and almost kicked the bottle . . .by myself. I don’t think I have drinking problem. Would it make you feel better if I said I did? That main way it gets in the way of reading and writing is that once I start I’m usually more apt to watch TV or play music than read. Drinking can be a night ender. But I never start before five. Ok, four on Fridays.

Tunes. My friends turned me on to last.fm recently and I like it. But I don’t listen to much music during the day. That’s when I should be reading and writing. At night though we listen to Jason Bentley on KCRW here in SaMo except on Tuesdays when they broadcast City Council meetings. I have an extensive music collection though. My iPod has about 2500 songs on it and I have probably five hundred cds and records. I used to have more records. I was DJ in college. Now, I end up burning cds for friends and spend time working on various mixes. I’ve been saying I’m going to download Audacity so I can really mix but I haven’t. I frequently tell Bethany that being a successful electronic/dance DJ must be the greatest job in the world. Everywhere you go are happy people who want to dance.

TV. I really don’t watch much TV except for sports and when I can’t sleep at night. Occasionally, I watch PTI or check what’s on HBO. Nothing is the answer. We have a saying in our household whose phrasing is borrowed from the Brits: TV is pants. It really is. We got into The Wire and ended up watching Seasons 1-4 last year before Season 5 came out. Season 5 was terrible but we still miss the show. Now, we’re into Mad Men but it’s no Wire.

Vid. Here’s something I’ve really cut down on. I really got into EA soccer for a while. And Madden and EA Hockey (took Ottawa to the Cup). Ok, it was against the computer. I also played a lot of GTA San Andreas and Katamari and some Guitar Hero. But outside of GH I haven’t play a video game since January when we got Clyde. In a way I’ve substituted reading. But not in a big way.

So there you have it. With all these other interests it’s a wonder I sleep. My real problem is I’m a dilettante, jack-of-all-trades master of none. As I wrote this I paused to go find the cat. He was climbing a tree. The sun is out. I think I’ll join him outside with a good book in tow.

The Ruler has returned with a nod to Jay-Z

I haven’t written for over a month. In the meantime I finished Sacred Hunger on June 27th and was relieved to have done so. About 130 pages from the end there is a dramatic cut in time. The whites and blacks on the ship end up in a mutiny against the captain. Of course, you don’t get the exact details of what happened until the last twenty pages of the book. Meanwhile, Erasmus Kemp, the son of the merchant in Liverpool inherits his father’s debts after the latter commits suicide. So he can’t marry the girl he’s after. He rebuilds his life, becomes wealthy, falls into a sham marriage and then gets wind of the fact that his dad’s ship didn’t sink, that the crew and the slaves set up this sorta free love commune on the edge of the Florida wilderness.

So he decides to head across the Atlantic, break up the party and see his cousin (the ship's doctor) hanged. All because his cousin picked him out the water when he was little, basically saved him from drowning. Kemp makes it across the ocean in no time. It's like when Russell Crow returns home in Gladiator and goes through about four different ecosystems in a ten second sequence. But then we have to learn all about the commune. Not that it's so bad but they speak in pidgin so it's a little slow going. There are a couple of good scenes. One with Billy and Inchebe where they're out fishing and Inchebe slips while pulling up their boat and hurts his hand. He calls kudala, or witchcraft. Billy calls it chance. But Ichebe has a great line: 'Dat anadder ting about you, Billy, same-same all buckra white man, you say dere no answer mean you have no answer.' It's a nice moment that exemplifies a difference in cultures and I wish there were more of it.

I also wish there was a bigger fight near the end. But there isn't. Overall, the book could have been much shorter. It was certainly good in spots, such as aboard the ship. But it's strange. Kemp doesn't realize his folly until the end and you're like, duh, why did you waste 600 pages getting to this bit of enlightenment. If there are so few likeable, read humanistic, characters then what is the point of the story? That everyone is greedy?

Anyway, I finished it and have now almost finished Nature Noir, a non-fiction book which I'll get to next time. Next week I'm off to the beach so I need to pick wisely. The problem is I'm running out of fiction that I'm really looking forward to reading.

Arrgh, the Hunger!

Wow, it’s been three weeks. Looks like I’m really taking to this blogging thing. I guess Will Leitch was right; it is hard work. Especially, when you’re working on something else. But excuses, excuses. I’m still reading Sacred Hunger. Just starting to get in the flow. I wanted to finish it by June but it’s not looking good. I’m only 200 pages into a 630-page book. It was a little slow to begin with, the ship didn’t sail until around a 100 pages in. Now, I’ve got to look up all the nautical terms in order to correctly place each character in my mind. Scuppers, the punt, the forecastle, all that stuff. Reminds me on my wallpaper as a kid which had ships on it and my headboard which was a “real” ship’s wheel.

I’m starting to see why it won the Booker. It’s a well-written book and some of language is beautiful. There are times when I wish Unsworth would step out and take a few more chances. The book lends itself to points of magic realism but he pretty much plays it straight. There’s the beginning of Part 4 which I particularly liked: “There are moments in anyone’s life when some blend of circumstances, some consonance of surroundings and situation and character, show him in light of a peculiarly characteristic, make him seem more intensely himself–to the observer, that is: the subject will not be aware of it. He seems to us then to be immobilized, taken out of time – or he steps, rather, into some much older story.” And later in the same graph: “He is there imperishably, wild with his jealousy, vague with the peace of the day. He is always, always to be found there.”

Unsworth seems to be saying, look, notice this character here, this is his essence. And yet there is something vague about it. For you think of your own moment where you are “intensely yourself”. Occasionally, those moments reveal themselves then and there, but usually that occurs later. Maybe this will unravel a bit later in the book for he brings up the blind mulatto here who he cites in the prologue as sitting at the entrance to the labyrinth of his story.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m going to keep going but I’m thinking of adding a non-fiction book, possibly Interesting Times. All of this while the Lakers march into the Finals and my birthday, and more books no doubt, approach.

Sacred Hunger

So I decided to read Barry Unsworth’s “Sacred Hunger”. It’s a novel about an 18th century British slave trading ship (I should have read back-to-back with “And a Bottle of Rum”) and it shared the Booker Prize in 1992 with “The English Patient” which I really loved. I think my future wife read TEP and lent it to me or urged me to read it. We were working at the same place in NYC, a small bond trader. Here’s the thing though. We were just friends at the time. Very. Close. Friends. So I was pining for this woman, but she had a boyfriend. So I bought a copy of Jeanette Winterson’s “Written on the Body”, wrote some emotionally charged words in the front and gave it to her. She gave it back to me with a yellow sticky that basically told me where to go. But I won out in the end. I didn’t see her for ten years and then I called her up out of the blue. Then we moved to LA. Then we got married. Lucky me. There’s more to the story than that but that’s what I remember about TEP, besides the fact the film ruined a great book. Too much Willem Defoe. Oh, and I was cleaning out an old box in my closet here last year and guess what I found the sticky. I still have the sticky.

So I started the book, about fifty pages in. Big font, small chapters. The writing is a little old school for my taste but I like a good sailing/adventure story so I’m sticking with it. Plus, it’s 630 pages. When I finish it I will have completed 12 percent of my task. I have no recollection who gave me the book. I’m thinking it might be my mom or my sister. But I know I received it one Christmas along with “Perfume” which, of course, is also on the list.

The List

Below is my list of books for the year. I just copied my XL file so things are kinda scrunched together. As of today, I've finished the first five books, roughly eight percent of the 17,384 pages. Considering the year is almost 33 percent in the books (ha ha), that's not good. But I am enjoying the challenge. I just finished Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides which I thought was great. Like Shepard, he's really good with characters in the midst of adolescence as anyone who's read The Virgin Suicides can attest. I know he just had a short story in The New Yorker with art by John Baldessari. I've got to check that out. I've been going around saying "Total ripoff" in my best Greek/ethnic voice.

So, I have to chose a new book. I'd like to read The Masters Butchers Singing Club or White Teeth but they both seem like family dramas and I just got through one of those. Middlesex, I mean. So, I'm thinking maybe Cloudsplitter or Cryptonomicon or Sacred Hunger which I looked at tonight. The problem is I have a limited number of fiction books so I need to read a non-fiction one at the same time. I thought maybe With the Old Breed. I might throw in a short book here and there just to check them off the list. The Civil War stuff I'm putting off until the summer. Then, it's war. And more war.

Like You'd Understand, Anyway - Shepard, Jim 211
And a Bottle of Rum - Curtis, Wayne 256
Out Stealing Horses - Petterson, Per 258
Mishima's Sword - Ross, Christopher 244
Middlesex - Eugenides, Jeffrey 529
With the Old Breed - Sledge, E.B. 315
Meat is Murder -Pernice, Joe 102
The Rest is Noise -Ross, Alex 543
Cloudsplitter - Banks, Russell 758
The Masters Butchers Singing Club - Erdich, Louise 388
Bleachers - Grisham, John 163
The Unconsoled - Ishiguro, Kazou 535
The Road - McCarthy, Cormac 241
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness - Oe, Kenzaburo 261
White Teeth - Smith, Zadie 448
Cryptonomicon - Stephenson, Neal 910
Bay of Souls - Stone, Robert 249
Perfume - Suskind, Patrick 310
Sacred Hunger - Unsworth, Barry 630
Magical Thinking - Burroughs, Augusten 268
A Life in Writing - Chaplin, Charles 203
Reading, Writing and Leaving Home - Freed, Lynn 234
Interesting Times - Hobsbawn, Eric 418
Teacher Man - McCourt, Frank 258
Living to Tell the Tale - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 484
Herman Melville - Parker, Hershel 883
A Gentle Madness - Basbanes, Nicholas A. 533
Dark Star Safari - Theroux, Paul 472
The God Delusion - Dawkins, Richard 374
The Beleaguered City - Foote, Shelby 347
Battle Cry of Freedom - McPherson, James 867
Stillness at Appomattox - Caton, Bruce 380
Personal Memoirs - Grant, Ullysses S. 682
TCW -Fort Sumter to Perryville - Foote, Shelby 810
TCW- Fredericksburg to Meridian - Foote, Shelby 976
TCW - Red River to Appomattox - Foote, Shelby 1060
Literary Feuds - Arthur, Anthony 208
Nature Noir - Smith, Jordan Fisher 213
The March - Doctorow, E.L. 363
17384 Total Pages

like you'd understand, anyway

Jim Shepard doesn’t need my help. There’s no place for an amanuensis here. I just want to say that I loved his book of short stories. It was the first book I read this year, the start of my long slog, begun out in the desert near Joshua Tree and finished in a comfortable chair next to our bookshelf. I still haven’t put it up, still haven’t found a place for it. Instead, it’s floated around from bedroom to office to bookbag, always within reach when I want to tell somebody about a great new book.

I’ve given it to two people: My good friend Steve Carr and my crazy guitar teacher, Pete Steinberg who refers to me as “Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer” (my real name is John). Whenever Pete calls me on he phone and I say hello, he says, “Is this Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer?” It goes on from there. Pete is a hell of a guitar player, especially finger picking blues, a great teacher, and good conversation. I record all my lessons and one day I’m going to go back, transcribe his insanity and write the Pete Steinberg story. Don’t worry, Pete. I’ll be kind. One thing Pete likes to talk about the failed adventures of history’s wayfarers. Not surprisingly, his favorite story was My First South Central Australian Expedition.

I like that one too. Who doesn’t love a good shipwreck, even in the Australian desert? But I’d say my favorite stories were the two Eastern Bloc themed ones, The Zero Meter Diving Team and Eros 7 and the high school football story Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak. But really the entire book was fun to read. I haven’t read anything else by Shepard but I’ll get there. Probably not this year, but eventually.

I really like Shepard’s humor and use of real facts. The range here of styles here is mind-boggling but you also imagine it must have been a joy to write (if writing can ever be described as being a joy). But seriously, one day (week? month?) you’re writing about three brothers dealing with the Chernobyl, the next you’re writing as Aeschylus. What also is cool is Shepard cites his sources in the Acknowledgement at the front of the book. So you see how a story like Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay, which includes an account of a tsunami and an earthquake, was shaped by real events which Shepard read up on.

Of course, this attention to detail or facts wouldn’t work if the characters weren’t compelling. “like you’d understand, anyway” is character driven. All of the stories are first person narratives. You might think this would compromise the language, but it doesn’t and this might be the true wonder of Shepard’s work. He can get away with beautiful descriptions without the language being too lyrical and distracting you from the work. For instance, in The Zero Meter Diving Team, the narrator Boris describes his severely contaminated brother who was inside Chernobyl when it blew saying, “he was so still and dark that it looked like someone had carved his life mask from rich tropical wood.” It’s a great line but it doesn’t slow the pace or bring the reader self-consciously out of the pleasure of reading.

In the two Russian stories, Shepard also captures spot on the sort of fatalistic sense of humor particular to Eastern Europeans (Actually, South Americans have this sense of humor too. Just about everybody besides Americans). When Boris visits his youngest brother, Petya in the hospital, the latter is clearly glad to see him but gives him a hard time:
“Are you feeling sorry for me?” he asked after a pause. A passing nurse seemed surprised by the question.
“Of course I am,” I told him.
“With you sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he said.

The fate of the two sick brothers is another nice touch. Petya, who Boris thinks is lazy, is confined to his apartment on a pension with his cigarettes and his tape player and no one to nag him. Mikhail, who always had problems sleeping, is finally able to rest.

But my favorite character is Solovyova, the backup female cosmonaut in the story Eros 7 whose stolid exterior hides a fascinating personality. Her answers are always calculated and spoken when the women’s superiors are within earshot. And yet she’s always needling the narrator, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, who has been chosen to be the first female in space. Valentina falls in love with Bykovsky, a male cosmonaut in the same program and Solovyova is not only aware of it, she’s jealous and perhaps in love with the narrator. At one point she chastises the narrator’s obvious feeling for Bykovsky. “Look at your absorption! It’s like a warped version of intellectual activity.” There’s a real sense of sadness in Solovyova, sadness for herself and her secondary position but also a sadness that her friendship with Valentina is ending. It’s in her silences and her farewell where instead of kissing three times, the two bang their helmets together.

Overall, it’s a really wonderful book, which I hope to reread soon.

Against the Dizay

I love to read but I’m a fairly slow reader. How slow? Well, that’s still to be determined. But I’ll give you an example. In 2006, I bought Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day” exactly at midnight on November 20th at Skylight Books in Los Feliz (he’s my favorite author and Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon are two of my favorite books). It was a typically weird Pynchonian gathering I had heard about from my mother-in-law who’s a librarian (shout out to Susie). A bunch of TP fans, sadly about ninety percent male (an exception was the Wife), paid for their books at the counter, then milled around until midnight. There wasn’t much interaction, just the feeling that we were “in” on something cool. I thought of a line of Pynchon’s from GR describing Roger Mexico: “eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer’s reflex”. TP would have liked it, although I didn’t see anyone resembling the man.

Anyway, upon our departure we encountered a woman who seemed to be sleeping on a bench. But it turns out she was only half-asleep. As we getting into our car, she sat up and said “Goodnight, murderers" in a voice reminiscent of Glinda the Good Witch. Now, having lived in New York for 15 years, I have a pretty good feel as to when it’s pointless to engage the random street person and being addressed as a murderer is not a great jumping off point. I mean, yeah, a case can be made that Western affluence comes at the expense of people in the Third World but it’s not the type of discussion I want to have at midnight on a street in Los Feliz. I think it was Lou Reed who said the street is the dumbest place in the world. So we got in the car. Then, just to prove my point, as I pulled away from the curb, the woman tried to run after us, shouting “Wait, wait”. Of course, a couple of miles down the road we figured out what she was trying to tell us. One of our headlights was out.

I started in on ATD right away but I didn’t finish it in late July 2007. Now, it is 1085 pages and on several trips I took in between I didn’t lug it along. Our cat Grover also fell ill and died in January 2007 and that took a lot of wind out of my sails. But it shouldn’t have taken me eight months to read a book. This is my answer to my friends who think the idea of my trying to read 40 books in one year is taking the fun out of reading. They say I’m making it a chore and call me obsessive when I tell them of how I’ve composed a XL spreadsheet to help track my progress. Even my wife in mid-February floated the idea that I leave the Civil War subset for another year. I may yet. The point is if I don’t set a goal it will not get done. Not that I’m good about setting goals or even good about maintaining a certain pace. I’m not.

Of the several ideas I’ve had about how to keep myself on target the spreadsheet seems the best. But by the time I drew up the XL document, I realized I was already behind. Once totaled, I came up with the sum of 17384 pages. That averages out to about 50 pages a day. Seems doable except sometimes I don’t read 50 pages. Sometimes I read 30 or 20 or 5. Also, I’m not really sure how fast I can read (another experiment in the works). By the end of February I had only finished three books totaling 725 pages or four percent of my goal with the most embarrassing fact being that one of the books is a collection of short stories. A very good book I might add, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” by Jim Shepard. To date, I’ve also read “And a Bottle of Rum”, “Out Stealing Horses”, and “Mishima’s Sword”. I’m currently wrapped up in “Middlesex”. Completing that I will have read 1498 pages not even nine percent of the year’s goal. I have a lot of reading ahead of me over the next nine months.

the quest

A few days after Christmas last year I took inventory. Under the tree sat two stacks of books, peeking out from the sagging branches. I always ask for books and this year, like many past years, I had received several. While I contemplated what I wanted to read first I couldn’t escape the fact that similarly large stack remained ominously perched like steps to an invisible mountain castle, upon my bedside table. Included were three books I hadn’t finished: This is Your Brain on Music, Tree of Smoke and The Armies of the Night, which I had read twice before and was revisiting after the death of Norman Mailer.

I stood up and ventured over to our fiction bookshelf. In New York, it had dominated an entire wall of my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) apartment but here in Santa Monica, it barely took up half of one. Still, it’s big sucker, an inside-out construction built by my father-in-law with a spiny exoskeleton of ten 2X4s supporting 7 shelves. We had weighed the idea, in light of a possible earthquake, whether to anchor it to the wall. But the sheer weight of approximately 450 books (80 on the top shelf) has kept it sturdy.

At first glance, I could pick out at least dozen books I had received for Christmas and never read. There were the ones I had begun reading, liked and never finished (Cloudsplitter, Middlesex), monsters I had inexplicably asked for and received (The Unconsoled, Cryptomicon), and the random, unsolicited gift (John Grisham’s Bleachers, Magical Thinking by Augustin Burroughs, “Thanks, Sis”). I stood on a chair and started writing down the titles. Twenty books, mostly fiction.

Then I scanned the smaller bookshelf across the room that held some non-fiction plus a gaggle of Civil War books my wife had unloaded two years ago. I say unloaded because all eleven books, including Shelby Foote’s trilogy, arrived in a one, large, wrapped box. I am related to Ulysses S. Grant on my mother’s side and my wife, a history teacher felt I needed some reference. I added them to my list. Including the stacks under the tree, the two bookshelves I came up with 36. Eventually, I would add a few more buried in my office down the hall. 39. And so I decided, that over the next year, I would make it my project to try and read them all.