Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass (Original 1855 Edition)
Walt Whitman
92 Pages
Read in 15 days

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?...I do not know what it is any more than he
...I guess the grass is itself a child...the produced babe of the vegetation

Walt Whitman

Over and over we flatten the clover
Shocked me too the things we used to do on grass
It would shock you too the things we used to do on grass

"Grass" Andy Partridge (XTC)

I think every picture of Walt Whitman that I have seen is one of an old man with long white beard and kind eyes...The truth is that Whitman (self) published Leaves of Grass when he was 36 years old. And I have to be honest, he was a little randy back then...don't know how he matured in his later years, but if he was a department-store Santa (as he looks like on my cover), don't think I would sit on his lap.

No, it's not that bad, but he definitely wasn't subtle (especially for 1855) with his words: "I hear the trained soprano...she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip." Hello!

In the end, Leaves of Grass, to me, is a collection of thoughts that use nature as a starting point but not only praise nature, but the human's place in it (and the beauty we bring):

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,
And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sounds contribute
toward me.
I hear the bravuras of birds...the bustle of growing wheat...gossip
of flames...clack of sticks cooking my meals.
I hear the sound of the human voice...a sound I love,
I hear all sounds as they are turned to their uses...sounds of the city
and sounds out of the city...sounds of the day and night

Whitman said that he intended the book to be small enough that it could be carried in a pocket so that people could read it in the open air. I have to admit I loved reading this book in the back yard with the sound of our fountain, the birds chirping, and cicadas buzzing. Even as I type this, I am aware of the night sounds outside the window.

Perhaps that is why I found the book so excellent...after reading the meditations from Whitman, I find that I become more aware of my surroundings and try to take a minute to absorb all that is around me.

I know that I will reread this book for many years to come.

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars..."

Up next...Persepolis.

The Bear

The Bear
William Faulkner
131 pages
Read in 10 days

Not proud of how many days it took to read this book. If I read just 13 pages a day on average, then it will take me 61 days to read The Way We Live Now. What can I say, life gets in the way sometimes.

There are just 5 chapters in the book and I think it can be broken down as follows:

1 and 3- The Hunt...respect for nature.
4 - The boy making sense of his life, his land, and his upbringing
5-The hunt again, trying to relive the same feeling, only the world has completely changed and the frontier is being taken over by industry.

I enjoyed this book tremendously and using the reference from Newsweek as a guide on how to view the book. I definitely saw the environmental themes.

The first 3 chapters detail the hunt for Old Ben, a large black Bear, who is an almost mythical creature for the locals. Many bullets and traps have been set for Old Ben , but he will not go down. I felt, through Faulkner's words, that I was indeed in the camp and out in the hunt. As I said before, the men look to the woods and Old Ben with respect. We watch the main character, a boy named Ike, as he grows up a more confident and accomplished hunter. When Old Ben is finally killed, with the aid of a wild dog that was trained by Sam Fathers (Ike's mentor), we get the feeling that life will never be the same.

In chapter 4, the writing is noticeably different. Ike is now 21 and the chapter starts with four paragraphs that have no period; a stream of consciousness style of writing. I felt the approach was deliberate to show an instability in Ike's life. As if we were him talking through all of his emotions in coming to the decision to give up the land that was part of his inheritance...There were times, however, in this chapter, where it got a little muddy for me. I could feel the sense of urgency as the boy states his alarm at the way the land has been taken from the Native Americans and the history of slavery...when he says:

I'm trying to explain to the head of my family something which I have got to do which I don't quite understand myself, not in justification of it but to explain it if I can. I could say I don't know why I must do it but that I do know I have got to because I have got myself to live with for the rest of my life and all I want is peace to do it in.

You see that he is trying hard to understand things that he does not understand.

The last chapter, he returns to the hunting grounds before a logging company comes through and destroys the land. He can hear the trains come closer and sees firsthand as industry quickly swallows up the forest.

Faulkner was definitely ahead of his time...this story was first published in the 1930s. The story, itself, takes place in the late 1800s. The themes here about the effects of industrialization and expansion on our shrinking wilderness is something that was not as hot a topic in the 1930s. It is an impressive story that is as appropriate today as it was then.

Next story is Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Perfect for the summer. Just wish we would have weather that resembles it soon!

The List

Almost done with The Bear...very good, Chapter 4 was a little hard to follow, but good. More to come on that later. I thought before I go too much further, I would list the Top 50:

	Book Title	Author	In Posession?
1	The Way We Live Now	Trollope, Anthony	x
2	The Looming Tower	Wright, Lawrence
3	Prisoners of the State	Ziyang, Zhao
4	The Big Switch	Carr, Nicholas
5	The Bear	Faulkner, William	x
6	Winchell	Gabler, Neal
7	Random Family	LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole
8	Night Draws Near	Shadid, Anthony
9	Predictably Irrational	Ariely, Dan
10	God: The Biography	Miles, Jack	x
11	The Unsettling of America	Berry, Wendell
12	A Good Man is Hard to Find	O'Connor, Flannery
13	Underground	Murakami, Haruki
14	Disrupting Class	Christensen, Clayton
15	Air Guitar	Hickley, Dave
16	Leaves of Grass	Whitman, Walt	x
17	The Trouble with Physics	Smolin, Lee
18	City: Rediscovering The Center	Whyte, William
19	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Dick, Phillip
20	Benjamin Franklin	Morgan, Edmund	x
21	The Mississippi Books	Twain, Mark
22	Among the Thugs	Buford, Bill
23	Brooklyn	Toibin, Colm
24	Frankenstein	Shelley, Mary	x
25	Bad Mother	Waldman, Ayelet
26	Guests of the Ayatollah	Bowden, Mark
27	Whittaker Chambers	Tanenhaus, Sam
28	Midnight's Children	Rushdie, Salaman
29	American Prometheus	Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin
30	The Lost	Medelsohn, Daniel
31	Gilead	Robinson, Marilynne	x
32	Pictures at a Revolution	Harris, Mark
33	Kim	Kipling, Rudyard	x
34	Walking with the Wind	Lewis, John
35	The Line of Beauty	Hollinghurst, Alan	x
36	The Dark is Rising	Cooper, Susan
37	Persepolis	Satrapi, Marjane	x
38	Underworld	DeLillo, Don
39	Why Evolution is True	Coyne, Jerry
40	American Pastoral	Roth, Phillip	x
41	The Botany of Desire	Pollan, Michael
42	The Regeneraton Trilogy	Barker, Pat
43	Senator Joe McCarthy	Rovere, Richard
44	Year of Wonders	Brooks, Geraldine	x
45	The Elegance of the Hedgehog	Barberry, Muriel
46	Gone Tomorrow	Child, Lee
47	Things Fall Apart	Achebe, Chinua
48	American Journeys	Watson, Don
49	Cotton Comes to Harlem	Himes, Chester
50	The New Biographical Dictionary of Film	Thompson, David

16 pages to go on The Bear...

So, here we go...

Well hello there. If you happened upon this blog, congratulations. Simply put: this blog is meant for me to document my personal challenge to read through all 50 books that Newsweek recommends we read now: http://www.newsweek.com/id/204300. It truly is a diary that I can look back on or share with my children when they get older. However, if people join and start talking about the books, I would love it. Call it a virtual book-club.

A few things about me:

1. While I am always reading, I would not call myself a voracious reader. Sure, my whole day is spent reading emails, marketing materials, blogs, newspapers, magazines, and "tweets" for my job, when I sit down to read a book, I am unfortunately so tired, I end up reading a page and I am out.
2. I keep busy...I have two wonderful young children under the age of 5. My wife is going to nursing school so that means that the bulk of the parental duties are on my shoulders. Not complaining at all, just between work and kids, the free time is not really there.
3. Which is BS...Like most Americans, I finish dinner, put the kids down and then I plop down in front of the TV and zone out for a few hours. Why not devote more time to reading? So, instead of turning on the TV right away, I am trying to get a habit to get in at least an hour of reading every night. I hope that time grows even more. Really, I don't need TV. Cooking shows are fun, a couple comedies are cool too...but after realizing I was not going to get through the last 5 "24" episodes because, well, I don't really care if Jack saves the world again, I made the effort to read more.
4. Which is part of why I am embracing this article in Newsweek. At the same time I said "enough is enough", this issue came in the mail and I said, "ok, Newsweek, it's ON!"
5. The Iran election also is a motivation for this, as well. In the aftermath of the results, I was following a couple sources on Twitter to see what was happening overseas. My heart was with all the protesters and while I understood what was happening on the surface of all the demonstrations, I really didn't quite understand the background to it. I was 8 years old at the time of the Islamic Revolution and saw Iran as many Americans did - They hate America and want to destroy us. The "tweets" and reports from the Daily Show's Jason Jones showed a much different picture. These were people who wanted to be liked in the world, they wanted to be free...I read up on articles in Salon.com, Newsweek, New York Times, pretty much anything that gave some background on how we ended up at this point in history. While I have a basic understanding now, I realized that is a very complex picture there. I was excited to see that there are several books about Iran (including the graphic novel, Persepolis) on the list. I hope these books help me gain understanding of what is going on there.
6. I majored in Psychology and Sociology in school. While I was required to take literature classes, I do not call myself a literary critic. And really, that isn't the point. I will give my thoughts and plot summary to the books, but hopefully I will talk more about why this book is pertinent now. Literature is, I feel, completely subjective. Each person who reads a story will get something different from it. Case in point: in college, we read Hemingway's short story, "Hills Like White Elephants." Our professor was going over symbolism in the story and said that the suitcase that was left behind signified an abortion...Em, wha? Not what I got from the story at all. So, no discussion of symbolism, if you want that, take a class.

Ok, so there is the background. Now the rules:

1. I will not read the books in order, but once I start a book, my intention is to finish it.
2. I don't have a set time frame. It would be great to say that I am giving myself a year to do it, but 50 books is basically a book a week. Could be done, but I am not going to kill myself trying.
3. The intention is to post once I finish a book...I may put posts during reading when I came across something important, or that I find interesting.

So, yesterday, I went to a local used bookstore and started looking for the books on the list. Got 10 of them for about $45. I ended up getting an 11th at Barnes and Noble. Now, the first book:


No. 5 on the list...William Faulkner's, "The Bear". Newsweek calls it: "A boy comes of age in the 1880s by learning the ways of the fast-disappearing Mississippi forests. The best environmental novel ever written." You can get it on Amazon. Now, I have 47 pages left in the book I am reading now (The Mad Ones, if you must know)...should be able to finish that today and then it will be onto The Bear. See you soon.