currently reading: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Best 2021: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

 The best book of 2021 was easily Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Exceptional world building and character development. I loved the atmosphere Clarke creates with small details. And some parts and lines were quite funny! Definitely going to reread this one.

2. Ben Hogan's Five Lessons by Ben Hogan

 I'm new to golf so I have both the thrill of learning and the frustration of being a beginner. I watched a lot of golfing channels to get ready for my first season in a local league, and played with my friends as much as I could to practice. And I exhausted every golfer around me asking for recommendations and any tribal wisdom they could impart. One book that kept coming up was this tiny book of advice from golfing legend Ben Hogan. 

It's hard to imagine that you could learn something as complicated as the golf swing from a book, but it did help. Hogan reviews his principles of a solid swing: grip, stance and posture, the first part of the swing, and the second part of the swing. I got the most out of the grip chapter and the placement of the feet. I expect I'll read this little book more than once, coming back to it as I - hopefully - improve my game.

I liked Hogan's style - it had that encouraging style that good teachers use when they are trying to impart their wisdom in a conversational, accessible way. The wisdom that comes from experience, from thousands of golf swings, could be too ephemeral to put into a book, even with the killer illustrations by Anthony Rivielli, but Hogan believes in us. He believes it is a thing that can be learned and constantly improved upon.

Of all the golfers who played every week, I came in DFL. But that didn't matter at all. I gained some XP, approached every week with a student-mind, and got a little better even if my score didn't show it. I played with a great group of guys, who were patient and super-encouraging. Already looking forward to next year.

1. The Surgeon's Mate by Patrick O'Brian

 Happy New Year!

One of my resolutions this year is to be better about logging the books I read. I read a lot of books in 2021 - and no, not just high seas adventures and Napoleonic naval warfare - but I didn't keep track of how many or what I thought of them. And the plan here is for shorter, clippier reviews. I just can't match the reading pace and review quality of say, the Dean of the 50 bookers, Olman Feelyus.

Where have I been? Ah, off doing Dad stuff, and sailing, and trying golf, building some stuff out of wood, and making a ton of new great friends.

In September I started Spanish on Duolingo, Drops, and Fluent Forever. Fluent Forever was good, but it just didn't work for me. You should check it out if you are trying to learn a new language. It starts from the nuts and bolts of the alphabet and the sounds, and does a good job teaching you vocabulary. Drops is similar, but does words and phrases by topics (the name Drops is from the way vocab words drop in from the top of the screen). I like this one for focused learning and review, like colors, days of the week, or seasonal words. But what works best for me is Duolingo. It reminds me of language class in HS and college: vocab, in context, and useful phrases and actual sentences that you can imagine yourself employing in a conversation. As of this writing I know 938 words, according to my Profile, and I feel quite...able to get along with simple sentences. Fortunately I live and work surrounded by so many Spanish speakers, and so I'm able to practice speaking and listening. All of these apps use the spaced repetition method, or process to get your brain to learn and remember. I am committed more than ever to becoming a Spanish speaker, so I feel like with all of the apps, my friends, and my work-mates, I'll finally have some success.

Most of 2021 was spent in rereading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series because I stalled midway through Book 7, The Surgeon's Mate, and I wanted to be able to start that one over. And so I reread the first six to get reacquainted with the sailors, the ships, and the plots. There's not a lot of contextualizing the life and times of the two main characters, so we are left to fill in some blanks on our own. And O'Brian's writing style sometimes jumps narrative time or even the highlighted character. In one paragraph we'll be at Jack Aubrey's Ashgrove Cottage and the next we'll be with Stephen Maturin dashing about Spain or Ireland. Gotta pay attention!

I also read a couple of spy novels, a couple of sailing non-fiction books, a bunch of graphic novels, and two books about fishing.

But on to this year!

The Surgeon's Mate follows the two central characters of O'Brian's books, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin, doctor, philosopher and spy. We start in Nova Scotia, where we left Maturin, Aubrey, and Diana Villiers after their escape from Boston (and engagement with the USS Chesapeake). 

This mission brings them to the Baltic where they have to do some tricky shallow water sailing in fickle winds. Their goal is to get Maturin to the island of Grimsholm, which is being held for Napoleon by Catalan soldiers. His goal is to persuade them to leave the island behind to weaken the Emperor and help the English. Once that is achieved they are to escort the troops back to England, but getting out of the Baltic is a little bit more difficult thanks to headwinds and stormy conditions. Their ship runs aground and they are captured by the French. After a brief imprisonment in Brest they are taken to Paris where things get a little more dicey, as the French have figured out who Maturin is and what havoc he has been causing for them (his exploits in the first six books). Another extremely narrow escape and they are headed back to England on a covert little sailing boat called a cartel (skippered by our old pal Babbington!).

I can't get enough of these books and I'm looking forward to more in the next 12 months. I imagine that when I finish the series I'll start it all over again.

1. The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude by Howard Axelrod

The title, sub-title really, and the summary-blurb, and even some of the quotes on the cover left me with higher expectations, that I was going to be treated to some insightful reading of Man through Nature. An updated Thoreau. Modern Romanticism. I regularly reread Thoreau and read Wordsworth for fun. So I was quite excited to receive this as a Christmas present and started into it immediately.

Axelrod retreats to the woods in order to think out and sort out his place in the world. A big goal. A combination of setbacks, or major changes, have left him somewhat adrift: graduation and the feeling of not knowing what's next, a romantic disappointment, and worst of all, a devastating injury to one of his eyes, suffered in the last few minutes of a pickup basketball game during his senior year of college. The confusion of major transitions can be difficult to overcome, heart break can heal quickly with some courage and confidence, but physical injury, especially to Essential Components can really crush the spirit.

So, his trip to the woods was designed to heal, physically and emotionally.

The first third of the book is super tight. Lots of walks in the woods, accompanied by lots of notes about the transitions of seasons, metaphors for Axelrod's transitions from student to professional, from Boy-Man to Man.

But after the first third, we got sort of jumpy and disorganized - like the editing pen stopped and the focus that we had was gone. Winters merge, we jump to a scene in Italy - an important one, but seemingly thrown in to explain why we went to the woods in the first place - was it romantic disappointment or physical injury that forced us out of the social order? The physical injury seems an afterthought until after the romantic disappointment.  So we go to the woods, but eventually family pressures pull us back to the mainland of social interaction - where a seemingly innocent Thanksgiving dinner nearly turns disastrous.

Ultimately, I was disappointed.

1. N by E by Rockwell Kent

Great, great book telling the tale of Kent's trip to Greenland in a 33' sailboat.

I knew of RW from his Moby Dick woodcuts. And I learned a whole lot more about him in the intro: he designed the logo for Random House, Modern Library, and Viking Press.

And not only a visual artist, but a real wordsmith, too.

"Man is, after all, less entity than a consequence and his being is a derivation of a less subjective world, a synthesis of what he calls the elements. Man's very spirit is a sublimation of cosmic energy and worships it as God."

Take, for example, the compactness of the following sentence, as evidence of Kent's style:

"Shunning that coast as if it had the power to pursue us, we laid a course that put us at the bright hour of sunrise so far at sea that not the highest peaks of any land disturbed the far, hard line of the gulf's horizon."

5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Technically a reread since I read it once when I was designing my Monsters course.

Quite a book!

4. A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols

It seems weird to me that I read PN's first book, Sea Change, seven years ago. Weird because I have very specific images and memories about the book still in my head, and other books I read at the same time, and recorded here in this blog, I have almost no recollection of. It's been on my shelf for a while, spared from donation, unread, through a few moves, and a few hurricanes. What finally pushed me to pick it up was this short essay by Maggie Shipstead.

This book is about the sailors who competed in the first non-stop, around-alone sailing race in 1968. I became so enthralled with the exploits of the four major competitors that I impulsively went to Amazon to buy a number of Bernard Moitessier's books, and Knox-Johnston's account of the voyage. The excerpted logs and diaries weren't enough, especially for what I have read as complementary material about BM, who seems to have the same religious view of the sea that I have.

At points I found myself looking for some kind of graphic organizer, so I could make sense of the dates and positions of each sailor in the race. And more pictures! But at the same time I thought the interweaving of journal and narrative was done very well. And PN is a master at the end of section foreshadowing that you find in a lot of these narratives of adventurous epics.

Since this 1968 race there have been more single-handed around-the-world races and more fully-crewed around-the-world races, so the idea caught on. I mean, people still want to explore the boundaries of what is capable, and this kind of racing certainly qualifies as a Test.

3. REAMDE by Neal Stephenson

I love Neal Stephenson and I love long books  (This one also clocked in at over 1000 pages!).

REAMDE is a computer virus that encrypts all of the users files and holds them hostage until a ransom is paid. And not the kind of ransom that is put in a briefcase and tossed off a bridge, but a ransom paid in an online game. So imagine hundreds, thousands of computers infected with this virus, and all of the users forced to pay a small ransom of in-game gold to the virus writer in exchange for the password.

That's the premise of the book, and so over the next 1000 cinematic and descriptive pages we meet an assortment of characters including Russian gangsters, Russian "security agents," hackers, jihadists, and gamers, all of whom wind up on one of the longest chase scenes in modern fiction!

I can't wait for the movie!

2. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

I like long books.

The main character in this long book - almost 1000 pages - is the cathedral that is being built in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England. I read this book when it first came out and I was in HS and I have thought about it every once and a while since then. It's nothing like the first three books of the Dragonlance series, but somehow the characters in this book and those books have stuck in my head like people I actually met and know.

1. Crime & Punishment by F. Dostoevsky

Great book - though I had a little trouble with the Russian names - with a very satisfying ending.