15 January
2012
I love
books. And yes, I do mean books, not literature. I know the difference. I’ll
read just about anything, but sit me down with a book generally regarded as a
“classic” and I will most likely moan and groan the entire way through it. Back
in elementary school I won three reading competitions, but after that I slacked
off a bit. I’m sure there were various reasons, but the one I remember most
clearly was an incident that happened sometime in 6th grade. I had
just moved to a new school in a new state, and like I mentioned in the last
post, I have a hard time making friends.
During class one day, we were doing classwork and I finished before the
time allotted so I took out my book to read a little during the few remaining
minutes. From across the room, my teacher called me out and asked me something
along the lines of, “What are you doing? Think you’re too good to pay attention
and do the work like everyone else?” While I don’t remember exactly what he
said, I remember feeling ashamed and that all the other kids were laughing at
me. I never brought another book to school until college.
Cut to 2011,
Mongolia, and Peace Corps. Since I don’t really do much for work and I broke my
external hard drive last month, I have A LOT of downtime. I read over 30 books
last year, the majority of which were after June. Considering I’ll spend this
entire year in Mongolia, I should have more than enough time to read more than
that. Ever since the beginning of the year, I’d been debating what to start out
with – Russians? Fantasy? Classics? Novels? I just worked through a little more
of Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal
(because of course I read English books in Spanish in Mongolia) until I could
decide on something that called to me.
Break
started on the 14th and on the second day, Gerlee (my CP/hashaa
family) came over to pick up a test I had corrected for her. She sat down in
one of my chairs and told me how she had just watched something on TV about an
important black American called King. I told her that it was Martin Luther
King, his birthday was the next day, and that, yes, he was very important. I
showed her a book about American history in both English and Mongolian and she
asked me questions about slavery and race relations and I told her what little
I know.
After she
left, I got to thinking. If she wants to know more about American history and
culture, I should embrace that and use it as a platform to enable her to know
more. She’s really interested in race relations and slavery which is a topic I
only know superficially. The best way to learn a topic is to teach it so I
definitely wouldn’t consider the research a waste. I told her about the
miniseries Roots so once my external
hard drive comes back, we’ll probably watch that. Plus my motives aren’t
completely philanthropic – I eventually want to take the Foreign Service
Officer exam and we were lucky enough to have a high-ranking member of the FS
come to our Thanksgiving shindig and talk to those of us who are interested.
She said to study up on current events and US history, both of which I need to
step up on.
Which brings
us to Book Mission 2012: Read my way through US history. Unfortunately I’m
limited to the e-books I snagged from another PCV and my keyword searching
abilities. There are definitely gaps in time periods (poor, poor 1800s), but
either I don’t have them or I’m search-incompetent or they’re not tagged with
anything other than their title. Some of them aren’t what I would have chosen
given more than 1500 books to choose from, but it seems to be the best I can
do. If anyone can think of any that should be added, let me know so I can check
to see if I have them. Put those thinking caps on!
Books for
Book Mission 2012
- Lies My Teacher Told Me – James W. Loewen
- Last of the Mohicans – James Fennimore Cooper
- Common Sense – Thomas Paine
- 1776 – David McCullough
- John Adams – David McCullough
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- Devil in the White City – Erik Larson
- Theodore Rex – Edmund Morris
- The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
- Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano
- This Side of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Half Broke Horses – Jeannette Walls
- Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
- Helmet for my Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific – Robert Leckie
- Citizen Soldiers – Stephen E. Ambrose
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Alex Haley
- Roots – Alex Haley
- My Life – Bill Clinton
- Columbine – Dave Cullen
- Known and Unknown: A Memoir – Donald Rumsfeld
NB: if you
poke around Goodreads, you should be able to see whether I’ve read a book or
not
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