Two thousand sixteen or, The Triumphant Return of My Literary Supplement Blogging

Yes, it has been a while. I had blogging issues in 2015 (laptop issues, really), but it's a new year, fresh start, etc. I won't bother doing too much detail in a '15 recap; let's just quickly mention that the year basically included continuing to trudge through my many simultaneous reading projects.

The best books I read in 2015 were Room by Emma Donoghue, Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, A Room With a View by my boy E.M. Forster, and Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z by David Sacks. Some other interesting finds, well worth checking out, were Les chercheurs d'os by Tahar Djaout, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (which essentially restored my faith in contemporary literature and made me believe there are actually good writers writing out there), Good Behaviour by Molly Keane (thanks, book group!), and Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. Overrated, or maybe just overfussed about: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt (apparently some people think she's dismissing or defending the perpetrators of the Holocaust? Hello? Did they actually read the book?), One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I really need to read in Spanish, which is why I was reading/suffering through it in English, to prepare for this necessary Spanish reading that I'm going to get aroudn to any minute now), and Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, which I was really prepared to enjoy more than I did, it being her Pulitzer-winner and all, and me having really loved the other book of hers I'd read. I didn't really hate hate hate any book I read in 2015, unless you count Wild, which I mostly came to hate after I read it, when I actually thought about it. The process of reading the book was enjoyable enough, but the author, Cheryl Strayed, is more than a little full of shite and not that great of a writer, and one starts to realize this when one applies a little thing called critical thinking to Wild, but if that sounds too hard, and you prefer to be entertained laugh-out-loud style, go read the entirety of this anti-Wild blog.

So anyway. Now we're in 2016. Wheeeeee!  Here we go.

Yes, my projects continue, but I can definitely see the light at the end of their tunnels! In my Prez Bios project (wherein, you'll recall, I set out to read a bio of every president in order to see where we went wrong, a goal clearly conceived during the Dubya administration), I've recently finished --and reconsidered--Nixon and am now at Ford. Totally in the home stretch of this project: I've reached my lifetime! In my A-to-Z championship, I have one more finalist to read and then will select my final winner (which I wasn't even planning on doing when I first read the 26 novels, one author's last name for each letter of the alphabet, but that project evolved after I finished what became the first round). When that wraps up, I'm going to embark on a reverse-gender A to Z, because I realized that I read far more men than women in my A to Z selections, so I've decided to remedy that.  As for prize-winning Pulitzer and Newbery novels, I've read a few each year and continue to plug away.

Speaking of that, I've just finished William Faulkner's The Reivers.  The Faulkernization of my adult life continues, as well it should. More on that in my next post.