Finished Reading:
Currently Reading:
- Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum – That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
- William S McFeely – Grant: A Biography
- John J Reardon – Edmund Randolph: A Biography
- William A Link – North Carolina: Change and Tradition in a Southern State
- Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
I enjoyed reflecting on my 2011 reads so much that I decided I’d try to make a point to blog each week about my reading habits to both get me back in the habit of writing regularly and to share what I’m reading with folks.
The first completed read of the year was Beatty’s Age of Betrayal. While I did enjoy it and it enhanced my knowledge of the Gilded Age in US history as well as stimulated my thoughts about the parallels to our modern time, I wish that Beatty’s transitions between topics had been a bit smoother. Either he could have split the subjects out to various works as he had a great amount of material from which to draw or he could have lead the reader through the various facets of the time period a bit better. My favorite part of the book was the two chapters on the Supreme Court during the Gilded Age. I feel like I better understand why the Fourteenth Amendment is used to support corporations and why the Fifteenth Amendment was made to not guarantee African-American suffrage, leading to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
I’ve got a good number of other books I’m currently working on. I opened up Link’s North Carolina today because I begin a class on North Carolina History next week. On the reverse end of the spectrum, I’ve been reading on the Friedman and Mandelbaum for a while (looks like since September according to Goodreads). It’s an interesting book, but I think I’m deliberately stretching it out in order to allow myself time to process all of the ideas that they bring up. Though I’m only halfway done with it, I’d still recommend it to anyone. It’s one that I had originally picked up at the library and decided I must have in my library.
McFeely’s Grant is the latest in my journey through presidential biographies from Washington to Obama. Thus far, it’s been a very good, insightful book, and I’m enjoying McFeely’s writing style. It’s very approachable. Reardon’s Edmund Randolph highlights the rather checkered career of our first Attorney General and second Secretary of State. I’m currently at the beginning of Randolph’s taking over as Secretary of State in 1794. Once Randolph entered the Cabinet, the book became more detailed, revealing some aspects of the Washington administration that I hadn’t even known previously. I haven’t picked it up for a few days so that I could finish up the Beatty, but now that I’m done with that one, I might return to it in the next few days.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is part of a new challenge that I issued myself this year. Instead of focusing as much on quantity of books read as I have the last couple of years, I’d like to make a concerted effort to read works that are often referred to as important in historical and intellectual development. I realized as I began reading this one that I really didn’t know much about Uncle Tom’s Cabin besides the fact that it caused an uproar in the 1850s and was one of many points in the path to the Civil War. The story has been executed well thus far. I can see why it caused a stir as it highlights the painful realities of slavery for individuals who were caught up in a system over which they had no control.
I should mention that I did get David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas from the library, but due to a good number of requests for the book and my existing reading commitments, I will probably return it and read it at another time. The few pages that I did read though were interesting. Also, I’m going to begin J M Coetzee’s Disgrace soon as it is the February read for my book club. I’ve heard that Coetzee’s an author people either love or hate. We shall see which it shall be for me!
