Reading lists for 2010, 2011 (Updated)

Since I’ve added a few more reviews than usual to the site, I have installed a new plugin that will allow me to rate the books and movies via a five-star system. This is how it will look, and I already used it in my review of the movie, “Agora“:

[rating:4/5]

Also, I plan to make a concerted effort to keep track of the books I read this year. I’ve never done this pragmatically, so it will be interesting to see how many I can get through. I’m not John Milton (He supposedly studied from 6 a.m. until midnight and then repeated the cycle), and I probably have more hobbies than good ol’ John (Learning and writing being his main pursuits), so I will likely be a little disappointed in the result come December 2011, but I’m at least going to give it a ago and try to top my numbers for 2010. I’ve got quite a few in the cue and began a new one, “Positivist Republic” by [[Gillis Harp]] today. Next up will either be, “Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years” by [[Carl Sanburg]] or possibly, “1421: The Year China Discovered America.” I have read negative reviews on the latter, so I may defer to something else when the time comes.

That said, and since I didn’t make a concerted effort to keep track of what I read this year, here is an annotated and approximate list of books that I read in 2010 based on memory, listed more or less chronologically from most to less recent:

‘When in the course of human events …’

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more. — “Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, ‘Had a Declaration…’“. Adams Family Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/cfm/doc.cfm?id=L17760703jasecond. Retrieved on 2009-06-28. 

In a particularly busy week at work — nothing unusual there — I was asked to compose the editorial for the week at about 9 p.m. the night before it would be published in the paper. I got started about about 10:30 p.m. or so that same night and this was the result. If I had to summarize what the July the Fourth holiday means to me, I suppose this would be pretty close to my personal feelings. (As a point of clarification, “institutional editorials” as they are called in the newspaper business, have no author, per se. They are supposed to be the “collective” position of the paper’s editorial staff, which would be me [news editor], the editor and the publisher.) I have to clarify that point because we get calls occasionally asking, “Who wrote that darn editorial!” which likely blasted some public official or another. We reply, “It’s the collective opinion of the paper and has no author, per se.” Anyway, I felt compelled to make that point because for practical purposes, although I was the author technically, I was only the vessel by which the editorial sprang forth … or something like that.

That said, as “we” laid out in the editorial, our very ability to be able to celebrate the liberties and freedoms we enjoy in this country were anything but inevitable, and it’s truly remarkable that we have come this far, given our sundry and violent history.

This weekend — and I’ve already started with a concert by some military orchestra band — I am covering a couple July 4th events including a Fun Run near one of the local lakes and a fireworks display the night of the Fourth. I have covered the fireworks show before, but I dare say Dillard, Ga. will again be brimming with locals hoping to catch the show. We in American have a bad habit of thinking too little about history and too much about the future. I do hope that as folks go out and shoot fireworks, grill, swim or whatever, that they will take a moment to reflect about how we got here. The path, as noted in the editorial, was not laid out so much by God’s providence, but by much sacrifice, sweat and tears … many of those tears coming from peoples we either oppressed, displaced or enslaved. The Enlightenment ideas, eventually, and quite slowly, took hold finally in the mid-1960s, and we today are less apt to publically denigrate our fellow man as we did for centuries prior. So, I wanted to quickly make the point to say that, as we celebrate where we are in this country and celebrate our place in the world, we need to also celebrate how far we’ve come. There was no “Ready and Easy Way,” to coin a phrase from John Milton, and the present reality we know was anything but a given and nearly resulted in a country torn asunder.

Adams got it right when he said July 2 (the actual day America made a resolution declaring  independence. The famous “Declaration of Independence” was an explanation of that resolution) will be “the most memorable epoch in the history of America.”