OK. Let’s dust off this old blog and get something good going in 2022. New Year’s resolution. Let’s start with something easy. A popular thing to post and share on social media is your prior year’s reading list. I’ll start off the year with that. The books I read last year. The list is pretty thin, even for me. I try to get twelve books in a year, and usually do much better than that, but…not last year. Who knows the reason. I just didn’t give it the time, and so only read a few books.
All of the books I did read were books that came into Good Find Stores with consignments. Because of that, all of the books were a little special as objects. That is to say, they had some special physical quality beyond the content of their written word. Most of the books, in fact, all of the books that were written in the last 30 years, were signed by their author. Let’s look at each one.
My first book, The Jasmine Trade by Denise Hamilton. Hand signed by Denise, and an enjoyable fiction read. What I really liked about this book is how it gave me a flavor of Los Angeles at its specific moment in time, and a feeling for the mood, opinions and attitudes like a snapshot of twenty years ago (the book was originally published in 2001).
The next book I read was Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. Probably, everyone else in the world has already read this one, or seen the movie. I had not done either before receiving this copy, signed by Laura herself. Now I have done both. An inspirational read, for sure.
Following Hillenbrand, I read this fantastic collection of shorts from the master: Ray Bradbury. Not all Bradbury is wild sci fi, as Driving Blind demonstrates. And of course, signed by the man himself.
My final contemporary book last year was Blues in the Night by Rochelle Krich. Like The Jasmine Trade, this book is set in LA, and really captures the spirit of the city, or at least this author’s slice of it, in a way that transports one back to the Los Angeles of the early aughts. Krich also, through her story telling, gives us some insights into her own, orthodox Jewish culture.
The remaining books on my reading list of 2021 are special, not because they are signed by their authors, which would be super cool, but because they are from the nineteen aughts. During the year I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, Series one and Two. My vintage copy is undated, but I know because of the collection it came in with that it predates 1914. The book contains twenty essays, and the transcript of a lecture at Armory Hall. I did not read them in order, and it is possible that I have missed one or more, but I read a few of them more than once. I find, because of the language and the sheer density of Emerson’s expression, that it is easy to read the essays several times, and soak in it. Specifically, I read Self-Reliance and Nominalist and Realist more than once.
Emerson’s Essays is not listed on www.goodfindstores.com because I go back to it sometimes and explore, but if you think you must have it, you may message me with your offer.
My final book of 2021 is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. OK, technically, this is the book I am still reading, and there is a good chance if I write a blog post about my 2022 reading list in January of next year, you might catch me double counting this one. In my defense, it is a pretty thick book. The edition I am reading was published in 1908, and my copy has never been read before. I can tell this because the pages are still uncut from the binding process. Every fourth page, I have to run a letter opener along the bottom to separate the two pages, which were originally printed on a single large page, and then folded into quarters for binding. So this copy of Middlemarch has been waiting on the shelf of a library for a hundred and thirteen years for someone to read it. I am happy to be The One.
I hope to read more books than last year in 2022. I enjoy it so much, and truly, I read a lot in 2021, just more articles. And, you know, Twitter. I am not making a resolution to read a certain amount. I have already made a resolution to be a better host to the hundreds who are following this thinly published blog, and I don’t feel that people can realistically keep more than one (or, possibly, two) real resolutions.
Happy New Year. I resolve that you will see more of me.
P.S. – My 1909 edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch will become available on www.goodfindstores.com once I have finished it, but the pages will have been cut.