Books I'm reading: 2024

Looking back on 2024 from the perspective of the reading I got done, it's a bit depressing to see that I finished only nine titles – ten if you count the book I'm finishing now, in January 2025, that I started in December (see below). It's tempting to congratulate oneself for reading anything at all these days, knowing that many Americans read their last book in high school or college. Rather than taking comfort in that sad statistic, however, I take some instead from the fact that nearly all the reading I did was substantial. With the exception of a collection of popular essays on engineering-related subjects by Henry Petroski that I took along on my March–April trip to Japan, I read about art history in 2024, and mostly academic writing rather than writing aimed at a broader audience. A lot of it, while worth it, was challenging and slow going. I have several more volumes along the same lines waiting on my bookshelves for 2025. 

That last book was Sea and Sardinia, by D. H. Lawrence (I read the older Penguin paperback edition shown). I had thrown it into my bag on the morning of my departure for Los Angeles for a short trip in early December. I chose it simply because it was small and light. In the end, I read most of it at home, after my return, although, with the two-hour delay to our departure because of fog in LA, I was glad to have had something to make a start on. I have no idea where it came from. I don't remember buying it. It may have been something my father left behind. It's an odd little volume. A travelog, it recounts a short trip from Palermo to Sardinia and back over the course of a few days. The trip is by ferry to Cagliari and from there north up the spine of Sardinia by train and motor coach (brand new in 1921) eventually to the port at Olbia. From Olbia they travel by ferry to the Italian mainland (landing north of Rome). Following a train trip south to Naples, they cross by ferry again from back to Sicily. 

There is much description of the landscape; the dreary, impoverished towns they stay in with filthy inns, indifferent innkeepers, and scarce, unpalatable food; of the peasants, with a great deal of attention paid to the subtle differences in their costumes from region to region; and of the various other characters Lawrence and his companion (whom he refers to as the Queen Bee, or the q-b, for short) encounter along the way. Lawrence and the q-b don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much and one wonders what prompted the trip in the middle of winter. Vague wanderlust is the excuse given. That said, Sea and Sardinia is interesting for the glimpse it gives of Sardinia 100 years ago, not long after the end of the First World War. 

Books I'm Reading: The House on the Strand; Light Years

I haven't been reading lately as much as I customarily do. Too many distractions, I suppose. I've been much more deeply engaged in listening to music recently. It could be that – although the two aren't necessarily incompatible. 

My mother died in January. In the last ten days or so of her life I spent a lot of time in the hospital at her bedside. I brought a couple of books with me, picking up whatever was to hand. I'm not sure why, but I chose a copy of Daphne Du Maurier's classic The House on the Strand (a 1974 University of Pennsylvania Press paperback edition) that was on one of my bookshelves (as it happens, a copy my father left behind at the time of his death). I first read The House on the Strand in high school when I was going through a phase of reading a great deal of fiction by English writers, many of whom were suggested by my grandmother and my mother (school teachers both, my grandmother a teacher of English literature in high school; I read a great deal of Thomas Hardy at the time), so it is was perhaps an appropriate choice. 

I didn't remember much about the book, but it's held up pretty well, I'd say. Although a certain suspension of disbelief is required to accept the idea of a potion that transports people back in time, the transitions are written rather deftly and I enjoyed reading it again. The only Thomas Hardy novel I've re-approached as an adult is Return of the Native, which seemed rather naïve to me on re-reading. I recently re-read Moby Dick, which I enjoyed as much the second time around as the first. 

The other book I read during my mother's final days was Light Years (Icon Books, 2015), by Brian Clegg. I have a habit of subjecting myself from time to time to books about physics in the hope of better understanding some of the great peculiarities of the quantum world, but there always comes a point at which the mind boggles and I'm left feeling worn out and confused and like I've made no progress. Still, I like to keep trying. This was among the easier such books I've read, though, because it was essentially a survey of the history of human thinking about light and it was only at the very end of the book that the ideas became challenging. It was engagingly written and worth the time, I thought. It was at the very least a useful distraction. So far, these are the only books I've read in 2023. I will try to do better in the coming months....