My Reads for 2010

As 2010 draws to a close, I feel a need to examine the books that I have read this year. Truly, this was the most prolific reading period of my life thus far, for which I am forever thankful. Whether I shall read as many in 2011 is a matter for the next year. However, that process cannot begin without looking back on this year’s accomplishment.

I have ranked each book that I have read in terms of personal favorite. As there were so many different types of books on my reading list, it’s hard to provide a clear justification for the position of each on my list. It is completely subjective in terms of style, influence, importance and enjoyment in the reading process. In order to rank the books, I broke them down into lists of five (the top five, the next top five and so on down to the bottom five – note: this was before I finished reading the 62^nd book and realizing that I had left out a book, so both were added after this process). Once they were grouped as such, a ranked them within the sublists, then put them all back together in a larger list. Upon looking at them, I did make some minor alterations, moving a couple up and a couple back, but this process helped me to better grasp the task at hand.

While not commenting on all of the books, I would like to take a moment to address a few. I’ll start at the bottom. I chose The Presidency of Martin Van Buren by Major L Wilson as my worst read of the year for the simple fact that it was a horrific chore to get through. Half of the book was very dry and dull, and I came out of the reading feeling like I knew little about Martin Van Buren or his presidency overall as it dwelled on the battle for reform of the banking system for a good portion of the book. The second lowest, Cheever’s American Bloomsbury suffered from a grandiose vision. It is my humble opinion that Cheever could have attained a greater goal by not jumping around from subject to subject as such. Considering that she was writing about some of the most interesting literary figures in American literature, it should have been a much more enjoyable experience than it was. Towards the end, when only two or three people were chronologically still alive, the reading got much easier, but with a multitude of subjects at the beginning, it was hard to follow.  Greene’s The Presidency of George Bush is at the position it currently holds due to the utter lack of fact checking making it hard to trust the author. Not even being a scholar of the time period and still being of a wee age during the elder Bush’s presidency, I was able to point out numerous factual errors.

During the course of sixty-one books, I read four by Bob Woodward and have purchased three more that I’ve yet to touch. However, the first one only shows up on my list at #24 with the lowest ranked one at #52. While highly informative and well written, my focus has been more on earlier American history. Thus, his books were of less scholarly interest to me though they were quite fascinating in the perspective of an American citizen. One might also look curiously upon the fact that the official guidebook to Mount Vernon is ranked #44 on my list, above many other arguably well-written (including three titles by the aforementioned Woodward) works. The reason this 143 page guidebook ranked where it did is that it fulfilled its purpose remarkably well. As someone who has yet to visit Mount Vernon, I felt as if I were going room by room and getting the story of the Washingtons’ domestic life. As a Washington scholar, I think the guidebook provided knowledge above and beyond the basics for a layperson.

I also read a number of books from the Times Books’ American Presidency series with Arthur Schlesinger as one of the series editors. For the most part, I recommend these books as a good way to either learn about a president one knows nothing about or to quickly refresh one’s memory about a president. With some notable exceptions, including Diggins’s John Adams, Appleby’s Thomas Jefferson, and Zelizer’s Jimmy Carter, there is little commentary/analysis on the presidential subject.

Getting closer to the top of the list, some may argue that Robert Inman is a far cry from others such as Joseph Addison, Albert Camus, and Jorge Luis Borges who ranked lower to at least one if not both of the Inman titles on my list. Again, this is purely subjective. To use a cliché, Inman’s works tugged at my heartstrings. I felt they were solid, approachable and enjoyable reads that I would highly recommend to anyone needing that warm, fuzzy feeling. Are they as heady as Borges’s short stories? Not even close. It took me nearly half the year to read Borges’s Labyrinths, not so much because it was difficult to finish but because I wanted to savor each story like a sip of a fine wine. I wanted time to mull over what I had read before proceeding, a process that I would recommend to anyone wanting to give Borges a try.

Before I get to my top picks, I feel that I should acknowledge the three books that I began but was unable to finish this year – Harry Turtledove’s The Great War: American Front, John Banville’s The Infinities, and Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reid’s The Plan: Big Ideas for America. There were different reasons for not finishing each one. I had enjoyed Turtledove’s first book in his Timeline-191 series, How Few Remain, the second book was less political and more battlefield, which lost my interest. Though it was rather well-written, for one reason or another I just couldn’t get into Banville’s book. I might try again someday because it could’ve just been my frame of mind at the time, but I didn’t finish it. With the Emanuel /Reed book, I put it down because it teed me off. Rather than any “big ideas,” it was more of a talking head “Republicans: bad, Democrats: good” waste of paper that represents the worst of politics on both sides of the spectrum and to which I cannot subscribe nor consider worth my time and effort.

Going from the worst to the best, Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea was the fiction book that most impressed me this year. Very well-written and engaging, the book motivated me to learn more about Haiti and Louisiana, the two settings of the novel. Listening to Allende on “The Diane Rehm Show” was a wonderful experience that propelled me to bump the book up on my reading list, and I’m very glad I did. One of the toughest choices in compiling this list was choosing between Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and Wiencek’s An Imperfect God as the top book this year. Chernow’s book is an amazing work. Though quite lengthy (818 pages), I never once felt lost as a reader. Chernow kept the reader engaged and provided one of the best critical views of the Revolution and early Republic I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, all through the eyes of the political lightning rod that was Alexander Hamilton. He made Hamilton burst off of the page, and I even grew angry with him at times for events that occurred over two hundred years ago. However, what put Wiencek over the top was that he was able to achieve much the same thing in less pages and with his focus on where the domestic life of our nation’s first president met his public persona. Wiencek neither condemns nor condones Washington and his slaveholding practices. Instead, he examines Washington’s interactions with slaves and opinions of slavery in the context of his time and in so doing provides invaluable insight into one of the most written about yet in many ways most misunderstood figures in American history. When I was reading Wiencek’s book, I remember looking up and smiling as I thought, “He gets it. He really gets it.” For that reason, Mr. Wiencek is on the top of my reading list for 2010.

With that being said and without any further ado, I give you my ranked reading list for 2010:

1. An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America – Wiencek, Henry
2. Alexander Hamilton – Chernow, Ron
3. Island Beneath the Sea – Allende, Isabel
4. Martha Washington: An American Life – Brady, Patricia
5. Home Fires Burning: A Novel – Inman, Robert
6. Labyrinths – Borges, Jorge Luis
7. Madam Secretary: A Memoir – Albright, Madeleine
8. The Library at Mount Vernon – Carroll, Frances Laverne
9. Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Time – Cleaves, Freeman
10. Burr: A Novel – Vidal, Gore
11. Timothy Pickering and the American Republic – Clarfield, Gerard H.
12. The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House – Harris, John F.
13. Thomas Jefferson: The American Presidents Series – Appleby, Joyce Oldham
14. Ecotopia Emerging – Callenbach, Ernest
15. The Revolution: A Manifesto – Paul, Ron
16. Lafayette – Unger, Harlow Giles
17. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane – Howe, Katherine
18. The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction: Researching and Writing Historical Fiction – Thom, James Alexander
19. Captain Saturday: A Novel – Inman, Robert
20. John Tyler: Champion of the Old South – Chitwood, Oliver P.
21. Gentleman Revolutionary : Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution – Brookhiser, Richard
22. The Stranger – Camus, Albert
23. The Presidency of George Washington – McDonald, Forrest
24. Obama’s Wars – Woodward, Bob
25. The Amnesiac – Taylor, Sam
26. John Adams: The American Presidents Series – Diggins, John Patrick
27. James Madison: The American Presidents Series – Wills, Garry
28. A Man Without a Country – Kurt Vonnegut
29. John Jay: Founding Father – Stahr, Walter
30. The Promise: President Obama, Year One – Alter, Jonathan
31. Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America – Borneman, Walter R.
32. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime – Heilemann, John
33. Cato – Addison, Joseph
34. The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness – Unger, Harlow Giles
35. Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series – Zelizer, Julian E.
36. The Kalahari Typing School for Men – Smith, Alexander McCall
37. Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution – Puls, Mark
38. From Mount Vernon to Crawford: A History of the Presidents and Their Retreats – Walsh, Kenneth T.
39. John Tyler: The American Presidents Series – May, Gary
40. President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination – Reeves, Richard
41. Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series – Holt, Michael F.
42. James K. Polk: A Clear and Unquestionable Destiny – Leonard, Thomas M.
43. Failures of the Presidents: from the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and war in Iraq – Craughwell, Thomas J.
44. George Washington’s Mount Vernon: Official Guidebook – The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union
45. James Monroe: The American Presidents Series – Hart, Gary
46. Bush at War – Woodward, Bob
47. The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter – Levy, Andrew
48. Letters from George Washington to Tobias Lear – Bixby, William K, ed.
49. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Founding Father – Zahniser, Marvin R.
50. The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House – Woodward, Bob
51. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill – Suskind, Ron
52. Plan of Attack – Woodward, Bob
53. The Supreme Court – Rehnquist, William H.
54. On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System – Paulson, Henry M
55. John Quincy Adams: The American Presidents Series – Remini, Robert V.
56. Sam Houston: Biography of the Father of Texas – Williams, John Hoyt
57. George Washington: The American Presidents Series – Burns, James MacGregor and Dunn, Susan
58. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House – Meacham, Jon
59. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam – Goldstein, Gordon M.
60. The Presidency of George Bush – Greene, John Robert
61. American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work – Cheever, Susan
62. The Presidency of Martin Van Buren – Wilson, Major L

Should you have any questions or wish to know any more on my opinions of the books listed above, please feel free to contact me. I’m always glad to discuss good reads. Here’s to 2011 and to even more reading adventures!

What is 2010?

Year-end introspection time. This is actually the most fulfilled I’ve felt at the end of a year, yet my mind is racing to figure out what else needs to be done. Looking back on my reading list provides an example of my strengths/successes and weaknesses/areas of improvement. As of now, I’ve read 56 books this year. Once I decided that I wanted to try my hand at non-fiction, my book list changed from a mix of fiction and non-fiction to solely non-fiction. Honestly, I can’t tell you offhand when was the last time I read a fiction book, and I’m too lazy to check my list right now. It’s been a few months. However, though my non-fiction list has mostly revolved around the presidency, I’ve read books on everyone from George Washington to Barack Obama, from John Tyler to LBJ, from Alexander Hamilton to Madeleine Albright. The question now is where does that leave me. I’ve figured out what I want to write. I know that I have the drive and determination to write it should I choose to. Yet my energies have been more scattered than they should have been. 2010 has been the year in which I read extensively. I think my goal for 2011 will be to read with definite purpose. I already have plans to reincorporate some fiction back into my reading and to gear my non-fiction reads towards my non-fiction writing project. I’ve actually got some books from the library that I’m planning on returning unread for that purpose. They do not advance the project. I am currently working on a couple of books – Hank Paulson’s On the Brink and K Jack Bauer’s Zachary Taylor — that I intend on finishing though they are unrelated to my writing project. I guess the best way to describe it is that I’m realizing that I have to be the change I need.