2015 Books.

Something I have enjoyed blogging about in the past is books.
I like to keep track of the books that I read.
So maybe for a bit this blog could be about books.

It seems fitting with the year ending that I could share my list of books I read in 2015.
So here it is:

1. Yes Please - Amy Poehler
2. The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales - Oscar Wilde
3. Equivocation - Bill Cain
4. How Each Child Learns: Using Multiple Intelligence in Faith Formation - Bernadette T Stankard
5. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
6. A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. If You Feel Too Much - Jamie Tworkowski
9. An Abundance of Katherines - John Green
10. Clatter - Neil Hilborn
11. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
12. Neverhome - Laird Hunt
13. Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
14. The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls
15. Our Numbered Days - Neil Hilborn
16. Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
17. Big Fish - Daniel Wallace
18. To a God Unknown - John Steinbeck

I spent a good chunk of this year not reading at all. So I was a bit sad when the end of the year came and I had not read more than 18 books. But alas, what can you do.

I spent a particularly long time trying to get through Lord Jim. It seems I have a hard time reading Joseph Conrad books. I enjoy them, they just seem to take ages to finish. The same thing happened to me when I read Heart of Darkness. It took me at least two tries to get through. It really makes no sense to me. I would say that I thoroughly enjoyed both books. They weren't boring or slow to read, but I just seem to struggle. I think in the end it took me 2-3 months to finish Lord Jim. 

I am happy about the diversity in my reading this year. I am usually one to avoid non-fiction, but this year six of the eighteen were non-fiction. Add into that a play and a couple books of poetry and I'd call it a pretty well rounded year. 

I managed to knock back a couple classics. Wuthering Heights has been sitting, unread, on my bookshelf for a couple years now. It was great to finally move that one to the finished pile. I don't know what exactly I was expecting from it, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would and finished it rather quickly. 

John Steinbeck is one of my absolute favourite authors. I was very excited to read To a God Unknown. It turned out to be a lot weirder than I expected. Even though the story was not as enjoyable as I anticipated, I still enjoyed his writing. There is just something about Steinbeck.

Fun story about reading this book: sometimes when I am reading a book I get a distinct picture in my head of a character. Sometimes this picture is a person I have imagined out of the author's description and sometimes it is an actor or person I know who seems to fit the description. Sometimes it is not even that accurate. But once my brain has decided on an image, it usually sticks. For some reason my brain decided the main character from this book was the actor who played the janitor on the television show Scrubs. It was a weird one. I couldn't shake it. 

If you asked me what my favourite book of the year was I think I would have to say it was Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I have know about this story for years but never gotten around to reading the book. There is a bit of controversy surrounding the story. A lot of people think Chris McCandless was foolish and unprepared. Some people view him as a visionary and a minimalist who just had some bad luck. Some people thought he was suicidal and had a death wish. I enjoyed this book because I felt like Jon Krakauer seemed to really try to understand who he was as a person. He raised the point that many mountaineers and outdoorsman have gotten themselves in similarly dangerous situations. He told a story from his own past of a particularly dangerous solo outing he took to the Devil's Thumb in Northern BC where he was lucky to have returned alive. He seemed to take the position that the situation McCandless found himself in was no different, only he had the misfortune to die. It was the product of some oversights and bad decisions, yes, but many outdoorsmen have made mistakes and oversights and not had to die for them. He says, "The fact that I survived my Alaska adventure and McCandless did not survive his was largely a matter of chance; had I not returned from the Stikine Ice Cap in 1977, people would have been quick to say of me - as they are now of him - that I had a death wish. Eighteen years after the event, I now recognize that I suffered from hubris, perhaps, and an appalling innocence, certainly; but I wasn't suicidal." It was a very interesting read*. Some of my favourite bits:

"He needed to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, 'that mattered.' He possessed grand - some would say grandiose - spiritual ambitions. According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all." 

"It would be easy to stereotype Christopher McCandless as another boy who felt too much, a loopy young man who read too many books and lacked even a modicum of common sense. But the stereotype isn't a good fit. McCandless wasn't some feckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential despair. To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily. He demanded much of himself - more, in the end, than he could deliver."

*I finished that book and decided I was a fan of Jon Krakauer and that I need to read more of his books. I read Into Thin Air when I was quite young, but remember relatively little from it. Recently I have been getting into reading more about Mt Everest, specifically the 1996 climbing season. In doing so I have stumbled across quite the controversy surrounding the reporting of the events. I have read Anatoli Boukreev's book, The Climb, which points out some serious issues with the way Jon Krakauer wrote about Anatoli in his book and the way in which he interacted with him after the tragedy. It was a bit sad to read and it made me question my love of Krakauer. However, I am currently reading Into Thin Air and trying to understand both sides of the story before I decide what I think about Krakauer. More to come on that later.