I have a tendency to be reading several books at a time, and this can be mega-frustrating. I have to force myself to finish books I'm not necessarily interested in at that time to keep the number of open tomes down to a manageable level. It's not so bad as it sounds, but it can be inconvenient.
So I'm going to write about the books as I finish them. It's highly unlikely that I'll cover-to-cover one book per week. That's just not going to happen. My objective will be to finish 52 books in 52 weeks. I'll do my damndest to finish one book a week. In all likelihood, I'll finish two some weeks, and none others. So long as it balances out in the end, we're golden.
Most of these books will be nonfiction, but I'll likely toss in some tasty, worthwhile fiction from time to time. It depends what I come across in my various book-gathering activities.
I'm not really sure what these book reports are going to entail. Much of what I read can be evaluated on some kind of a standardized rubric, but this is not always the case. I don't think there will be much scoring going on. The most consistent evaluation I'll likely give will be "I Recommend it" or "Don't touch this fucking thing."
It's unlikely that, since I'll be reporting on books I finish, there will be many examples of the latter. I don't do things I don't like, and that includes reading shit. I must be weird like that.
I imagine that I'll be reading a work or two (or more) which comes from the "I feel like I should have read this by now." It wouldn't shock me a bit if I offered a negative review of a classic. So often, I think, "classics" remain so because they were labeled so long ago. If selective pressures were allowed to extend to canonized literature, we'd have a lot more people interested in literature. So it goes.
Since it's now officially the 8th (12:09 AM), I suppose I can write about book #1.
Inside of a Dog : What Dogs See, Smell and Know
Alexandra Horowitz
Scribner. 2009.
This book was given to me as a Christmas present. I read through it almost non-stop (which, as I said, is pretty rare for me). I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is a dog owner/lover.
As promised in the introduction, Horowitz totally changed my perspective of my dog, and all of dogkind.
The format and style of this monograph is consistently engaging and informative. Horowitz doesn't bullshit around and doesn't waste her readers' time inflating her own literary value with $5.00 technical jargon.
With a pretty thorough Notes and Sources section, Horowitz gives the interested casual readers an opportunity to further their self-education, as well as making this book available for use in a college classroom. In which course this would be required reading, I'm not sure, but I think it would fit in fine with a course with a title like "How to be a Decent Human Being 1306."
Horowitz forces us to recognize the relationships we have with dogs, and by extension, all other animals. Any reasonable human in the developed world understands that we humans are also animals, so it only stands to reason that Horowitz' work would allow a reader to evaluate the way humans interact with other humans, as well as canines. Though canines are the focus, it's not hard to draw the sociological implications from Inside of a Dog.
This book seriously changed the way I look at not only my dog, but the world I live in. Being an anarchist at heart, it's never been difficult for me to stop and smell the roses (as well as the rotting garbage at the top of the hill). But the way Horowitz places her readers firmly within the perspective of other animals leads one to not only appreciate all of the natural world through the senses of another animal. Try as we might, when we find ourselves examining the rose or the rot, we will never fully experience it the same way our dogs do. But if we try to understand their world, it enriches reality for both of us.
Wonderful book.
Book 1-- in the BANK.
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