• 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
• Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome – North Carolina: The History of a Southern State
• Alexander McCall Smith – The Sunday Philosophy Club
• Thomas L Friedman – Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America

So not only did I not finish a book this week, but I added more to my stack of books I’m reading! The little flimsy bookstand beside the bed is straining under the weight, but here we are. These things just seem to happen sometimes. Luckily, I’m nearing completion with one.

Alexander McCall Smith’s The Sunday Philosophy Club is going faster after I got through the first forty pages. I have to admit that initially it took me a bit to warm up to it. Isabel Dalhousie is no Mma Ramotswe. However, after page 40 or so, that became a good thing. It seems to me as if Smith himself was getting used to the new character at the beginning, but once she came to life, she became an interesting character. Strange thing, though. Less than a hundred pages to go, and no Club yet. It has been a fun read, though, of which I was in need.

The Friedman book is for work. That’s my justification with adding that one. The fact that I just finished another Friedman book is simply a coincidence…at least it would have been if not for the fact that I picked the book to read for Professional Development credit because I had read the other Friedman book. In any event, this is the book preceding That Used to be Us, so it’s interesting to see Friedman begin some themes that he picks up in the book I’ve already read. It’s good thus far, though rather overwhelming in outlining the challenges of the 21st century.

In my reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the title character, Tom, has reached a city I know all too well — New Orleans. Stowe’s writing style is fascinating in how she introduces new characters. She pauses the story to give some backstory and speaks directly to the reader while doing so. It’s a rather more intimate writing style than usual, and I wonder if she deliberately did it to invoke a personal touch to bring to heart her message of the inhumanity of slavery.

As mentioned before, the Link is for my North Carolina history class. We’re currently up to the early colonial period, just past the Tuscarora War. I haven’t read in the Lefler/Newsome yet for this week, but I’m sure that will be coming at some point this weekend. I also have not read any more in the Reardon. Hopefully I can get back to it soon if I can get through some of the others.

The McFeely is going really well. I’m past the Civil War and up to Grant’s involvement in the Johnson administration. What a crazy time in American history the Johnson administration was. So much political intrigue and power grabs in a time that the nation was supposed to be working towards coming back together. Meanwhile, Grant was trying to walk the middle line and stay above the fray. It must have worked well enough for him to be elected the next president, so I’m interested to read how he managed that one.

I promise to be done with at least one of the seven books I’m reading by next week, though I’ll have to add at least one more to the list — Coetzee’s Disgrace, which is waiting for me at the library. A member of the book club said that it was a quick read. We’ll see how quick it goes when added to six other books!

• 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

Currently Reading:

• 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
• Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome – North Carolina: The History of a Southern State

So after saying last week that I felt like I was stretching out the Friedman and Mandelbaum book, I decided to go ahead and finish it up. I’m glad that I did because the last part brought up some interesting concepts about the dysfunction of politics that will be good to keep in mind as the election season continues. As I said last week, I highly recommend That Used to Be Us to anyone who admits that America is facing some serious issues in the near future and who is looking for constructive non-partisan (i.e. non blame game and ideas that go beyond sound bites) possibilities of how we can move forward together as a nation.

I had my first North Carolina history class this week, which went very well. I’m holding off on progressing any further in the Link book as the next class meeting will cover material from the same chapter that I’ve already read, but I decided that I wanted to go a little above and beyond (because, yes, I’m that big of a geek) and read Lefler and Newsome’s book on North Carolina that I’ve had for a while but haven’t taken the time to read. I figure that I’ll read this one in conjunction with the Link since it goes a little more in-depth into North Carolina history than the Link book.

I’m still working on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’m finding myself near the point of tears at certain parts of it because of the cruelty of the slavery system and how it destroyed individuals and families. I can only imagine how someone living at the time, especially along the border states who might have actually seen slavery in practice, would have felt. No wonder Lincoln allegedly called her, upon their meeting, “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Speaking of the war, I’m in the midst of it in McFeely’s Grant biography. Vicksburg just surrendered, and Grant’s off to Chattanooga. I’m really enjoying McFeely’s style. While he gives you a good sense of what’s going on in the battles, the focus always remains on Grant rather than getting lost in the technical details of troop movements and positions as some writers have a tendency to do. He’s also provided some fascinating insights into Grant’s life that have really helped to flesh out in my mind this iconic figure of the war.

I didn’t get far, but I did pick up Reardon’s Edmund Randolph again. I’m intending to work a bit more on it over the three-day weekend. I realized when I started reading how much I had missed one of my reads being from the early republic.

Next on tap for my reading list is a quick read from the Times Books American Presidents series on Andrew Jackson as well as Coetzee’s Disgrace, both of which I’m picking up from the library shortly.

• Jack Beatty – Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900

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!

I read the most books in the months of July and December (10 books each) and the least in the month of March (2 books), though I have to admit that I was working on a pretty hefty read (Team of Rivals) through most of March and didn’t finish until the beginning of April. As expected, I’ve read more non-fiction than fiction (49 versus 35), though it wasn’t as overwhelming of a difference as some might imagine.

The author who I read the most books by this year was Rick Riordan with 6 books (I read the entire Percy Jackson series as well as the first in his Kane Chronicles series). The oldest book I read was Sun Tzu’s The Art of War from the 6^th century BC, followed not so closely by Moliere’s Tartuffe from 1664 AD.

Twelve of the books that I read were published in 2010, and 52 of the 84 books (62%) were published in 2000 or after.

As I did last year, I won’t comment on all of the books as 84 books are too many to individually comment on. However, as I began my wrap-up last year with the worst, I’d like to begin this one with the best. Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow is, by far, one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Chernow is very detailed in his narrative of Washington’s life, yet unlike with many history texts, the reader doesn’t get lost in the details. Rather, the details provide a vivid picture of Washington’s surroundings and the events that shape him as he progresses through the various stages of his life. The Washington that comes out in Chernow’s biography is more well-rounded and believable than any other characterization of Washington that I’ve yet to see. He wasn’t perfect by any means, but he was a man who tried to do right and to serve the nation as best he could.

The next book on my list, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is nearly as impressive. It highlights Lincoln’s presidency with a focus on how he incorporates his various rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination into his Cabinet. Goodwin’s style of writing is easily approachable, yet full of details to thrill the history geek.

The top fiction book on my list is The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. It’s a hauntingly beautiful tale of love gone awry. Greene does an excellent job of both plot and characterization. Likewise, Marianne Wiggins’s Evidence of Things Unseen is a fantastical journey that begins in North Carolina and carries on into Tennessee in the time between the world wars. The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl, though being the first book that I finished in 2011, still stands out in my mind enough to end up in the number five spot on my list.

Some non-fiction highlights include: Alison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (#7) which is impressive not just in her style but also in the fact that the records are rather spotty from the time, yet Weir succeeds in doing justice to relaying the facts of Eleanor’s life and separating the factual from the myths and legends that have grown up over time; The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics by Rob Christensen (#12), which does an excellent job of highlighting the progression of politics in North Carolina through the 20^th century leading up to the present day; Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy by Ian Toll (#21), which, despite a couple of minor factual errors that only a hardcore early republic American history buff would catch, interested me in learning more about the history of the Navy; Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln series (The Prairie Years and the War Years), which I believe tells Lincoln’s story in the way that Lincoln himself would’ve told it.

Some tried and true favorite authors read this year include Erik Larson, Alexander McCall Smith, and Anthony Everitt – it’s always a pleasure to pick up a book by an author you ‘know’ and have the near-assurance that it’s going to be good. An author that I’ve come to know well over this year is the aforementioned Rick Riordan, and I’m looking forward in the year to come to continuing with the Kane Chronicles and delving into the Heroes of Olympus series.

A couple of new authors caught my attention with their books – Matthew Gallaway with The Metropolis Case (#38) and Rebecca Makkai with The Borrower (#39). Though both books fell a little short, I thought they were admirable enough first novels that I’d like to read more of their work in the future and would encourage others to do so as well.

The biggest disappointment from an author I’ve read before was Mark Dunn’s Ibid: A Life (#72). I really wanted to like this book as I had enjoyed his Ella Minnow Pea so much. However, I just didn’t get into the characters as much as I would’ve wanted and the literary device he uses (a story told in footnotes) got a bit tiring and didn’t really work for me.

The three worst books of the year were all in some way, shape or form presidential biography-related. Marvin Kitman’s book, The Making of the Prefident, 1789: The Unauthorized Campaign Biography (and yes, he did spell “President” with an f instead of an s in the title), while trying to be humorous, came off as more flippant to me. The anonymous O: A Presidential Novel fell far short of being interesting. It came across as more of a novelty than a serious attempt to make a point about modern politics or to have an interesting plot. The worst, however, was Paul Finkelman’s Millard Fillmore. Most of the time, even with history books that I don’t necessarily like or feel were effective, I still find something useful, interesting or informative in them. This is one of the very rare exceptions. The only person that I would recommend this book to is someone who wants to know what not to do when writing a historical biography. Finkelman acted as a biographical bully, constantly berating Fillmore through 137 pages and making no attempt at all to try to understand the subject of his biography. I even tried listening to Finkelman when he was featured on C-SPAN promoting this book and had to turn it off.

The full list is below. If you’d like to learn more about any of these books, feel free to either check out my reviews on Goodreads.com or just ask me! I’m always glad to talk about good reads. I hope everyone has a happy New Year’s and that 2012 brings fun reading adventures to all!

01. Washington: A Life – Ron Chernow
02. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln – Doris Kearns Goodwin
03. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
04. Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel – Marianne Wiggins
05. The Last Dickens – Matthew Pearl
06. Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time – Robert V Remini
07. Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life – Alison Weir
08. The People on Privilege Hill – Jane Gardam
09. Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals – John A Buehrens
10. Franklin Pierce: Martyr for the Union – Peter A Wallner
11. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 1864-1865 – Carl Sandburg
12. The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events That Shaped Modern North Carolina – Rob Christensen
13. Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor – Anthony Everitt
14. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
15. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 1861-1864 – Carl Sandburg
16. House of Leaves – Mark Z Danielewski
17. A Short History of Reconstruction – Eric Foner
18. Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History – Erik Larson
19. Spin – Robert Charles Wilson
20. In the Company of Cheerful Ladies – Alexander McCall Smith
21. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy – Ian W Toll
22. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
23. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years – Carl Sandburg
24. 84, Charing Cross Road – Helene Hanff
25. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
26. Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President – Robert J Rayback
27. They Also Ran – Irving Stone
28. Washington’s God – Michael Novak and Jana Novak
29. President James Buchanan: A Biography – Philip S Klein
30. Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics – John Niven
31. Will Grayson, Will Grayson – John Green and David Levithan
32. Fever 1793 – Laurie Halse Anderson
33. The Sherlockian – Graham Moore
34. The Last Olympian – Rick Riordan
35. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Annie Barrows
36. Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son – Peter A Wallner
37. Mr. Chartwell – Rebecca Hunt
38. The Metropolis Case – Matthew Gallaway
39. The Borrower – Rebecca Makkai
40. Joshua Coit: American Federalist, 1758-1798 – Chester McArthur Destler
41. The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan
42. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Vol I – The Pox Party – M T Anderson
43. The Titan’s Curse – Rick Riordan
44. Wonderstruck – Brian Selznick
45. Profiles in Courage – John F Kennedy
46. The Supreme Court: A C-SPAN Book, Featuring the Justices in their Own Words – C-SPAN
47. Courage to Stand – Tim Pawlenty
48. Andrew Johnson: Plebeian and Patriot – Robert W Winston
49. The Full Cupboard of Life – Alexander McCall Smith
50. Doctor Who: Galaxy Four – William Emms
51. Light Boxes – Shane Jones
52. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
53. The Red Pyramid – Rick Riordan
54. No Apology: The Case for American Greatness – Mitt Romney
55. People of the Wolf – Michael W Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear
56. The Sea of Monsters – Rick Riordan
57. The Battle of the Labyrinth – Rick Riordan
58. Decision Points – George W Bush
59. Wanting – Piper Vaughn
60. Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth – Romney for President
61. George Washington – Roscoe William Thayer
62. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World – Frank Lambert
63. The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers – Jerald A Combs
64. An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government – William C Davis
65. Doctor Who and the Web of Fear – Terrance Dicks
66. Martin Van Buren – Ted Widmer
67. The Choice – Bob Woodward
68. The Cornplanter Memorial: An Historical Sketch of Gy-ant-wa-chia — The Cornplanter – James Ross Snowden
69. George H W Bush – Timothy Naftali
70. Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness – Walter Isaacson, ed.
71. Andrew Johnson – Annette Gordon-Reed
72. Ibid: A Life – Mark Dunn
73. Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest – K Jack Bauer
74. Eisenhower and the Cold War – Robert A Divine
75. The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson – Forrest McDonald
76. Abraham Lincoln – George S McGovern
77. Tartuffe – Molière
78. Sherman – Steven E Woodworth
79. Amistad: The Slave Uprising Aboard the Spanish Schooner – Helen Kromer
80. Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W Bush – Frank Bruni
81. The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House – Barbara Olson
82. The Making of the Prefident, 1789: The Unauthorized Campaign Biography – Marvin Kitman
83. O: A Presidential Novel – Anonymous
84. Millard Fillmore – Paul Finkelman

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!

This brings me to my latest pet peeve — drama. Over the last few months, I’ve enjoyed being a part of an online reading group. I missed that sensation of reading something with other people and getting together to discuss it. It was fun (though I’m sure there are some who wouldn’t find so much pleasure in reading presidential biographies). Sadly, like all things, it had its time, and now I’m a solo reader again. The reason? Drama. A rather complicated, ridiculous story of drama, online politics, and people with too much time on their hands turning the simple act of reading a book as a group and discussing it into some huge ordeal. I’m toying with the idea of starting up my own group with one simple rule — no drama. However, right now I’m still hurt that a simple pleasure, something that I found myself looking forward to, was ruined because people live on drama, something that I abhor and have never understood. Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I expect too much of people — civility, cordiality, communal learning. However, for the life of me, I can’t understand why something so seemingly simple has to be so complicated. I’m reading a memoir of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright now. In it, she talks about the lonliness that comes with being different, for her, a combination of being of foreign origin and having a thirst for learning at an early age. I know I won’t always feel this way, but right now, I feel very alone in my intellectual quest.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this post from the blog Bookavore entitled “E-books article drinking game.” I thought it was a good laugh.

Writing, oh writing. The novel progresses. I’m going to try a new writing exercise, adapted from one in The Writer’s Portable Mentor, in which I set aside 15 minutes each day and write about one character in my novel each day. Each time I sit down to write, I discover something new about these characters, so I thought this might be helpful in order to get better acquainted with each one and as a reference moving forward. 148 days left between now and my Christmas deadline. I’d best get to writing!

On a completely unrelated note, I thought that I would share a really fascinating segment from the Diane Rehm Show today in which she spoke with Ayelet Waldman, author of the new novel Red Hook Road. She read an excerpt from the book at the beginning which really got me interested in reading her work, and the conversation was quite fascinating as they discussed everything from the writing process to grief and loss. She seems like an interesting person, and I’m looking forward to reading the novel.