frumiousb

All other sensible people have their book lists finished by much earlier in January. But as I noted in last weeks post, reading for me is a two-step process. I read a book and then I revisit it, recording my notes and thoughts. This year it meant that step two was several weeks behind step one. So this is why I find myself, several weeks behind, finishing up my reading summary for 2007. An extra special post for The Sunday Salon in which I prove myself once again incapable of following the rules. I promise to actually have a post about current reading later in the day.

2007 saw one major change for me in terms of how I administer my reading. Instead of keeping the reading notes in journals or the reviews on Amazon, I started using this livejournal as my key notes/review platform. I'm not sure that this made any of my readers happy. After all, the idea of the journal was counting my blessings and not counting my books. But as I have said repeatedly in this journal's four year history: This is more for me than it is for you.

Statistics

I read more Agatha Christie than any other author. Unsurprising, since she is definitely one of my favorite flavors of literary comfort food.

Total Books: 157
(You'll notice that if you believe my journal, my count ran to 159. When I was counting the reviews not in my journal, I apparently double counted two reviews as this year that were actually last year's reading.)

Speculative Fiction (46)
Mystery/Detective (27)
Fiction (Literary) (19)
Children's Literature and YA (10)
History (8)
Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir (7)
Grief and Loss (6)
Poetry (5)
Science and Technology (3)
Short Stories (3)
Thrillers (3)
Travel/Regional (3)
Business Books (2)
Essays (2)
Horror (2)
Media (2)
Cooking and Food (1)
Economics (1)
Health (1)
Journals and Diaries (1)
Medical Ethics (1)
Plays (1)
Psychology (1)
Religion and Spirituality (1)
Sociology (1)

10 Best Reads of the Year

In no particular order, and completely subjective:

• The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
  
  
• The White Man's Burden: Why The West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, William Easterly
  
  
• A Stone For A Pillow, Madeleine L'Engle
  
  
• Zwilling's Dream, Ross Feld
  
  
• All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
  
  
• A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis
  
  
• The Undergound Man, Ross Macdonald
  
  
• Tales of Love & Loss, Knut Hamsun
  
  
• The System of the World, Neal Stephenson
  
  
• Accelerando, Charles Stross

( book lists )

How do you read a book?

Some of you may have noticed that I read a lot. It's a combination of a kind of hyperlexia added to a normally introspective nature. I love books. I am a confirmed Bibliomane. But the topic of today's post is not that I read a lot, it is about how (over time) I have developed a way of reading that involves processing-- a kind of re-reading.

I got into this method of processing after I realized that I was reading too much, and books were slipping too easily from my memory. This was somewhere in my early college years, I think. As a result, I started doing the following:

• Copying or typing over all of the notes, quotations and thoughts that I had while reading a book. That means that I take notes while reading in pencil, and then erase them as the notes are added to my journal or files. In this process, I add books to my wish list. (This wish list is in all honestly long enough to most likely to be impossible to clear in a single lifetime.) I also look up poems or music cited.
  
  
• Look up words whose meaning was fuzzy or unclear.
  
  
• Finally summarize my overall thoughts on the book in a kind of review. I say a kind of review because I am not really writing with an audience in mind. It is more a kind of note for myself-- something to remember what I thought at a later stage. Originally, I kept these reviews in journals. Later, I moved them to Amazon. Finally, I've moved them here. Over time, these reviews have become a way of opening communication with others about the book as well as being a note for myself.

I'm curious whether anyone else out there in the very bookish Sunday Salon has their own obsessive habits around reading or rereading? How do you process or take notes about a book? How do you fix it in your head, or do you simply not bother?


*****

And now, onto the book review.

The book for discussion today is The White Man's Burden: Why The West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, by William Easterly.

One way of how not to do it is having Western lawyers and accountants rewrite the legal code overnight from the top down, as the West tried in Eastern Europe after 1990. In Eastern Europe, chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West, who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western law. Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct. At the behest of the donors, Albania dutifully passed a bankruptcy law in 1994, one of the elements of property rights. Only one bankruptcy case ever made it to the Albanian courts, even after a national pyramid scheme in the mid 1990s led to losses for investors amounting to 60 percent of the GDP.

As legal practitioner Wade Channell summarized the legal reform experience of Eastern Europe after 1990: "It is hard to imagine any rule of law aid specialist pursuing law reform in his or her own country in this fashion. If I assembled half a dozen recognized European or U.S. Specialists to redraft the U.S. Code of Judicial Ethics and then tried to get it passed by the U.S. Congress with little or no input on the proposed draft from congressional committees, the judiciary, the bar, business interests, law schools, or other stakeholders, I would be looking for a new career rather quickly. Based on many current practices, however, that career could easily be found abroad "helping" transition countries with the same process."
Pgs, 94-95

( the review )

Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

"And if you believe your own version, your own lie, how can it be said that you are being misleading? To what extent can you bring yourself not to know what you know? Eventually it is not the lie that matters, but that mechanism in yourself that allows you to accept distortions." pg. 112

( more )

I'm delayed in writing today, since I have been reviewing excerpts for a fiction contest. This is something that I haven't done since I was a grad student (for money) and now I remember why I stopped doing it altogether, no matter how nicely someone begged. All the excerpts read to me like bad usenet alt.porn stories. Dreadful. Never ever again.

So, anyhow, it took me a little while to get around to reading books. I suppose that I could have talked more about reading these excerpts. I am sure that there is a witty story there for someone with a better brain. But on this subject, my brain is pretty much broken. No wit.



Onwards and upwards to a lighter subject: Genocide. The book of the day is The Key To My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda by Elizabeth Neuffer.

My trip to Africa in the spring has led me to a great deal of reading about the continent and the political histories of the various nations. I picked up this book as highly recommended for a look at the recent atrocities in Rwanda. Elizabeth Neuffer was a foreign affairs reporter for The Boston Globe during the period that she gathered material for this book. It was in part based on a ten-part series of articles that she wrote about Rwanda and Bosnia called "Buried Truth". (Sadly, Neuffer died in a car accident in Iraq in 2003.)

The Key to My Neighbor's House is often described as being about the atrocities that happened in the two countries. In fact, it is about something more specific than that. Neuffer writes about the question of justice in the face of genocide and tracks the progress of victims and perpetrators as the stories unfold in front of international war crime tribunals.

Why do people kill in this way? How can you really bring justice in the wake of such a situation? What are the relative values of truth and justice when their interests may conflict? Can a country that has been so divided against itself ever be reconciled? Neuffer asks the important questions that those of us who can only witness from a distance would like to ask. The fact that she does not come closer to a definitive answer doesn't make the questions less important.

The Key To My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda is smart and moving. Neuffer manages to bring the reader into the human side without belittling or overly simplifying the subject matter. An excellent book, if you can say such a thing about a terrible subject.

The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda
Neuffer, Elizabeth
2002
Picador
0312302827

( books added to my wishlist )

Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson

( more )