Happy New Reading Year!

Today, a friend of mine wrote in his Facebook status that one of his resolutions for 2010 was to "read a book." I have not determined yet, although I intend to clarify this, whether this was a facetious comment, or whether he meant that his work and life have been so hectic in 2009 that he could not find the time to read a book. I think it may well be the latter, unfortunately. As someone said, it's better to be a pessimist because you're rarely disappointed.

His post led me to two thoughts. One is that I have read more books in 2009 than probably in several preceding years. The second one is that my Kindle has helped me read more.

On the first point, those who know that I retired in May 2009 will of course understand how suddenly the necessary time materialized to enable me to read more. I'm no longer filling personnel appraisals that no one will care about, or redoing slides three times because the boss at level N+1 is afraid that the current version isn't right (and is too long) for level N+2, etc. You can't create time, but when circumstances permit, you can stop wasting it.

My retirement present was a Kindle 2, with which I rapidly discovered, stingy as I am, that there was great value to be obtained because Amazon has many classics, not longer copyrighted, available for download for free. Just a few days ago, I found out that this also now extends to French classics in the original language, although I have not taken advantage of this yet. Actually, I would also like to find some Spanish or German texts, so that I can improve (for the former) or try to recover (for the latter) my knowledge of these languages.

So here's my May-December reading list:

• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
  
• Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
  
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes, ibid., because one can never read too many good short stories
  
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (what a delight!)
  
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (they don't make people like this any more)
• Travels in the United States by William Priest (not as good as Alexis de Tocqueville, but still interesting)
  
• The Legends of King Arthur (the version by Sir James Knowles)
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (I have only read a small portion of this text, which does not contain the drawings, and is very heavily annotated, making it a rather more scholarly exercise than I was intending
• A Tramp Abroad, Vol. 1, by Mark Twain
  

Currently, I am reading Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Yes, it is about very small people and very big people and very weird people, but it is also a very smart, and very daring for the time, criticism of the politics and mores of Europe. The first focus of these imaginary travels to Lilliput and Brobdingnag and other fantasy lands is to convey the idea that everything is relative. As if that wasn't provocative enough, Swift then proceeds to let his foreign characters express incredulity and shock at what Gulliver tells them of the common practices of Europeans. For example, explaining the concept of war to the Houyhnhnms, who don't know it, he writes, "Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent." Which is eerily reminiscent of Wallace Sayre's saying, which I have been fond of repeating to professors I know, at least when no weapon other than their repartee is available, that “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” Except that Swift was being more daring by attributing this behavior to people who did have the power to do harm to him. And he wasn't putting his potential defenders on his side by adding, a few pages later, that "there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid." No modern lawyer joke really approaches this level of sarcasm, and the following pages just get worse, of if your prefer, better.

I have also downloaded, and intend to read next:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• The Prince by Machiavelli
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (which I only read in French translation several decades ago)

I have downloaded samples, for later purchase, of:

• 30 novels (!) by Jules Verne, in French, in a single file. I'll have to pace myself. I do own an illustrated print edition of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, so I can skip the electronic version of that one, but I never read most of the other books.
• The Spell, by Alan Hollinghurst. I am very fond of his other two books The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, which I read just a few years ago in print.
• In the same vein is At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill, which I know from the sample will be hard to read because of the Irish dialect, which is faithfully reproduced, and also because of the emotions that will swell until the fatal climax of the book (yes, I've read the synopsis).

I'm not sure there is a conclusion to this chronicle of my reading progress in 2009 and plans for 2010, but here are two observations. First, e-book readers, which some understandably decry for the loss of the special feel and smell of paper books, can actually help you read more, simply because of their convenience. I can carry a large number of books at one time, switch from one to another, keep my place in each book, look up a rare word in the Oxford dictionary on the fly, all within a small box about as long and wide, and half as thick, as a regular book. Secondly, there is a lot of literature out there that can be had for free (only on an e-book reader), and it is often the best literature ever written. As for modern books, they do cost some money, but much less that a hardcover book, often less than even a paperback, and they download in about thirty seconds. So even though I still like to browse in bookstores, this is at least an additional option to get back in touch with the power of words, expertly manipulated by the best writers in the world, dead or alive.