What You Should Have Read by Age 80

 I have been giving this idea some thought and then today’s NYT Book Review features exactly such an article.  I reject more books than I read each week.  I bring three or four books  home from the library and do well if I read two of them.  I download books for my Kindle app and delete many of them.  I have plenty of time to read but I don’t care to read anything that is not interesting and worth reading.  In the last few months, I have had much pleasure in rereading a series of books—the Maisie Dobbs mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear.  And I enjoyed them very much even if the plots were familiar.  I was happy for Maisie all over again when she found love for the third time and adopted a precious and needy little girl.  And I lived through the two world wars with her in dangerous and difficult times in England.

So what have I never read?  Sometime “By the Book” in the NYT  will ask that question of the interviewee.  What classic have you never read?  Well, I have never read To Kill a Mockingbird.  I have tried a few times and I think I will try again.  I have never read the great Russian novels by Dostoevsky and I may not get to those with their great length.  Although, I will not say never.  I have tried to read The Power and the Glory by Greene more than once and gave up.  To his credit, Jim picked it up recently and did read the whole thing and Lawless Roads also by Greene recounting his own time in Mexico.  Middlemarch?  I tried and have no interest in trying again.  Anything by Faulkner?  I have Sartoris on my Kindle app now and will give it a try. Love in the Time of Cholera?  I tried and gave up although I may try again. I have read War and Peace, memorably while nursing a baby 42 years ago during the middle of the night.  Short chapters made it easy to pick up and read a bit at a time.  I read Moby Dick because I wrote a paper on it for Freshman English many, many years ago.  I have read The Great Gatsby more than once but not Fitzgerald’s other novels.  

I read mysteries for escape but draw the line at serial killers, true crime books, and those that feature “family secrets” or abuse.  But then mysteries that are too “cozy” are not worth reading either, and certainly not those that feature a dog or a cat as the detecting partner.  

What have I read with interest in the last few weeks?  Abigail and John: the Portrait of a Marriage, a wonderful biography that lead me to looking for other biographies of that era—Benjamin Rush, Samuel Adams, Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton (a young adult book was just right for me!).   How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising East Asia by Hamid, such a strange, intriguing title and a strange, intriguing book but I enjoyed it and even took a screen shot of one memorable page.

Right now I am almost finished with a book Surprised by Hope by NT Wright that has been worth reading.  But I read only one dense chapter at a time and try to take notes on it.  And I have requested a brand new book from our library and picked it up today—The Secrets of the Abbey, a Brittany Mystery by Bannalec that I am sure  to enjoy.