Rebecca Henderson

Here it is, the not-so-clever introduction to my list of favorite books from the year. Last year was the first time for me to post such a list, and I really enjoy thinking through these types of things at year end, so here I am again.

On 2010’s list were two novels and three nonfiction books. This year I’m including two novels, three nonfiction books, and one book of poetry (hey! I read a whole book of poetry this year!). And just a note for anyone who cares about this sort of thing — this isn’t a list of books from 2011, but a list of favorites that I read this year. I’m not always so up on things that I actually read books the year they come out.

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World by N.D. Wilson — I wrote an Other People’s Thoughts post about this one in May and how affected I was both by the truths Wilson presents and by the masterful and artistic way that he presents them. I recently started rereading the book, again in an airport of all places. I guess I really need the poetic and the divine when I’m in transit.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry — I sort of am in love with Jayber Crow. The character and the book. It was my first Berry novel to read, followed later this year by Hannah Coulter. Berry has a lot to say about love, and I like what he says about it in both novels, but Jayber Crow did a better job of completely stealing my heart. (Goodness, am I making Berry sound like a romance novelist? He’s quite the opposite.)

A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 by Wendell Berry — My poetry year started off with this book of Berry’s poems and changed the way I approach poetry: namely, I actually do approach poetry now. Before, it always made me feel nervous and intimidated. I learned so much from reading through this book of Sabbath poems and am thinking about starting off 2012 with it as well. (See posts on this book here, here, and here)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot — Crazy that I’m including a book with so much info on cellular biology and medical ethics, but somehow it works. The story was riveting, partly because it’s true and partly because Skloot does a terrific job of putting all the pieces together. I learned a lot about writing creative nonfiction from reading this one.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte — I wrote a lengthy post about why this is an all-time favorite. Read it to find out.

Country Driving by Peter Hessler — Another wonderful piece of creative nonfiction. I love reading Hessler’s writing on China in the last 10 or so years (Oracle Bones is another favorite), and I also enjoy seeing how he frames a story and brings it all together. Country Driving was of particular interest to me this year, as I’m working on my own book about a road trip, though mine will be through West Texas instead of China.

Honorable Mention: A Praying Life by Paul Miller — I’ll be honest, the writing in this one wasn’t spectacular — it’s not bad, though, it just doesn’t stand out. But what Miller has to say in the book has impacted my life and thinking more than just about anything I read this year. He completely pinned me down on his descriptions of cynicism and how it affects our faith. I’m still struggling with how to live in what he calls the desert that lies between hope and reality and how my being in that desert for a few years now is affecting my prayers. This book is another one that I’ve picked up to reread sections at the close of the year.

What have you enjoyed reading this year?

I wrote in January that I wanted to read Jane Eyre at some point this year. It’s October, and I’m finally getting around to it. For years I’ve said that it’s my favorite book, but I had lately started to worry that if I reread it now I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I did when I was younger. Look for a post in the next couple of weeks about whether or not I’m finding that the book lives up to my memories.

Today’s “Other People’s Thoughts” is taken from a scene early in the novel, in the lead-up to Jane meeting Mr. Rochester for the first time — such lovely, picturesque description of the countryside:

“I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.”

I remember now why I loved and identified so much with Jane all those years ago — she can sit on the roadside and ponder a field and linger from 3:00 “till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear behind them.” My favorite time of day, my favorite way to while away a few hours.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few weeks, but it’s hard to get motivated for a summer reading post when it still doesn’t seem like summer here in the Tri-Cities. Last weekend was nice and sunny, but the weather could only be classified as warm, not hot. I guess I need to continue refining my definition of the seasons.

Nevertheless, here it is, my summer reading list. I liked the categories I used in my “Reading List for 2011, the first half,” so I’ll go with some of those again and give a bit of follow-up to what I’ve read so far this year. As always, you can check out my shelves on Goodreads for more titles.

Poetry — My poem-a-day goal for 2011 is going well. I finished (and loved) A Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry. I read a short book of poems by Gary Soto, and now I’m working on Emily Dickinson for a while.

Writing — I started Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg but lost motivation to finish it. I hope to pick it up and read a few essays here and there to wrap it up over the next couple of months. I also still need to read Creative Nonfiction magazine’s Keep it Real — I’m working on a couple of articles and a new book idea that would benefit from these essays on writing nonfiction.

Nonfiction — Not much change from my previous list, I’m sad to say, so I’m going to make a more reachable goal: I want to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as soon as I can get it off the waiting list at the library.

Fiction — I did read (and loved) the novel Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, so now I just need to revisit Jane Eyre. I’ve been looking forward to that for months, but somehow other books keep sneaking their way in ahead of it. What better time than summer to indulge in an old favorite?

What are your reading plans for the summer?

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear.”

- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

A fine line to walk, a fine boundary to discover, the right amount of story to tell and the right amount to leave out. Something to think about as a writer and editor, but I imagine it’s also an apt word for just about everyone to apply to conversations with anyone other than a counselor!

This past week, on a quick trip to Texas for my cousin’s wedding, I packed up all my books from my parents’ house to ship back to Washington. It’s been over a decade since I lived in the same place as my books. I’ve become pretty militant about decluttering in recent years, so I own fewer books than I did at one point in my life, but there were still several boxes to pack on this trip.

I decided one box needs to go to North Carolina to my niece. In it are books that I’ve kept since childhood, but realize now that Patience will get more use out of them than me. An almost complete set of Anne of Green Gables (what happened to #6 Anne of Ingleside?). A few Nancy Drew books, some passed down to me by my own aunts. Charlotte’s Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Secret Garden. Several Ramona books by Beverly Cleary.

Several didn’t go in Patience’s box, but will go with me to Washington. I bought her a set of the Little House books a few years back, and she’s reading them aloud with her mother now, so I’ll take mine with me. And my Chronicles of Narnia — well, I’ll buy her a set of those because I just can’t part with mine, not after I read them so many times as a child and again in a literature class at Baylor.

And one Beverly Cleary book will find a place on the shelf in Kennewick. Ribsy, printed in 1982 and purchased at a book fair at David K. Sellars Elementary in Fort Worth. My teacher wrote in clear letters inside the front cover: Becky, Room 2. I very distinctly remember buying this book. It cost $2.25 and was the first book I picked out and bought on my own. I was very proud that day to be old enough to buy my own book, and even though it’s just paper, just a thing, it makes me happy that I still have it with me. Because even though it’s just paper, it’s something much more than just paper. It’s a tangible reminder of a day almost 30 years ago, when I started down a path that shaped the me of today.

After my post yesterday about Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl, a friend asked me on Facebook if there was a way I could organize a place to share books and recommendations. Thus, this post about Goodreads, the place that is already organized to do just such a thing.

I’ve been on Goodreads longer than I’ve been on Facebook. Only by a few days, but still, Goodreads is technically the first social media site I used. Kind of appropriate for someone who loves books as much as I do, huh?

Goodreads is a super cool site for several reasons, and I’m going against my typical stance on lists in blog posts by highlighting those reasons here:

Goodreads is great for keeping up with what your friends are reading. As your friends update their books, you can log on and interact with them, or you can choose to get email updates. If you have a lot of friends who read, it’s a great way to stay in touch about what you’re currently reading, what you are enjoying, what you wouldn’t recommend.

It’s also handy for nerds like me who like to keep track of what we’re reading or have already read. You can make list upon list on Goodreads, as well as let people know what page number you’re on in your current read. I’m not so obsessive as to update page numbers on a regular basis, but I have used that feature to keep track of my progress during my poem-a-day in 2011.

Goodreads is the best way I’ve found to give book recommendations on Facebook and Twitter. I went through a couple of Facebook apps for sharing book reviews, star ratings, and recommendations before realizing that Goodreads is just the best. It’s easy to link your Goodreads account to both Facebook and Twitter.

It’s also easy to link to a blog. See that link on the left? It takes you to my Goodreads shelf called “Favorites.” Any time you want, you can click to see what books I love. Any time. My friend Jen uses Goodreads on her blog to highlight the books that she’s found useful while training for triathlons.

It’s a great site for looking at reviews when deciding if you want to read a book. Once upon a time, I consulted Amazon’s reviews alone for this information, but now I check Goodreads before Amazon when deciding if a book is worth my read. Which leads me to say…

Goodreads helps out writers. Writers can choose to develop a Goodreads Author profile and have more opportunities to interact with potential readers. Obviously, good reviews given to authors on Goodreads lead to more people buying and reading their books. And writers who interact with readers through social media also have the potential to increase book sales.

Goodreads has one of the best newsletters for keeping up with the latest books to hit the shelves. I get a lot of email newsletters in my inbox, but I actually read the one from Goodreads before deleting it. And I’ve purchased books that I read about in that newsletter, which means, once again, that Goodreads is helping writers and publishers.

Are you convinced yet that you should start a Goodreads account? Be sure and friend me when you do.

A late landing, a mad rush to find my next gate, a connection delayed because the pilot was at a different airport. I ended up having a two hour layover in Dallas instead of Seattle on my way from Raleigh back to Washington. Frustrating to be stuck in an airport 35 miles from the house I grew up in, the house my parents still live in. Frustrating to be stuck in what may be the last airport in North America not to have free wi-fi, when I had banked on settling into a corner at Sea-Tac, sipping coffee, and getting a couple of hours of research done.

I called each of my parents at work to say hi from the short distance and to complain over the phone about how crummy my day was turning out to be. I wasn’t happy about having to run through the airport with my backpack and roll-aboard. I wasn’t happy about the TSA nazis. I wasn’t happy that I had woken up at 3:45am to start my journey, which my sister pointed out would really be 12:45am by the time I made it back to Kennewick. I whined.

And then I plopped down, and out of boredom and lack of wi-fi I turned to the book I had chosen to start reading on this trip. The book I hadn’t had time to read yet in the previous two weeks. Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World by N.D. Wilson. He writes many lovely analogies of our existence on earth and relationship with God. One is that we are each characters in a story — read the book to do the analogy full justice. God is sovereign and He is good. How do we deal with that in the day-to-day, not to speak of in the tragic moments?

“What will your character do when the petty things happen, when your car betrays you in the cold? When the pipes freeze? When God knowingly places ice on the sidewalk beneath your feet? When the sun sets beautifully while you needle your wife? Do you laugh at the jokes and love the lovely? Are you too important to be amused at your own finitude? Are you unaware that your bowels move daily? How lofty are you?”

Rebuked. When the pilot is still in Austin and wi-fi is a distant thought, I need to just get over myself. God has bigger things going on, and I’m cranky over an inconvenience. That’s not the character I want to be in this story.

April is National Poetry Month, and in a few days I will finish reading my first book of poetry during my year of reading a poem a day. For my first book, I chose A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 by Wendell Berry. I have thoroughly enjoyed the past few months of reading Berry’s poetry out loud each day, and I look forward to reading his novel Jayber Crow soon (as I promised myself to do in my reading list for the first half of 2011).

A few lines from Berry’s Sabbath poems of 1992 that I found fitting for this season of the year:

“The winter world of loss

And grief is gone. The night

Is past. Along the whole

Length of the river, birds

Are singing in the trees.

Again, hope dreams itself

Awake. The year’s first lambs

Cry in the morning dark.

And, after all, we have

A garden in our minds.”

In light of my post earlier this week about listening to people and helping them tell their stories, I wanted to share a  couple of quotes for today’s Other People’s Thoughts from the book The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur. The author, Daoud Hari, himself escaped the war in Sudan, then went back to serve as a translator during the UN investigation of the genocide. He helped interview those affected by the war, and one chapter in the book is called “Two and a Half Million Stories.”

Hari says, “It helps many people just to have someone listen and write their story down; if their suffering is noted somewhere, by someone, anyone, then they can more easily let loose of it because they know where it is.”

At the close of his book, Hari calls his readers into action: “…it has no meaning to take risks for news stories unless the people who read them will act.”

So I ask myself, how are the stories I read moving me to act? How are the stories I’m writing helping others to act on something?

I’m not saying that we should only read or write stories that spur us to take up a cause or something like that (although those are really important stories to read and write). But how do stories teach us and move us and become a part of us in deep ways?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions — please share your thoughts and answers in the comments below.

“These poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors. A reader will like them best, I think, who reads them in similar circumstances — at least in a quiet room. They would be most favorably heard if read aloud into a kind of quietness that is not afforded by any public place. I hope that some readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort.”

Wendell Berry, in the preface to his collection of Sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir

I’m three weeks in to my attempt at reading a poem a day in 2011, and I’ve taken Berry’s advice in reading each of his poems aloud, slowly, though I think I need both patience and effort. So far it’s been an experience both enjoyable and beneficial, bringing a stillness and quietness to my soul as I let the words tumble around in my mouth and work their way into the deep places of my mind. For years I’ve read the Psalms aloud for the same reason.

Kennewick has been chilly with gusty winds since I arrived, so I haven’t ventured out to read poetry out of doors — I want the pages to stay in my book. Maybe when spring arrives I’ll move my daily reading outside.