In 2001 I started the year by reading The Horizontal Instrument by Christopher Wilkins. This is a wonderful novel about a man who looses his wife to a slow disease which takes her mind before it takes her body. The man decides to honour her memory by building a perfectly accurate timepiece. In 2011 the first book of the year was The Big Burn by Timothy Egan. This is the story of the biggest forest fire in American history and how with the help of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot it laid the foundation for much of 20th Century American conservation and environmentalism.
In 2001 I was interested in, still am actually, time pieces, specifically wristwatches. I can’t remember how I found this wonderful little novel by Wilkins but it was a great start to the year. The Big Burn came on to my reading list after scanning through book reviews in the New York Times. This, I hasten to add, is not something I do overly often, but on reflection think I should! I do receive a weekly email newsletter from the newspaper, however as with many emails, finding time to read them doesn’t always happen.
Next up then in my reflection on 2001/2011 personal reading habits is “The Clock of the Long Now” by Stewart Brand from 2001 and “Bird Cloud: A Memoir” by Annie Proulx. The former about a special clock which will last 10,000 years and the latter about the trials and tribulations of building your own home. I don’t remember much of the Brand book, other than it scratched an itch I had at the time on reading books about clocks, watches etc. I did notice the subject of this book come up on DarrenBarefoot.com earlier this year which was fun to see.
Bird Cloud seem to connect someone who I knew was an accomplished writer, the author Annie Proulx, with a more current past time of mine, bird watching. There was too little actual bird stuff in the Proulx book, although when it did come up it was written beautifully! I should mention now before I get too far into the year a little about my approach to selecting books to read. In simple terms I refuse to have a plan and go from one thing to another for any reason. Sometimes there is a theme to a series of books I am reading, but half the time I couldn’t tell you what that theme was! As a result, writing these posts is as much a journey of discovery for me as it is for my dear reader. More in the next post!
p.s. click on any of the book covers above to be taken to the book on LibraryThing.
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