Top 5

For Christmas this last year Joe got me Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Journal. From January 1, I have diligently recorded every book that I have read so far. My goal for this year is to read at least 50 books, and I reached the halfway point last night. I thought I would resurrect Alyson and my book blog with my 5 favorites of the year thus far.

1. The first book I read this year was Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year, a memoir of her younger years and her passion for the Brooklyn Dodgers. This was a fun and easy read. I loved the description of her childhood in the fifties, and the changes she saw in Brooklyn as she got older. She also used baseball to build a relationship with her father, as she sat by the radio recording every play of the Dodger's game of the day for her dad while he was at work. Later she found out that the newspaper always reprinted the stats from the game, so her scrupulous note-taking was unnecessary, but taught her the love of the game.

2. Next on my list is Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage. This book was a little bit slower to plow through, but well worth it. Ambrose gives a great account of Meriweather Lewis' contributions to the Corps of Discovery's journey through the Louisiana purchase and beyond. After every chapter I would close my eyes and try to envision exactly what Lewis and Clark saw. Endless landscapes mostly untouched, tribes of Native Americans encountering white people for the first time, and animals and trees previously undiscovered.

3. Sorry everyone, but more history is in store. A friend recommended David Oshinsky's Polio: An American Story to me and I loved it. This book gives a detailed description of the rise of the Polio threat in the U.S. and the push to discover a vaccine. I never understood the politics involved in science and medical research, but I have a better idea now. This book was fascinating and even somewhat suspenseful.

4. I did read some fiction this year, and my absolute favorite was Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. This is a story of a woman during the late 19th century who has a promising career as an artist on the East coast who marries a mining engineer that moves her out West. The endure hardships as he loses jobs and is forced to relocate to various remote locations (even to the Boise valley, I of course loved that). The story is told by her grandson, an aging historian who envisions her life through the letters she wrote to her best friend she left behind. The story is bittersweet, sometimes it actually hurt to read it, and yet it was so good. I definitely am planning on reading more by Stegner, I loved his prose.

5. Finally, last night I finished Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; a non-fiction memoir of her families efforts to eat locally for one year. At the beginning her story she and her family move from Arizona to a farm in Virginia. There they decide to eat produce and meat that they either raise themselves or that can be purchased from other local farmers. Kinglsolver also delves into many interesting aspects of the project. I really became interested in the Ark of Taste project she talks about with heirloom species of seeds and animals. I also just liked following her family through the various seasons when different plants begin to ripen as others die. She definitely gained a greater appreciation of these yearly time changes and the greater impact they had on her life. Now I want to make my own cheese, eat more heirloom vegetables, and have Joe bake us some bread (her husband had the task of the daily bread baking, which sounds fair enough to me). Even if I cannot have my own garden yet, or devote my life to entirely local and seasonal food, I felt like there were some things I could take away from this book now.