Back Room

I recently organized my memory box. Surely everyone has something like this, right? A cardboard box full of old receipts, post cards, and photographs? Mine is a gray plastic milk carton with deep scratches, and a faded warning labeled on the side proclaiming "case misuse punishable by law". It includes a couple of long discarded cell phones, my Gameboy color from 1998, and a mysterious USB drive (I did not check the contents, in this case imagination is likely far more enjoyable than reality). I have never organized this box before. It has moved around a lot, seen the inside of the closet of my college dorm rooms, the underside of my mattress in a dingy Queens apartment, and most recently the attic of my mom's house. It has seen a lot of the inside of my car. Things have been added to it over time. There is a ticket for a 2008 Death Cab for Cutie concert at M Park Pool in Brooklyn, a concert I went to as a senior in high school with my best friend's older sister who I was lackadaisically in love with. There is a wrinkled composition book from high school, filled with my rambling critiques of an assigned piece of poetry.

In 2015 I read forty four books. This is six shy of the fifty books that I pledged to myself that I would read. The list is below:

Submergence - J.M. Ledgard

Giraffe - J.M. Ledgard

Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Wolf

Crow Fair - Thomas McGuane

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Old Gringo -- Carlos Fuentes

Anthem -- Ayn Rand

Missoula -- John Krakauer

The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Nothing's Impossible - Lorraine Monroe

The Possession - Annie Ernaux

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

Beacon 23 - Hugh Howey

Injured Reserves - DC Bourune

The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Flatland - Edwin Abbott Abbott

In the Orchard, the Swallows - Peter Hobbs

Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick

Einstein: His Life and Universe - Walter Isaacson

Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius - Leonard Shlain

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Into the Woods - Bill Bryson

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

The Trial - Franz Kafka

The Girl from Krakow - Alex Rosenberg

The Hundred Year Flood - Matthew Salesses

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks

Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie

Blindsided - Jay Giles

A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Crystal Crypt - Philip K. Dick

The Scarlet Plague - Jack London

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan

My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse

Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

The Next 100 Years - George Freidman

So, I've failed my resolution to read 50 books in a year. My most ardent fans will remember that this marks the second consecutive year I have failed to meet the same resolution. I'm not too upset about it, overall. Of course I would have loved to have met my goal. But let's face facts: I read a lot more than most people do, and some of these books were pretty amazing. It's funny now, glancing back through the list. I think more about the circumstances surrounding the reading than the actual content of the book. Of course, some plot shines through, some characters cling, but the first memory is almost always where I was and what I was doing while reading it. 

There was a big chunk of these books read during the summer on my motorcycle road trip. I downloaded a big chunk of them to my Kindle and just blasted through them, one after the other, late at night, tucked away in my dark tent, listening to the engine of my nearby Honda slowly tick away as it cooled down. 

I remember being frightened, bruised, and exhausted, reading The Emperor of All Maladies in the backwoods of the the Arapho National Forest. I had just blown out my front tire and crashed, and I was miles from the nearest gas station. But I remember reading that book and thinking about cancer and the history of cancer research, and I was taken away from that situation and completely transported to a world of malignant cells and radiation treatment and surgical margins. That book helped me to forget myself for a few hours, and this happened with almost every book I read this year. Books can transport you, and that is what makes them so great. That is what, in my opinion, make authors such powerful people. 

The best book I read this year was probably a tie between The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes (dark, haunting, beautiful) and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (irreverant and honest).

My resolution for the new year will be to write (and publish to this blog) one piece of short fiction every month.

Here's a photograph I took near Montauk Point Lighthouse.