What are You Reading/Why are You Reading?

What are You Reading/Why are You Reading?

cnn.com just reported on America’s reading habits, an update from the 2002 National Endowment for the Arts report which offered a fairly bleak, perhaps just discouraging sign that more and more, fewer and fewer of us are reading, but then the question is,
What are we reading? Here’s the article in case you’d like to read it.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/08/21/reading.ap/index.html

But then I began wondering if I had made the quota for the year, as an older near retirement age, aging literature professor. So if you don’t mind, I’ll pass along a few titles that have been quite rewarding, some more so than others, some which disappointed, and some I couldn’t finish as I didn’t have to write a paper or review.
Hope you enjoy the list, and they are all recommendations. Lastly, I didn’t read these last week, but over the last year.

I’ll start with the last book read, a recommendation, and one I actually started to read a second time as I wanted to more clearly remember everything the author wrote.
Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept was quite an eye-opener, and made me realize how naïve I was about the effects of Muslim immigration, population surges and Scandinavia’s complacency with integration. I believe the paperback is coming out on Sept. 11.

While all sorts of books on Buddhism are available to the public, I started rereading one book that I found in our Honolulu hotel several years ago, The Teaching of Buddha, which would probably be found by writing to the publisher BDK Sudatta Hawaii, in Honolulu. This isn’t anything like Thich Nhat Hanh or The Dalai Lama’s books, for it has more of a scriptural feel to it. Highly Recommended for someone who has an interest in the less commercial texts on Buddhism.

By all means read John Updike’s Terrorist. I’m not sure if it will grip you like it did me, but I found that this is one of the recent books I just couldn’t put down. Don’t you hate that when a good book completely absorbs your life!

Just before the movie came out, I wanted to read Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. What a beautiful writer. I loved every page of it. As with all books made into films, this one is much more rewarding than the beautiful filmic “Namesake.” Her The Interpreter of Maladies was quite wonderful as well, but I found that I had earmarked my last page about half way through. I do enjoy short stories, and if you are looking for perhaps the best recommendation of a good story writer, please, go out and find Jhumpa Lahiri.

Did anyone read Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason? I hope so. The material he writes about is quite absorbing, and I assume that anyone, anyone interested in the health of our planet will find a few chapters worth staying up late for.

This summer I couldn’t get enough information on triathlons, but I did find the magazine
Triathlete to be a delightful fantasy of what I could become, if I trained every day, found a trainer, and of course, landed a corporate sponsor. I can pretend I am right behind everyone one of those speedy swimmers, cyclists or runners. HaHa. But the book that helped the most, perhaps in its small tips, was Michael Finch’s Triathlon Training. I’ll start rereading it again in the winter when I am about to start training for my second entry into the New York City Olympic Triathlon next July.

Just the other day, while browsing through one of Milwaukee’s bookstores, I opened the pages of The New York Review of Books. I had always assumed it was the stuffiest of stuffy book magazines, but I found several wonderful articles which I quickly read over
several cups of coffee. The issue had a fascinating article on Gunter Grass’s new memoir, which if you haven’t heard about it, is quite controversial, and I also appreciated the insights about the Islamic scholar, Tariq Ramadan. I’ll look for more issues.

In a different bookstore I found a small blue book which just seemed quite enticing. Has anyone every heard of the Polish poet, Tadeuz Rozewicz? His new poems were quite refreshing and yes, eclectic, and yes, about Polish life and culture, and yes, require a reader to be patient with references the American reader might need background on, but it is a delight to read European poets. This collection was translated from the Polish by Bill Johnson.

I did enjoy, and have enjoyed, and will continue to enjoy the Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa & Co., translated by Richard Zenith. I found this 1998 text in a used bookstore, but really, everybody reading this, go out and find Fernando Pessoa. I would recommend reading and rereading every poem!

Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon came highly recommended, and I gave it a good read but about halfway through, I decided I wanted to let it go, and find something that might hold my attention a little stronger. I am sure I can come back to it. Perhaps I put my expectations of the South American novel ahead of the novel, if that makes any sense.

Over Christmas Break, I read, breathlessly, just before seeing the movie (a must!!) PD James’ The Children of Men. Oh, what a story. I admit having never read a PD James novel, but this story is so extraordinarily compelling, even though that sounds a bit too praiseworthy for any novel. A must read.

Speaking of must read, please put your hands on anything by the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk. I didn’t get all the way through his Istanbul, but I’ll admit the competition for my time were hundreds of undergraduate English essays which had to take priority.
So I read the compositions, and as a change, or reward, I read his lovely memoirs of growing up in Istanbul. But his Snow is probably one of the most engaging, thoughtful, beautifully designed novels I’ve read, well, in a long time. He’s the recent Nobel Prize winner in literature, and while that doesn’t always raise an eyebrow, I would recommend you find something by this amazing writer.

Do you like history? I just found the most intriguing publication, the BBC History Magazine. It is just a treat, a delight, not necessarily a hoot, for it is quite academic, but it is for the common arm chair historian, and if you want to read about anything British, well, try to find this colorful and charming magazine.

And lastly, but not in order, I’d recommend that you find Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Toleranceby Ian Buruma. This book, along with While Europe Slept will give you a good detailed picture of what’s happening politically and socially in Scandinavian Islamic countries.

Please don’t think I’ve read these day by day, month by month, for I haven’t. But when I saw the cnn.com article on what we Americans were reading, I couldn’t help but look back in awe and amazement for just a few of the wonderful titles out there that might capture your attention as they did mine.