29 Reasons I Loved Failing the Book-a-Week Challenge in 2018

It is my delight to tell you all that, again, I have failed the book-a-week challenge. Last year was the first year I attempted, and failed, the challenge. As like last year, I thoroughly enjoyed the motivation the challenge gave me to read and I kept by my resolution to read books that interested me, not just small books that are quickly digested. I would like to say that my To Read list is 29 books shorter but I'm lucky if it's even the same length. I am constantly, constantly, constantly adding more books.

I have over 500 books on my To Read list. Even if I set aside a whole year just to read, there's no way I could read 365 of those, let alone more than 500. Be it that I am a slow reader that likes to stop and ponder and reread sections or that I was overseas for 8 months this year with no access to a library or that I have plenty enough to read for my university degree or I had other things in my life that take up my time, this year I have averaged a bit over one book per fortnight over the course of a year. At that rate, it will take me nearly 20 years to read all the books on my list. And during that time, more and more books will be added to the list (not to mention rereading all favourites).

As for those books on my To Read list, they are a combination of classical fiction and 20th century greats but by far the vast majority of the list have been published in the last twenty years. Books whose authors are not renowned but whose topics intrigue me - biographies, political thrillers, philosophy, poetry, science, sociology, and cross-disciplinary imaginings.

The point I make by pointing out the vast number of books I wish to read is that there are so many books that deserve to be read that it is nearly impossible to read them all. I am definitely a member of the school of thought where if you don't love what you're reading, put it down and look for something better because there will be something better out there. For we non-literature students and we who do not live in the high literature or publishing worlds, all we can really do is listen to our friends' recommendations, or perhaps a reviewer's, set aside some time and start reading what we can. It is for that reason that I have no time for those people that smugly say "Wait, you haven't read that yet?" or "I read that years ago in high school". So? What's your point? Instead of creating an appearance that you are highly refined, you just give the impression, at best, you are ignorant that another person's life experience can be different from yours, and at worst, that you enjoy putting others down to boost your own obviously fragile ego.

Luckily the vast majority of fellow book lovers I come across are far from self-satisfied. They hunger for naught but clean prose and a captivating plot, or if it is non-fiction, something that informs, inspires or comforts. There is no pretense; just unadulterated enthusiasm for books that they loved reading, appreciation for books that fomented critical thinking and indifference to books that just didn't really do it for them.

But I digress, this post is meant to be about the books I read this year. In the following list you will find quotes that stuck with me from each book (bar a few exceptions) and upon reflection, I find it interesting to see the pattern that emerges.

It seems I was curious about different regions of the world and why things are the way they are. I also sought the best way to prioritise my time and balance saying yes and no to commitments. I tried to, unsuccessfully, to understand how to judge someone when they perform both good and bad actions. It also appears there was tension between my faith about the arc of human progress and my growing numbness in response to the shit people do to each other. Above all, my book and quote choices reflect my love of learning and reading.

So without further ado...

1. Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do - but who is that 'we'? - and nothing 'they' can do either - and who are 'they'? - then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

...

Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

The first Susan Sontag book I've ever read and I liked it although it was different from what I expected.

2. A History of Eastern Europe

The Great Courses

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

A really good history of Eastern Europe behind the iron curtain and the evolution of different countries since the curtain's fall.

3. Canada

William D Willis

Avoid at all costs. It does not explain major points in Canada's history and the parts it does explain are way too simplistic. To better understand Canadian culture and history, I would recommend Canada: The History of Us, a ten part docu-series.

4. The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time.

Really good. Would recommend. Pinker seeks to describe why humanity has entered into the age known as The Long Peace by examining the demons we have overcome and the angels we have nurtured. The result is an explanation that can best be summed up by one of Zadie Smith's quotes: "progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive".

5. What Went Wrong

Hillary Rodham Clinton

We need our politics to resemble our people. On the people who run our cites, states, and country overwhelming look a certain way (say, white and male) and overwhelmingly have a shared background (wealthy, privileged) we end up with laws and policies that don't come close to addressing the realities of American lives. And since that's a basic requirement of government, it's a pretty big things to get wrong. In other words, representation matters.

Insightful, humorous at times showing her interactions with her campaign staff, and it helps explains her guardedness. At times it feels like she was milking camera favourite moments of the campaign - constructing these well-received moments as something carefully planned instead of something that just happened on the fly. I also found that she was still too close to the campaign to understand what actually went wrong. A recent(ish) lecture in the Chatham House series talked about how Clinton ignored the rise of populism as a core reason why her campaign failed in her book.

6. Power and Fury

James Erith

Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: when one side profited, another lost. One side's victory was another's death. The old notion that politics was a trader's game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted - a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage - and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.

Something so shocking and wrong and counter to all my beliefs, first you are shocked, then you laugh, then you are numb/disillusioned then you are scornful.

7. A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

I first read this in my first year of university and it was pleasant to reread now in my fifth year when I had a room of my own.

8. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond

In short, Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography - in particular, to the continents' different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.

Talks about how Australia (among other places) was able to be settled in 100 years by Europeans that had benefited developmentally by quirks of geography. It does not, however, address different notions of agriculture/civilisation/real estate (see The Largest Estate by Bill Gammage for that). If you want the 10 minute version of Diamond's theory, watch this.

9. Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night colour.

I thought reading something that had snow in the name would be fitting while I lived in a place covered with it. I actually don't remember much about the book because I kept zoning out. Read into that what you will.

10. Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.

I finally read this after one of my friends kept going on and on about how many existential crises the book gave him (in a good way). I read it and I was not shook; entertaining nevertheless.

11. Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu & James A Robinson

Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. Nations fail today because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate. Extractive political institutions support these economic institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the extraction.

This book does not age well. China is still going as strong as ever, an 'extractive' example they list and so is bound to fail according to them. Nor would I call the USA a country with 'inclusive' economic and political institutions in this day and age.

12. Call Me By Your Name

Andre Aciman

We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as to not feel anything - what a waste!

...

He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn't changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.

Lovely.

13. Busy

Tony Crabbe

It's easier to simply react; to choose to try to do everything, rather than make the difficult decisions and unchoose things - it takes more courage to do less.

I really enjoyed reading this book a lot. I remember it being the topic of conversation for a few of the cross-continental phone calls I made to Mum while cooking dinner in the evening after a long day.

14. War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become confused.

...

Where there is law there is injustice.

...

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

Definitely a saga and a half. You read it for the ruminations for the characters and seeing how they evolve over the course of the book. Some meditations are quite interesting; like when he likens military strategy to a chess game, preconceiving John Nash's game theory by a few hundred years. Other meditations a bit long and boring - passages about the nature of free will, I'm looking at you. Tbh, I'd recommend watching the TV series with a young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezuhov if you ain't got the time to read this.

15. The Fellowship of the Ring

J.R.R. Tolkien

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Read over the course of a 4 day train journey. I don't think I could have read it otherwise. It is VERY descriptive with its world building. I watched the movies as soon as I finished it.

16. Notes on a Nervous Planet

Matt Haig

All through our education we are being taught a kind of reverse mindfulness. A kind of Future Studies where - via the guise of mathematics, or literature, or history, or computer programming, or French - we are being taught to think of a time different to the time we are in. Exam time, Job time. When we are grown up time.

To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.

...

And yet we can only read one book - and watch one TV show - at a time. We have multiplied everything, but we are still individual selves. There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives.

Definitely the second quote struck a chord because even if I spend a whole day reading, just for the fun of it, I still kinda think it's a day wasted. You could spend everyday reading and never get anywhere.

17. A Game of Thrones

George R.R. Martin

A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That is why I read so much.

Finally got around to reading this after a friend of mine has been telling me to read it for years. I mean I watch enough fan theory videos on YouTube about Game of Thrones, it was just a natural outcome. Loved it for the same reasons I love the show.

18. The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

The show is better. Don't @ me.

19. Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures)

Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain & Andrew Thomson

I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naïve and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?

Really fun to read.

20. Cities I've Never Lived In

Sara Majka

During the trip, the lover I left in New York had stopped calling. I was glad to be travelling, for the movement it gave me, but I was uncertain how my life would be when I got home. I didn't want another period of instability, and I felt the suspension you feel when you're find, but you're worried it won't last, and there's nothing you can do to make it stay.

A collection of short stories, all of them blurring the line between reality and imagination, like a half-seen outline of an island emerging out of the mist so characteristic of New England where it is largely set. It may start as a personal memory but then the story might follow the life of someone else or tell the story of a town that can never be found again once left. The stories don't describe anything close to my personal experience traveling the snowy hills of Vermont or the semi-frozen valleys of northern Quebec, but they capture the mood I felt when I traveled to those places. Seeing white fields and brown bracken until the fields melted into the grey sky or they folded into shallow hills. The world still asleep after winter and the only signs of change were the patches of dirt becoming more visible as the snow melted. There were still no leaves on any trees and old farmhouses were sprinkled few and far between. It was the knowledge that I would never drive these same roads and never see these places again and yet, these places had existed for hundreds of years. That brave few people ventured alone, into the cold, into the unknown and never saw their homes again.

But yeah, wouldn't read it again.

21. Men Explain Things to Me

Rebecca Solnit

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.

...

Think of how much more time and energy [women] would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren't so busy surviving.

...

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

She opens the book by introducing the concept of mansplaining - though common with men, I think anyone who comes from a position of privilege that gives them smug confidence. I know there have been times where I've been guilty of this.

Generally I felt the book was an easy read but after a few days, Solnit's insights really sunk in (especially quote 3). It made me think, what if Trump had banned all men from immigrating to the USA instead of everyone from certain Islamic countries? It's not fair but the gender correlation is stronger than any religious one.

22. Burial Rites

Hannah Kent

People claim to know you through the things you've done and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself.

My Mum and my sister had read this book and it was set in Iceland. Those seemed like good enough reasons. It was addictive reading the further it got to end because I could sense I was so close to finding out what happened.

23. The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.

...

But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.

…

I don't think about all the misery, but about the beauty that still remains. This is where Mother and I differ greatly. Her advice in the face of melancholy is: 'Think about all the suffering in the world and be thankful you're not part of it.' My advice is: 'Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy.'

I don't think Mother's advice can be right, because what are you supposed to do if you become part of the suffering? You'd be completely lost. On the contrary, beauty remains, even in misfortune. If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance. A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery!

I know most people read this in high school but it was my first time ever this year and wow.

24. Animal Farm

George Orwell

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Fun.

25. Wolf Brother

Michele Paver

Look behind you Torak!

The funny thing about living independently and being away from home for a long time is that you think of the things you had when you were still taken care of as a child at home. For me it came as a yearning to reread all my childhood books. As soon as I got home I started Wolf Brother and even now as I'm older it's still a great read.

26. A Clash of Kings

George R.R. Martin

A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.

Finally got to find out about characters that prominent in GOT fan theories but not in the TV show. I'm not sure if I agree with Stannis' understanding of balancing the good and bad in a person. He's a pretty black and white character anyway. The reason that it stuck with me is because it is similar to a quote in Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier: good memories are not tainted by bad but good memories do not cover up bad memories.

27. At the Same Time

Susan Sontag

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

...

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other than we are?

...

A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.

...

[On what writers should do:] Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Her last collection of essays, At The Same Time is almost like a greatest hits album. A bit of literary criticism, some essays on torture, a handful of speeches, a dash of the aesthetic, and just a hint of political activism.

28. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

Siri Hustvedt

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us - flesh and bone - only to be spewed out again in our own words.

...

The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

Meh. The blurb drew me in but was way too long.

29. Eggshell Skull

Bri Lee

A well-established legal doctrine that a defendant must 'take their victim as they find them'. If a single punch kills someone because of their thin skull, that victim's weakness cannot mitigate the seriousness of the crime. But what if it also works the other way? What if a defendant on trial for sexual crimes has to accept his 'victim' as she comes: a strong, determined accuser who knows the legal system, who will not back down until justice is done?

...

I lost count, throughout the year, of the number of women who excused themselves from sex crime trials because they themselves were survivors.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It is paradoxically easy and difficult to read. Lee's writing is addictive but the subject matter is heavy - especially at the beginning of the book. Her descriptions of the legal processes, of Brisbane, of The Freeze and of the high-expectation/low self-esteem groupthink of law students all hit very close to home.I want every one of my law friends to read this book. Especially the men. Actually forget law friends. I want all men to read this.

#reading #brisbane #bookaweek #musings #52booksin52weeks