The Emily Blog

Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blythe, 1766

Abigail Adams by Woody Holton.

My first biography of the year – I got interested in Abigail Adams because Frans watches the HBO John Adams documentary over and over, and I like it portrays the relationship between the two of them. That, and how Abigail is alway putting John in his place. Very good book, and I appreciated how Holton emphasizes how Abigail challenged the notion of coverture (the idea that a woman was legally/financially invisible once she married) by making investments, going into trade for a little while, and, towards the end of her life, making her own will. Also fascinating was the huge amount of correspondence going on between Abigail and John, as well as Abigail and her other relatives and many friends and acquaintances. Many of the letters between Abigail and John are available digitally on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Family Papers Archive. I just picked up a copy of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams – not sure if I’m going to have time to read the whole things right now, but I’ll definitely browse through it.

I’m not huge on New Years resolutions; I think fresh starts are more likely to take place on a random day rather than a day when they’re supposed to. Plus, the start of a new year should be a time for celebrating, not for feeling guilty about eating too much junk food or not exercising enough.

But I think this is a good time to look back at the books I’ve read over this past year. In January of this year I started my (now verging on epic) Books of 2009 list. I’m happy I decided to keep a list – this year was a huge year of adjustments and it’s interesting to see what I read as a way of coping with, exploring, or just escaping from some of the things I was dealing with. I’ll start a Books of 2010 list tomorrow, but for now, some reflections on what I read in 2009:

• Grand total of 72 books read (not counting journals, magazines, or books for class).
• 61 of these books were works of fiction; 18 of these works of fiction were in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series.
• Only 10 works of non-fiction (I couldn’t quite figure out how to classify Maira Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty), and of these, half were biographical, autobiographical, and/or memoir-ish.
• Only 21 of the books were written by women! That’s not even 30%! And I was TRYING to read more books by women!
• 13 were short story collections, either by one or multiple authors.
• 10 were translated into English from other languages.

Commentary:
Whoa boy, that was a lot of fiction, especially short stories! I think I really needed it after three years in graduate school. I’m really happy that I read a significant amount of translated work, and work coming from outside the U.S. I loved Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series and wish there were ten or twenty more of them. It was especially fun to be just a book or two behind my dad the whole time he was going through the same series. I loved reading Chimamanda Adichie, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich. I hope I can get my hands on a copy of the final book in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy (used, preferably!).

And next year? I won’t say I’m tired of fiction (especially since there’s a pile of it still waiting to be read), but I do feel like it’s time to branch out. I’d like to start reading more histories and biographies, especially ones dealing with women’s experiences in different countries/times.

Whatever I do read, it’ll all go on the list.

My “books to read” list is growing faster than I can read.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything Is Illuminated
The Wall In My Head
J. G. Ballard: Rushing to Paradise
J. M. Coetzee: Slow Man
Naguid Mahfouz: Palace of Desire
Patrick O’Brian: The Rendezvous (and other stories)
Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine

Hmm, still seeing a Man Imbalance here, though.

For my birthday, my mom sent me a check and told me to go wild buying books on Amazon. I haven’t exactly gone wild, but I did buy two books that I’ve been wanting for a long time, and they arrived a few days ago.

The first: Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty. I love Maira Kalman. I love her art. I love what she writes and how she writes it. It has taken every ounce of moral strength I have to only read a little bit of this book every day, instead of rushing through it in one gulp like I want to.

Second: Memories of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar, by Emily Ruete. Yeah, for real. Published in 1886. And where is Zanzibar, you ask? It’s here, off the coast of Tanzania:

All I knew of Zanzibar before this was based on that line in Muppets Treasure Island where they’re dreaming about where to sail to and someone shouts, “To Zanzibar! To meet the Zanzibarbarians!” Now it’s a little more real. The book is fascinating.

I just watched a wonderful TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian writer, about the importance of stories – many stories, not just one – so that no person or place or anything is defined by a single, limiting story. Here’s her talk:

I also (coincidence? no…) just finished her book of short stories last night. It was the most beautiful collection of stories I’ve read in quite a while (though Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was amazing too). I think one of my goals for this next year will be to read more writing by women – especially women from outside the US, and especially writing in the form of short stories. I think over my lifetime I’ve read WAY more writing by men than by women. I just did a quick count of the authors on my “Books of 2009″ list and, not counting anthologies with more than one author, I’ve read 36 books by men and 12 by women. This might be a bit skewed because I’m working my way through Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series, but even if I subtract those ten it’s still over twice as many men as women.

Now. Does this matter? A year ago I may have said no. Today I’m going to say yes. I think there’s something important I may be missing out on by overlooking these women writers – writers that may be harder to find out about, or to find books by, but have stories that are just as important as, if not more important than, the stories the men are telling.

I guess in the end a balance might be good. But this year I want to make up for lost time. Today is the first day of my twenty-eighth year*. I don’t want to be over-dramatic, but welcome to the year of the woman. :)

*or maybe yesterday, being my birthday, was, but does the next year really start on your birthday or the day after?

It’s just sitting there, looking at me. With “why aren’t you reading me?” written all over its sad little boxy-book face.

For this week’s edition of Weekly Geeks, I’d like to focus on one of the most useful tools for a bibliophile: Bookmarks. Do you use bookmarks or just grab whatever is handy to mark your page? Do you collect lots of different bookmarks or do you have a favorite one that you use exclusively? If you’re not someone who uses bookmarks on a regular basis, have you ever used anything odd to mark your place?

Okay, I think this is the first Weekly Geeks thing I’ve done. It caught my eye because I’m currently going through an enormous paradigm shift in my life with regard to bookmarks (is that dramatic enough?!). The thing is, I ALWAYS used to turn down pages – and yes, my mom would squawk at me – I did it because it was convenient, I was constantly zooming through books, and bookmarks got lost. Now I think I’m growing up, or something weird like that. I still zoom through some books, but others I’m more leisurely about, especially collections of short stories. And if a book is thick enough, it’s a little tricky finding that one dog-eared page, especially if a handful of others are already creased or wrinkled.

So bookmarks have been on my mind lately. I’ve started using business cards (my own, which I have way too many of) as temporary bookmarks but now I’m thinking I want something prettier, and maybe with some meaning. I dug through an old shoebox, thinking I might find some old bookmarks I’d received as gifts, and – lo and behold – I found one! My only bookmark. It’s a special one, too – my friend from southern China gave it to me, and it has writing on it in the Naxi Dongba script.

This is a good start.