Books of a Decade

Timothy Snyder and his little book On Tyranny became my touchstone 

for life after November 2016. He has been sadly correct in his terse predictions.

At the end of this decade, I consolidated ten years of annual book list spreadsheets into one long list of 376 books.  The list divides almost in half between the 177 books by 46 authors—the authors of whom I read between two to eighteen of their books—and the other 199 books.

The others I was obsessed with in the decade just ending:

C.S. Lewis—I re-read 18 of his books and read two books about him. I have read all 39 of the books he wrote during his lifetime and several posthumous collections. I have read something by him pretty much every year since I first read him in 1977. 

Patrick O’Brian—Beginning in June of this year I read the first twelve books in the Master and Commander series. I am reading the 13^th now.  There are seven more to go in the series and a few other books he wrote about sailing.

Hannah Arendt—I first read her a few months after I returned from deployment to Iraq. Sara Rouhi told me I should read her. I have read eleven of her books, an average of a book a year beginning with The Origins of Totalitarianism. Reading Arendt also makes me trendy, because sales of Arendt’s books spiked in November of 2016.

Kazuo Ishiguro—I first read Ishiguro in 2014 and fell in love with his book The Remains of the Day. By last year I had read all the rest of his books and re-read Remains of the Day for a total of ten.

Mark Helprin—next on the list with seven. I have been reading Helprin since 1983 when I read a short story in the New Yorker that was an excerpt from his first novel A Winters Tale.  I read everything he writes as it is published. His latest novel Paris in the Present Tense is my favorite.

George Orwell—I read six of his books this decade, most recently Animal Farm after the last election.

There are four authors of whom I read five books each:

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Timothy Snyder who both write about the dangers of Totalitarianism one from inside Russia during the Soviet era, the other looking back at how the Soviets and Nazis took power and what that history can tell us about current authoritarians.

Alexander Dumas and Joseph Brodsky, I read and re-read for their clarity and beauty.

Milan Kundera and Vasily Grossman are next on my obsession list with four books each.  I had not read Kundera before this decade. Grossman wrote a pair of novels Stalingrad and Life and Fate that together are 1,900+ pages about the battle that turned the tide of World War II against the Nazis.  The second volume Life and Fate is by far the better of the two, but Stalingrad has some brilliant scenes.

I read three books each by ten authors: Aristotle, Herodotus, Machiavelli and Russell Kirk from the past. I read and re-read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hariri, a simply incredible history of our species and his less luminous Homo Deus.  I read three mysteries by Alison Joseph who I met at a lovely reception in London.  Agatha Christie is a character in some of her lovely stories. I read three books by Elmore Leonard after seeing the FX series “Justified” based on Leonard’s novels. 

The list of authors of whom I read two books include novels by Hermann Hesse, Vladimir Nabokov, Sergei Dovlatov, Philip Roth, Boris Pasternak, Victor Pelevin, Tim O’Brien, Tom Robbins, David E. Fischer, Nick Montemarano and Vladimir Sorokin.  I want to read more by all of these writers.  Sorokin is living proof that there is still some freedom in Russian, otherwise his book Day of the Oprichnik would have gotten him killed by Putin.  Robbins is just crazy. Pasternak brings beauty to the smallest scene. Dovlatov is wickedly funny and makes me wish I could read Russian fluently.  Homer, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Dante, Primo Levi, Charles Pierce and Bernard-Henri Levy are also on my two-book list.

Amos Oz is also on the two-book list.  One of the categories I track is whether an author is living or not.  I have been reading more living authors in the past decade than previously. But Oz is on both lists. I read his book How to Cure a Fanatic before he died and his memoir after his passing.

On the one-book list are many authors I hope to read more of, particularly Jill Lepore, Haruki Murakami, James Wood, Svetlana Alexievich, Kurt Vonnegut and many others. 

Also, I re-read The Forgotten Soldier which I first read when I was serving as a tank commander in West Germany in the 1970s.  This book follows a teenager who enlists at 17 and serves in the German Army on the Eastern Front for the entire war with Russia. 

At the end of the year I got interested in the Enneagram and read The Sacred Enneagram. I plan to read The Wisdom of the Enneagram in 2020.

By category, Fiction is one-third of the all the books I read at 120. Most of the other categories fall somewhere in the twenty to thirty books on the topic range: Faith, Memoir and Biography, Politics, Philosophy, Science, Self-Help, History, Poetry and Language. 

The authors I will not read again: Eric Metaxas and Rod Dreher.  Metaxas for me is the worst of sell-out-to-idolatry Trumpvangelicals. Metaxas wrote a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian leader martyred by the Nazis, and now he supports Trump.  He is hideous.  My problem with Dreher is here in my 2017book report.

The first book I will read in 2020 is my quadrennial re-read of The Prince by Machiavelli along with re-reading Black Earth by Timothy Snyder, the 13^th volume of the Master and Commander series, the book listed above on the Enneagram, a volume of poetry by Leonard Cohen and a book called Silence.

No Bucket List! One Thing Just Leads to Another

A real book I found in a Bronx Thrift Shop

In a thrift shop in The Bronx, I saw the book above.  Inside the book are hundreds of places and activities that could form a personal Bucket List.  Just for good measure there are a dozen blank pages if skydiving naked and swimming the Bering Strait in the winter aren’t enough (I made those up.)

I don’t have a Bucket List. I don’t like Bucket Lists.  To have a Bucket List, you have to plan, stick with the plan, and believe you need to do or see a specific thing before you die. 

The stick-with-the-plan part is tough for me.  And all of my travel has deeply convinced me that nothing leads to further travel like the overwhelming impression many trips have made on me. 

It turns out, I am too optimistic to think I need to see and do this list of things, and I am unable to stick to a long-term plan so I could not have a list of Must-Do-Before-I-Die activities even if I wanted to.

I am a confirmed enthusiast as a personality type: Enneagram Type 7, Myers Briggs ENTP, and Strength Finders Woo. So, the thing I want to do right now is something that flowed from the last thing I did. And then there is a strong need to do what I think is being taken away from me. When I perceive my freedom or freedom of choice is inhibited, that motivates me to do things—sometimes awesome things, sometimes not so awesome. 

My re-enlistment in the Army a dozen years ago was an idea I held loosely for months until I broke my neck and nine other bones in a near-fatal bike racing crash. In a neck and chest brace, I saw enlistment being taken from me. I got angry and wanted to enlist. I was angry in a way that has happened in races when I crash and jump back on the bike, determined to finish, ignoring as well as I can the injuries. 

On my recent trip to Israel, I had planned to ride the length of the country. It’s a small country so the ride would be the equivalent of riding from Philadelphia to Boston.  But my recently replaced knee swelled up the night before the trip.  So instead of riding the length of the country, I drove the length of the country and then spent a week riding in and out of Jerusalem. 

My next trip overseas begins in Jerusalem with my friend Cliff and ends with visiting the Dachau and Flossenburg concentration camps.  In between I will be in Athens and Macedonia and Rwanda. I was going to go to Russia or Azerbaijan, but I wanted to go to Rwanda and just read a book about the Rwandan Genocide. I can get a relatively cheap flight and spend a week there.

I know people who travel by a plan and I realize the benefits of what they do. I admire them. It’s just that I know myself well enough that I can’t be them. 

I was delighted planning my 2017 trip across Eastern Europe visiting the worst Holocaust sites and many memorials.  I had planned to see and pass through 20 countries.  I did. But seven of the countries were different than the countries I planned to see. 

At one point I was on a morning train from Prague to Warsaw. My plan was to get to the Baltic States and St. Petersburg, then back through Lviv, Ukraine, to Auschwitz and back to Germany. But the ride from Belgrade to Prague had taken days longer than I planned. I realized that if I went north, I would not be able to spend a week at the Monastery where my friend Cliff is Franciscan Monk. 

As I thought, the sign board above my head said Katowice in five minutes.  Katowice is 30 miles from Auschwitz.  I could leave the train, ride south and be there by early afternoon. I pulled my bike from the hanging rack, grabbed my bags and left the train, throwing the bags so I could get the bike through the narrow door easily during the brief stop.

I rode from Auschwitz to Lviv and back to Krakow with a new plan and saw different countries. 

And from beginning to end, I was and am delighted with the trip. 

Beyond this year, I want to go back to Hong Kong and to southern reaches of South America, but maybe I will end up in Iceland or Mumbai or North Platte, Nebraska. (Actually, I’ve been to North Platte, probably not returning.)

Meditation and a Seven-Minute Mile

When I re-enlisted in the Army a dozen years ago, I had a goal of scoring 300, the maximum score, on the Army fitness test.  The test consists of pushups, situps and a two-mile run.  To score the maximum at 55 years old I needed to run two consecutive seven-minute miles.  I could run 7:30 but I wanted to run seven flat or even in the high sixes. 

I was a bicyclist and had not run for years, so I had lots of problems with my form.  The way I fixed my form, as well as I could, and got to my target speed was by running on a treadmill facing a full-length mirror. 

Unlike spot correction by a coach, watching my arms, legs, shoulders and torso for most of the run showed me deficiencies and allowed me to practice running as I should. 

Three years ago after I left the Army I started meditating. I am not sure what silly objections I had to meditating for the first six decades of my life, but now it is a daily habit. When I meditate, I am very aware there is no moment but now. Whatever my plans or memories, the only moment I can live in is this one.  This very moment. 

During meditation, when I leave this moment in my mind, my breath brings me back. And I am in the present, alive to now.  Meditation, in that way, is like that running mirror for my spiritual life.  I start running and see my torso tilt to the left or my right knee moving laterally or my elbows swinging out. 

As I run, I straighten my back, I pull in the stray elbow, I focus on making my stride straight as my speed increases. 

And I breath.

Meditation pulls my mind into alignment with my spirit. The animal/spirit amphibian that is my daily reality comes closest to unity when I focus on my breath and am aware that there is no other moment than this one. 

The mirror for running and meditation as a mirror for my spirit came late in my life, but not too late.

The Difference of a Decade: Soldier in Iraq to Street Protester

At the beginning of 2010 I was a soldier on active duty with the United States Army deployed to Iraq.  As this decade ends I am a Democratic activist who has participated in more than 100 protests since November of 2016. 

In 2010, I was a member of a Church. In 2018, after Jews were massacred in a Pittsburgh, I joined a synagogue.

In 2010 I was 56 years old—old enough to cause problems with an adoption that ultimately did not work out. But we did adopt two more kids in the years after I returned from Iraq. 

At the beginning of 2010, I had traveled to almost 30 countries on five continents, but had never traveled outside America unless on business or Army deployment. In 2011, we went to Haiti to meet a boy we hoped to adopt. It did not work out but we are still supporting him in Haiti.  After that trip to Haiti, I traveled to more than 30 countries just to travel, not on business, civilian or military.

At the beginning of the decade I could read French and Ancient Greek and knew a few phrases in German.  In 2015, I started learning Russian. I took four semesters and reached my limit of fluency--I forget the vocabulary very quickly, but I remember the grammar.  Then in 2017, I started learning Hebrew. That was even more difficult. Adding two alphabets is a big change. 

In June 2015 I retired at age 62. I had worked weekends and summers since I was 12 and had not taken more than two weeks off since 1965 and ever since I had a laptop and a cell phone, often worked during my vacations. Since retiring I have not worked at all. 

The year after I retired in November 2016, I made the abrupt transition from former soldier to political activist.  I had never protested in my life. I enlisted during the Vietnam War and re-enlisted during the Iraq War.  But the I could see the end of democracy in the failed casino owner in the White House. I have been in the street protesting most weeks since 2016, more than 150 times.

At the beginning of this decade, I had never swam the length of a pool. In 2013, I started learning to swim. In 2014 I swam 2.4 miles in the Ohio River at the beginning of an Ironman Triathlon I finished in 17 hours and 36 minutes.

After I retired, I tried meditation and yoga. I now do yoga weekly and meditate daily. 

In 2010 I had never been to Israel or a Holocaust site. My third trip to Israel will be in the February of next year. I have visited Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald and many Holocaust museums and memorials in Israel and across Europe. 

Life remains a crazy adventure. 

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Fifty Books for 2019: 50/50 Learning and Entertainment

The first of 20 books in the Master and Commander series

Every year begins with a list of books and a stack of books I want to read and every year ends carrying much of that list and stack into next year, because I discovered something new and delightful and went off in another direction.  The last book in this list predicts I would do that.

The best example of seeing something new and changing my reading happened this year with the "Master and Commander" series by Patrick O'Brien. I watched the movie based on the books more than a decade ago. I liked the movie. This year I watched the movie again, mentioned it to a friend who said he really liked the books. So I bought Book 1 in June.

Russell Crowe stars as Captain Jack Aubrey in the movie

Master and Commander

A few days ago, I finished book 12 in the series and will keep reading about the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Steven Mathurin next year. There are 20 books in the series, so I have lots more sailing ahead. I have learned so much about sailing ships during the Napoleonic Wars and about the British Navy.  The books are not only letter perfect about the details of sailing, but show how friendship develops between men and how that friendship grows over time. The movie couldn't possibly do more than give the sense of the books, but it is a very good movie and very true to the characters of Aubrey and Mathurin.

Jewish American Novels
The next group of books is part of a list I asked for from Danny Anderson, a literature professor who specializes in Jewish-American fiction in the 20th Century. He gave me a list of ten books. I have read four this year, after reading three last year:

Herzog by Saul Bellow
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick
All Other Nights by Dara Horn
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

I really loved "All Other Nights" and "The Plot Against America." "Foreign Bodies" was good.  "Herzog" was not for me.

Books About or Inspiring Video
Another small group is connected to video. I read "Catch-22" after watching the new series on Hulu.  I read "All the Pieces Matter" about the making of "The Wire." After watching the video series and not liking it, I read "The Man in the High Castle." I really liked the book, but after reading it, I have a hard time thinking the book and the video are related.  The book is so clear. The video is murky.

In the Plus-Size category were two books:
"Stalingrad" by Vasily Grossman at 1063 pages
Stalingrad is the first volume of a 2-Volume 1,943-page novel about the battle for Stalingrad.  It is "War and Peace" set in the most important battle of World War II--it was the first major defeat of the German Army and the turning point of the war. While "Stalingrad" has great moments, particularly the German air attack that started the battle and the battle for the Railway Station that marked the limit of the German advance, the second volume "Life and Fate" is a much more compelling story. Even though it is 880 pages it has a rapid pace.
"A Tale of Love and Darkness" a memoir by Amos Oz

I have only read one other short book by Oz, but I wanted to read his life which wove through so much of 20th Century Israeli history.  It's a good memoir.  It would also be a good memoir at 250 pages, but worth reading.  

Philosophy and Politics form a group of three books. I reread "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt and "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder. I also read "How Fascism Works" by Jason Stanley.  I heard both Stanley and Snyder speak last year and went to a conference on anti-Semitism at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College this year.  All three books point with dread to authoritarian governments.

Four more novels that don't fit in the categories above:

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie--the first book I read by him. It's very sadly funny and a good homage to the original. I read the unabridged Don Quixote in 2005 and was delighted. 

"Slowness" is the third novel I read by Milan Kundera and my least favorite. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Identity" were brilliant. "Slowness" lived up to its name.

I re-read my two favorite novels by Mark Helprin "Paris in the Present Tense" and "Winters Tale." I have read everything Helprin has written. Re-reading Paris before I returned to the City of Light was pure delight. I love the story. Re-reading "Winters Tale" was more vivid because I have read more Magical Realism.  When I first read "Winters Tale" 30years ago, I did not even know it was in this category but loved it for its crazy imagery and blurred time.  Now it is even more vivid. 

I read five books loosely under language including a couple of Hebrew textbooks, an abridged "D'Artagnan" in French, a Russian verb prefix book, and a memoir about French immersion by a 50-year-old student. I also read a dual-language book in Greek and English of some of the best passages of Thucydides on War.  

Two memoirs of war:

"Pumpkinflowers" by Matti Friedman, an Israeli soldier about the war in Lebanon.

"The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer a French teenager from Alsace who fought in the German Army for the entire war on the Easter Front. For anyone who doubts how terrible war can be, this memoir says war is Hell more clearly than any other I have read.

I re-read "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Hariri just because it is so good.  

Finally, I read a book called "The Sacred Enneagram" that explains the concept of the Enneagram. I have taken Meyers Briggs and Strengths Finders as part of two of my jobs, but the Enneagram I read on the recommendation of a friend. 

The Enneagram looks at personality in a more integrated way than the other methods I used.  Whether it works for everyone, I could see myself in a painfully clear way as an Enneagram Type 7--an enthusiast. So I delight in making plans, or lists of books, then see something new and changing the plans or lists.  I am going to read another book about it next year. 

My Life in Travel--the Trend is More!

It's the end of the second decade in this century. But that not-so-profound insight did not occur to me until about a week ago.  I was getting ready to write about the books I read this year, and realized I could also write about the books I read this decade, this century.  I have been keeping a spreadsheet of books I read since 2001.  

I started a spreadsheet about places I traveled to. First it was just the country and continent, then I added columns about where I rode, drove, flew, and took trains.  Then I added more columns about when I was there, which decade, on business or just traveling.  

The result is an exponential curve.  When I enlisted in January of 1972, the flight to basic training was my first plane ride.  Before that flight to San Antonio I had traveled no further west than Cleveland and no further south than Erie, Pa.  One trip to Cleveland was in a train, the other trips were in cars.  

By the end of the 1970s, I had lived in Texas, Colorado, Kentucky, Utah and Wiesbaden, West Germany.  I also had made brief trips to France and Switzerland. The trip to France was in a Huey Helicopter with my legs hanging off the side for more than 100 miles.  

By my 40th birthday, I had been to only five countries, including America, but I had been to more than half of the US states as well as several Canadian provinces.  

Travel really began for me when I took a job at Millennium Inorganic Chemicals in April of 1998. By the time the new Century/Millennium began in 2000 I had been to ten more countries on four continents.  In 2000 I went to four more countries including Brazil and Argentina, so I had been to five of the six inhabited continents and more than 20 countries.  

More importantly, when I traveled, I took my bike. I had not only flown on five continents, I had ridden on five continents.  

In the 2000s I visited a few more countries in Europe on business and went back to France, Germany, Belgium and the UK several times.  The decade that began with business class flights to Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Sao Paulo ended with flying into Camp Adder, Iraq, to Baghdad and Al Kut in a Blackhawk helicopter.  

After Iraq, overseas travel for business or the Army ended for me.  I was supposed to go to Afghanistan and Latvia with the Army, but both trips were cancelled.  My wife and I went to Haiti in 2011 to look into adopting a teenage boy. It did not work out for a variety of reasons. But after visiting and living in 30 countries, the trip to Haiti was the first one that was not business or military.  

I made a few more business trips in the US, but did not leave the country again until 2017.  Just as the decade of the 1990s began with a one trip to Canada and ended with tripling the number of countries I traveled to in just a couple of years, the current decade began with me leaving Iraq and staying in North America for seven years ended with several trips in which I visited more than thirty countries including twenty I visited for the first time.  

The first of these trips was in 2017.  For several years I had planned to ride from Odessa, Ukraine, to Helsinki by way of St. Petersburg, Russia.  The 1,300-mile trip would more or less follow the route my grandfather walked 100 years ago to escape the Tsar's Army and certain death.  

But in 2016, America elected a loud, proud racist as President who gave the head of Breitbart News an office in the White House and had high-level staffers with ties to white supremacists groups.  Instead of riding across Russia, I decided to ride to Holocaust sites and memorials to learn more about what happens when anti-Semitism is at its worst.  

I rode from Belgrade, Serbia, to Lviv, Ukraine, stopping at Auschwitz and Birkenau along the nearly 1,000-mile route.  Because I looped through the Balkan states, the site of so much suffering both during World War II and in the 1990s, I rode in a lot of countries.  

Then in 2018 I went to a history conference in the UK.  This year I was in at a conference in Bahrain and Cairo--by visiting Egypt I finally visited Africa--then was in ten more countries in October and November of this year.  

The next Year/Decade will begin with a trip to Israel, Europe and Africa. 

Of the 50 countries I have visited or lived in I have:

Ridden a bicycle in 35 on five continents--I still need to ride in Africa.

Flown to or within 32 countries on all six continents in planes and helicopters.

Driven in 24 countries on three continents--North America, Europe and Asia.

Ridden in trains in 16 countries on the same three continents I have driven in. 

So far, no trains or automobiles in the southern hemisphere. If I go to Rwanda on the next trip and both drive and ride a bike it will be the first time for both in Africa and in the southern hemisphere.