It's a month late but here's my picks from the first six months of my 2010 readings:
On the fictional front, I made two spectacular discoveries this year: Sylvia Townsend Warner and T.F. Powys.
A couple of years ago, I read Warner's The Kingdoms of Elfin, a collection of short stories set in various fairy realms. I enjoyed the book but was unaware that she had written anything else. Come an issue of The Nation and there's a review of a reissue of her novel Summer Will Show that sounded so interesting, I had to follow up. As it turned out, the first book I read was Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman. It was brilliant! Over the course of the next few months, I devoured Mr. Fortune's Maggot, The Salutation and the novel that started it all, Summer Will Show. On the to-read shelf remain The Corner That Held Them, The Music at Long Verney, T.H. White: A Biography, Warner: Selected Stories and The Barnards of Loseby (aka The Flint Anchor).
In the course of reading Warner, I came across the observation that she admired the author Theodore Powys so I decided to track down his stuff and was amply rewarded with The White Paternoster and Other Stories and Father Adam. Still to read is the short-story collection Mock's Curse. I'd like to get copies of Unclay and Mr. Weston's Good Wine. Unfortunately, Powys' work has long been out-of-print and it's difficult to find reasonably priced editions.
I can't explain better on why to read both these authors than to quote from John Gray's essay on Powys in The New Statesman:
"In their different ways, all three Powys brothers deserve retrieving for a
wider readership, but none more so than Theodore. He is by far the best writer
among them, and the most original. The greatest value of his work, though, is in
showing that it is still possible to write about the primordial human
experiences to which religion is a response. Secular writers tend to steer clear
of them, and end up stuck in the shallows of politics or fashion. On the other
hand, Christian writers are mostly precious and unpersuasive, like T.S. Eliot,
or else more or less openly fraudulent, like Graham Greene. Very few
20th-century authors have the knack of writing convincingly of first and last
things. A religious writer without any vestige of belief, Theodore Powys is one
of them."
Other fiction works of note this first half of the year include:
Anchorwick, Geoffrey Barlough
The Napoleon of Notting Hill, G.K. Chesterton
Blindsight, Peter Watts
The Red Tree, Caitlin Kiernan
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Run, Man, Run, Chester Himes
Lorna Doone, R. Blackmore
I've made comments on all of these at my GoodReads site.
Before moving on to the nonfiction side, I should mention that there were a few months when I went on a Star Trek novel reading jag, prompted by my purchase of a model of the rebooted Enterprise, chronicled in my April post. It turned out to have some profit: I discovered a very good author, David Mack (Sorrows of Empire, Vanguard: Harbinger, Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind and Vanguard: Precipice, again all of these have some commentary at my GR site).
In nonfiction, I found myself preoccupied with a loosely themed course of religion-based readings. I began last Christmas with an audio CD of Karen Armstrong's Buddha; in January, I moved on to Wendy Doniger's The Hindus. From there I moved on to:
Augustine, Gary Wills (audio CD)
Christianity and Chinese Religions, Hans Kung/Julia Ching
Lost in the Sacred, Dan Diner
God's Battalions, Rodney Stark
A People's History of Christianity, Diana Butler Bass
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
Becoming Enlightened, The Dalai Lama
Sarah the Priestess, Savina Teubal
The Woman Who Named God, Charlotte Gordon
Jesus, Interrupted, Bart Ehrmann
The Evolution of God, Robert Wright
Most have commentary at my GR site. The most "mind blowing" was Jaynes' The Origins of Consciousness, which argues that human beings didn't develop a modern consciousness until the 2nd millennium BC. Before then, we were essentially schizophrenics, listening to voices in our heads and interpreting them as gods (or God).
Another interesting and controversial book was Diner's Lost in the Sacred. The author argues that Islam suffers from a lack of secularization.
The Evolution of God was preaching to the choir when it covered the development of the notion of "divinity" over time but Wright lost me when he attempted to argue that our ideas have progressed toward an ever more benevolent and universal deity. He comes across as an agnostic desperately trying to find a reason to believe. That said, it's still a book worth reading.
My position on religion (atheism) didn't change - in fact, it was strengthened by my reading - but I did learn a great deal and enjoyed the experience.
Other nonfiction of note:
The Balkans, Mark Mazower (audio CD)
From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll
The 10,000 Year Explosion, Gregory Cochran
The Humans Who Went Extinct, Clive Finlayson
Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich
A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire, Anton Chekhov
Out of Our Heads, Alva Noe
One of the more interesting books was The 10,000 Year Explosion. The authors make the nonstartling (to me) assertions that evolution has continued to affect humans up to the modern day and raise all sorts of interesting examples to illustrate this but wind up relying too heavily on the biological basis for human cultures.
Well, it's the beginning of August and I've already got 9+ books under my belt for the second half of the year and many more interesting ones on the To-Read shelf so the year-end review should have some further interesting reading to talk about.
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