Looking back at January: a new year of reading and oft overlooked reading suggestions. I actually read a few of the works on this list while they were still in the news. I notice that a couple of the titles were of that genre often considered non-fiction (wink wink) and it’s good that I have read them before they turned dated and uninteresting.
Although I enjoyed these very contemporary views on the current corruption in both government and in the oil fields, I must admit that for the most part they at best provided me with a clear depiction of things I already knew, albeit in one compact volume with a lot of extra detail.
I find that I am rereading (re-viewing, re-listening) more and more news. I receive the digital edition of the Washington Post, and receive regular updates to the news via Apple News, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, etc. Not only this but I have recently unsubscribed from several other news outlets. It’s a good thing I don’t watch television but I do listen to the radio and along with the traffic reports (in Chicago) I regularly must sit through yet-another repetitious newscast.
I know there are several features or sites that attempt to provide a bullet list of limited major stories but even these just tend to go into the pile of repetition.
Speaking of repetition, I have watched those news stations on the television, especially in doctor’s offices and the like, and could only take a limited exposure to their urgent need to make everything seem like important news. When my family got our first television in 1956 the news was fifteen minutes and the federal news (Edward R. Murrow, etc.) was another fifteen minutes. Not even considering the non-news propaganda of Fox, we were probably better informed in fifteen minutes that the tsunami of pseudo-news filler that people are exposed to nowadays.
Add to that a faith that Truman and even Eisenhower were speaking the truth, or at least as much of the truth as was best for the people of this country.
Anyway, here are the books suggested in January.I intend to read a few more myself.
01-01-20 – The Familiar, Volume 4: Hades — Daniel Z. Danielewaki
01-02-20 – The Secret History of Costaguana — Juan Gabriel Vasquez
01-03-20 – The Face of Another — Kobo Abé
01-04-20 – White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination — Jess Row
01-05-20 – In Memorium to Identity — Kathy Acker
01-06-20 – Blowout — Rachel Maddow
01-07-20 – I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going — Peter McGough
01-08-20 – Create Dangerously — Edwidge Danicat
01-09-20 – The Fraud — Zadie Smith
01-10-20 – The Topeka School — Ben Lerner
01-11-20 – Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby
01-12-20 – Betrayal In Berlin — Steve Vogel
01-13-20 – Essays One — Lydia Davis
01-14-20 – The Year of the Runaways — Sunjeev Sahota
01-15-20 – Janis: Her Life and Music — Holly George-Warren
01-16-20 – The Uninhabitable Earth : Life After Warming — David Wallace-Wells
01-17-20 – Celestial Bodies — Jokha Alharthi
01-18-20 – Where the Crawdads Sing — Delia Owens
01-19-20 – Imaginary Friend — Stephen Chbosky
01-20-20 – Summer — Karl Ole Knausgaard
01-21-20 – Seven Types of Atheism — John Gray
01-22-20 – Lakota America — Pekka Hamalainen
01-23-20 – C’est la Vie — Pascal Garnier
01-24-20 – A Very Stable Genius — Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig
01-25-20 – The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — Giorgio Bassani
01-26-20 – A History of the World in 100 Objects — Neil MacGregor
01-27-20 – The Time Traveller’s Theory of Relativity — Nichole Valentine
01-28-20 – Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide — Richard Dawkins
01-29-20 – Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair — Carole Sweeney
01-30-20 – Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrical Drawings — Leonard Cohen
01-31-20 – Hiding In Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America — Sarah Kendzior
A Celebration of Reading 