Reader’s Diary

Today is the eighth birthday of Reader’s Diary.   The previous review is the 500th book review I’ve written in that time.  That’s 62.5 books a year almost evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction.

Reader’s Diary is probably the longest-lived unread blog on the Web, though at times the readership has jumped to as many as a half dozen.   It’s a good thing that popularity wasn’t my aim.   Reader’s Diary has achieved its goal, which is to help me keep track of the books I’ve read and to give me a way to exercise my atrophied writing skills.  Its unintended effect has been to make me a more thoughtful reader, one more conscious of the writer’s craft.  I’ve benefited from the effort I’ve put into it.

Chris Winters

The Great Lakes ore boat “William P. Snyder” was launched in 1906 (six years before “Titanic”) and celebrated 100 years as a working boat in 2006.  The boat (like submarines, Great Lakes freighters are “boats”, not “ships”)  is now named “St. Marys Challenger” and serves as a cement carrier.   She has “new” engines, but is still powered by steam.  She is quite possibly the oldest working ship – and certainly the oldest large steam ship – in history.

Chris Winters spent several years on and around the “St. Marys Challenger” photographing the ship and her crew.  I first saw his work at the wonderful and surprising Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, Minnesota.  “Centennial” is a large book full of his photos along with historic photos and informative text.  Winters’ love for the boat and appreciation for the passage of time come out clearly in the book.  He reflects that the boat’s first captain was born 20 years before the American Civil War and that her youngest crew member in 2006 was born 20 years after man landed on the moon.

I enjoyed this book a lot, though I would characterize the individual photographs as workmanlike rather than individually great.  “Centennial” is more “National Geographic” than David Plowden.  However, the whole transcends the parts and this is an admirable and well-executed project and I really appreciate how Winters celebrates the otherwise-obscure boat’s history and crew.  The only thing that disappointed me about the book was the layout, which is marred by “artistic” merging of photos in some spreads.  This might work for a wedding album, but here it’s just confusing and distracting.

Jonathan Harr

In the late 1980′s two art history students in Rome, working on a project to determine which of two paintings was a Caravaggio and which was a copy, discovered information about the history of a “lost” Caravaggio.  That painting, “The Taking of Christ”, had disappeared from public view centuries ago.  Harr’s book is the story of the hunt for that painting.  To give any more details would detract from a reader’s enjoyment of the book, but suffice it to say that it’s a fascinating story that reads like a well-written novel.

I was most interested in the sections about painting restoration in which Harr takes the reader into art museums’ back rooms.  Some of the techniques the restorers use are surprisingly low tech.

Christopher Beha

The Harvard Classics are a collection of classics selected by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot.  They were first published in 1909 with the goal of bringing a liberal education to the common man.  The common man in those days must have been much more intellectual than his modern equivalent because the series sold widely.  Perhaps many of those books were never opened, but their presence in American homes was symbolic of a shared idea of what a “classic” was and a consensus about what it meant to be an educated person.

Christopher Beha devoted a year to reading all 21,000 pages of the Harvard Classics.  “The Whole Five Feet” is his memoir of that year.  He hints that his plan was to write a comic memoir.   Indeed, I expected this to be an entertaining but lightweight book like “The Know-It-All” or “The Year of Living Biblically“.   Instead, the loss of a beloved aunt, illness, and the fact that he was  educating himself  just as Eliot had intended 100 years ago resulted in a more serious and personal memoir about his year that’s more Thoreau than Thurber.  With regard to the works themselves, Beha’s comments are thoughtful and interesting.  While he does reflect on the relevance of the works today compared to their role in decades past, he doesn’t sentimentally lament an imaginary golden age where everyone could quote classics and every barroom was full of amateur scholars.

William Least Heat-Moon

William Least Heat-Moon is a curious man with a talent for relating the things he’s learned. It’s a winning combination.  “Roads to Quoz” is made up of several reports on his rambles: a trip along the Ouachita River in Arkansas, conversations with a woman who lives so simply that her “carbon footprint was that of a cat”, the story of a man dedicated to photographing all of US Highway 40, and more.  This is a book,  circuitous, fat and with a leisurely pace, that the reader can sink into.   When the author says “mosey” he really means it.

Though it’s not strictly a travel book, it has the prime characteristic of great travel books, namely, a narrator you want to spend time with.  Heat-Moon comes across as the kind of person you’d like to find yourself next to on a long train ride.

By the way, “quoz” is, according to Heat-Moon an archaic term for anything “strange, incongruous, or peculiar”.

Matt Baglio

This is the story of Father Gary Thomas, a California priest appointed by his bishop to the diocesan  exorcist.  It follows his training in Rome and the beginning of his new ministry upon  his return to US.   His training includes “interning” with a very busy Italian exorcist.

Despite the topic, it’s not a sensationalist book.  Baglio respects Catholic teachings and is very careful to portray them accurately.  There are some disturbing things in this book, but there are also some very positive things, such as the good the exorcists can accomplish.