Goals for 2012

It seems like a lot of book bloggers are setting goals for 2012, in many different ways.  Listing just a few books that they really want to get to, aiming to read a certain number of books from the TBR shelf, hoping to get to a certain ratio of male/female, Western/Non-Western, Classic/Non-Classic or read in more genres.  I have thought a lot about the goals that I want to set for my reading in 2012.  In what direction do I want to take my reading?  How many books do I want to read?  What subjects do I want them to focus on?  How many books in translation do I want to read?

And after mulling and philosophizing and sighing a great deal, I came up with the following:

I refuse to set any reading goals for myself.  I said differently in my Best of 2011 post, I know.  I saw my stats and was disturbed.  But, you know what?  I am really proud of the way I read in 2011 and I didn't ever think back over my 2010 goals and try to read according to those goals.  I read what interested me and awoke a response in me and made me want to continue reading.  In 2011, that was mainly women's history, with an attempt to learn more about minority women's history in America.  In 2012, it may be something completely different.

As book bloggers, we put so much pressure on ourselves.  We not only want to read more, we want to read more diversely, read more classics, read more globally, read in tandem, read on deadlines, read certain genres, read certain numbers.  The list of goals and projects and challenges goes on and on, and people get so stressed and upset for not trying harder or pushing further or being more cognizant of books they feel they should have read, rather than enjoying the books that they did read. 

I don't really want to have any part of that.  If I have a goal for 2012 at all, it's to just read what I want when I want to read it, and enjoy it.  I don't care if I end up reading a disproportionate number of male authors, or fantasy novels, or books set in England, or ones that were not on my TBR list.  In looking over my Best of List for 2011, six of the eleven best books I read this year were impulse reads- ones that I just picked up because they appealed to me at the time, and then immediately absorbed me in their narrative.  I don't think that's a coincidence.  I firmly believe in the right book at the right time, and I'm going to let the literary fates have their way with me.

So I have no idea what 2012 will have in store for me, reading-wise.  But I am very excited to find out where I'll go next.

2011: The Year in Review

Wow, 2011 is all done!  What a rollicking year it was, too, for the world.  Reading-wise, it was a slow year for me.  I wasn't super-impressed with my reading this year, but in going over the list of books I've read, I read some amazing works!  I think I just read most of them in the first half of the year, not the second :-)  I'll get to goals for 2012 in another post, but here's the breakdown and my favorite reads of 2011 for you:

Total Books Read:  72.  This is a pretty significant drop from 2010 (101 books), but pretty much on par with 2009 (77).  I don't think I am likely to read 100 books in one year again for a very long time.  I suppose the easiest excuse for the drop this year is that I was in graduate school and spent more of my time being social or doing work or trying to find a job than reading.  Also, it took me weeks to read some books, and as I only ever read one book at a time, that may have had an effect, too.  And generally, I have expanded my hobbies beyond reading this year- I exercised a lot more (not that you can tell) and spent a lot of free time cooking fun meals.  Also, I was introduced to Dr. Who.  So, just many more ways to spend my time than in prior years! 

Male/Female Author Ratio:  25 Male : 47 Female. This is significantly more unbalanced than in any prior reading year for me.  I usually am right around 50/50 on this ratio, but this year I just got much more interested in women's history, and that really impacted my reading.

"Out of Comfort Zone" Reads (books not in the fantasy/historical fiction genres):  38!  This is a pretty great number for me, especially as I felt like I reverted back a lot to fantasy and historical fiction this year.  But I think I'm doing very well in expanding and cultivating my reading palate, and I'm happy about that.

Non-Fiction Reads:  13.  That's about 20% of  my reads for the year, so I am really pretty happy with the number, though it seems really paltry to me.  Some of those reads were the best ones of the year, though, so I think I'll continue to read more non-fiction going forward.

Books Read that were on the Bookshelf at 12/31/10 (reduction in TBR pile):  20.  Three of these were DNFs, however, and do not count towards the 67 books finished this year.  20 is not as high a number as I would have liked, but I was in New York for the entire summer, without access to any of my books, so I am going to use that excuse.  Also, I got a Kindle, which made me read many books that were not already on my shelves.

Classics Read (I define classic fairly loosely and include children's classics in this number):  12.  This isn't bad, especially when you combine classics with non-fiction and come out to 37% of my reads for the year being in some way "improving."  :-)

Countries Visited Through Books:  Britain, France, South Africa, Canada, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Austria, Switzerland.  This is a very Eurocentric list.  But it's hard to meet a huge variety of goals in one year when you have limited reading time.  Hopefully going forward, I will be more diverse with this.

Now, onto the more interesting awards!

Musings: An Accomplished Woman

Jude Morgan's An Accomplished Woman is one of his novels set in the late 18th century.  In the style of Jane Austen's Emma, it centers on an independent woman living in the country with her aging father and her many strong opinions.

In 1799 Lincolnshire, Lydia Templeton has just reached the age of 30.  She spends most of her days reading and walking and enjoying her life, but all that goes astray when her godmother Lady Eastmond asks her to accompany a beautiful young heiress, Miss Phoebe Rae, to Bath for a season.  Phoebe is young and naive and impressionable and has managed to fall in love with two men and needs help choosing between them both.  Lydia dreads this task like no other, but ultimately decides to become Phoebe's companion.  Luckily, her neighbor, former suitor, and witty friend Mr. Durrant will be there, too, hoping to find a wife and cut his useless nephew out of his succession.

Musings: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is one of the most popular non-fiction books to have come out over the past year or so.  It's about a 30-year-old woman in 1950s Baltimore who had a severe case of cervical cancer.  While being treated at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, the doctors took part of her tumor (totally normal practice at the time).  The cells from that tumor grew and multiplied more quickly than any other cells in culture ever had, and became known as HeLa, a strand used to help cure polio, to determine the effects of outer space on the human body and many other things.  Henrietta Lacks' family, though, only knew about this much after the fact, say that they have been lied to about the whole procedure, and none of them even has healthcare, even while many more corporations and laboratories make money off of Henrietta's cells.

I really enjoyed this book and found the science of it fascinating, but I admit that I didn't love it as much as I thought I would.  The whole story of the cells and the science and ethics and extensions of them was fascinating.  I loved learning about how HeLa has been used to advance science, really enjoyed debating with myself internally about the ethics of doctors using a person's body for science without that patient's consent, and was utterly fascinated by the way the HeLa cells contaminated so many cultures and cost millions of dollars in lost and wasted research, leading to a much more stringent cataloging and sterilization system.  So interesting!

Musings: Summers at Castle Auburn

Summers at Castle Auburn is a book that has sat patiently on my shelf for over five years.  Someone- of course, I can't remember who it was- mentioned it in a blog post recently, so I decided it was time to pick this one up.  A light romantic fantasy seemed like the perfect way to start winter break.

Summers at Castle Auburn starts when Corie is 14 years old.  She's the illegitimate daughter of a deceased nobleman and a wise woman, and every summer since she turned six, her father's brother comes to take her away from her grandmother's home so that she can experience the life the other half of her upbringing deserves.  So every summer, Corie goes to Castle Auburn and spends idyllic months with the handsome Prince Bryan, on whom she has a massive crush, his cousin Kent, the beautiful enslaved Aliora that the gentry employs, and her favorite person in the world, her sister Elisandra.  But Corie is growing up and as we pass through the next four years with her, she begins to see people for what they really are, what they are capable of doing and, more importantly, what she must do to ensure her own happiness.

Musings: I am the Chosen King

Ever since reading David Hastings' 1066:  The Year of the Conquest, I have wanted to read more about King Harold.  He was so sympathetically portrayed in Hastings' book; I felt so sorry for him as it really seemed like the fates just all turned against him at the end.  He is someone very deserving of fame and remembrance, so I was very excited to finally get my hands on Helen Hollick's novel about his life, I am the Chosen King.

Hollick starts her story when Harold is a teenager who gets along well with his parents but not so well with his siblings.  We follow him through three more decades- are with him when he meets the love of his life, as he gains confidence and consolidates power, deals with the difficulties of his capricious siblings and then, of course, see him setting on that fateful course that would pit him against William of Normandy.

Musings: The Heiress Companion

I was very excited to receive Madeleine Robins' The Heiress Companion from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program because I love the author's Sarah Tolerance mysteries.  The Heiress Companion is a reissue of a Regency romance Robins wrote in the 1980s, and I was excited to get wrapped up in the complex world and witty interplays that define Madeleine Robins for me.

The Heiress Companion is about Rowena Chartwell, a wealthy and independent 27-year-old orphan who decided to become paid companion to the widowed Lady Bradwell rather than be forced to live under the chaperonage of old tabbies.  We meet Rowena as she's planning a party for the widow's second son, Mr. Lyndon Bradwell, who has been away on the Continent for several years but is now returning home.  As you might expect, Mr. Bradwell comes upon Rowena unexpectedly, the two mistake each other's identities, dislike each other and then fall in love.

[TSS] Interlude - The Bhopal Disaster

One of the most impactful lectures I ever had in my life happened last week, when my Strategy professor, Dr. Gautam Ahuja, took an hour out of our regular class time to teach us about business ethics.  With significant emotion, he told us about how people within companies make strategic decisions to cut costs to better compete in the environment, often without recognizing that there are humans on the receiving ends of those decisions.  As future business leaders, it is imperative we take responsibility for our actions.  We are taught to believe so strongly in the market and in the forces that guide it, the ability of individuals acting selfishly in a collective fashion to punish firms that behave badly and reward those that do well, but this often does not work as a leveling mechanism.

Professor Ahuja asked our class, "What is the value of a human life?"  We all debated this awkwardly for some time, talking about future earnings potential, health profiles, etc.  He nodded in agreement with all of us, stating that of course those are important considerations for determining the economic value.  Then he said, "Based on that discussion, then... what is the value of an Indian life?"  Implying, of course, that many Indians make much less money than Americans do, have a shorter life expectancy and less access to quality healthcare.

He illustrated this point by sharing with us the story of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India.  Sadly, many of my classmates had never heard of this disaster, and it seems to have generally been forgotten in collective memory.  So today, I'd like to share the story with you in the hopes that you can get a small inkling of just how important this lecture was to me and to all my classmates.  It takes so much courage for a man to get up in front of 100 students, three days in a row, and tell them with so much emotion and guilt, exactly why business ethics are important.  It was a true act of bravery, and I hope it gives you pause as well.

Musings: The London Monster

I have had Jan Bondeson's The London Monster on my shelf since early 2007.  I am not entirely sure what made me pick it up.  Do you ever try to figure that out?  Why suddenly, a book you've overlooked for years pops off the shelf at you and you finally settle down to read it?  I am sometimes able to trace my reasoning, but in this case, no idea.

The book is about a series of crimes in London in the early 1790s.  Pretty women complained of a man accosting them on the street, saying dirty things and then often cutting them across the thigh or behind with a sharp blade and then laughing in their faces while they screamed in terror.  Sometimes, he would insist that they smell a bunch of artificial flowers and then shove the nosegay in their faces, cutting them with a hidden blade.  He never killed any of them, but he wreaked havoc on the streets of the city and made many women fear to go out at night.  Eventually, Rhynwick Williams was arrested, charged and found guilty of the crimes and sentenced to a steep prison sentence.  He was defended by the fabulously namd Theophilus Swift, a larger-than-life Irishman who liked to be the center of attention and made the trial even more fantastic.

Musings: A Slave in the White House - Paul Jennings and the Madisons

A Slave in the White House:  Paul Jennings and the Madisons is a long title that is pretty misleading.  Much of the story is taken up not with Paul Jennings (the slave) but with the Madisons, particularly Dolley Madison, with another good chunk devoted to Daniel Webster.  I assume the historical record is scarce on details related to Paul Jennings' life, so Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, the author, had to embellish by putting in a lot of details about other people.  But in that case, she should have chosen a different title.  I started the book really hoping to delve deep into the Madison administration and Paul Jennings' unique viewpoint on it, particularly as the slave of "the Father of the Constitution" who fought so hard for American liberty but did not give liberty to the African-Americans he owned.  But that is not what I got.

Paul Jennings was born into slavery on Montpelier, the Madison plantation.  As a young man, he accompanied James and Dolley Madison to the White House as a household slave.  (I thought this would comprise the bulk of the book, but in reality it was only one chapter, and most of that chapter was about Dolley Madison.)  After Madison left office, Jennings worked as his personal manservant for the rest of Madison's life, marrying a slave on a neighboring plantation and making life plans, expecting to be freed in the former President's will.  But Madison did not free him, wanting to ensure that his beloved wife Dolley was comfortable in her widowhood.  Montpelier, though, was not the thriving plantation it once was, and Dolley sold off some of her slaves.  Jennings became terrified that he, too, would be sold, and approached Daniel Webster for help to buy his own freedom.  Once Webster gave him the loan, he worked hard all the rest of his life to free himself and his children and earn a living for himself in Washington, DC.  He also wrote a very short memoir, A Colored Man's Reminisces of James Madison, which was published in his later years and which was a primary source in this book.