Reading Freely

Booking through Thursday says: Sometimes I feel like the only person I know who finds reading history fascinating. It’s so full of amazing-yet-true stories of people driven to the edge and how they reacted to it. I keep telling friends that a good history book (as opposed to some of those textbooks in school that are all lists and dates) does everything a good novel does–it grips you with real characters doing amazing things.
Am I REALLY the only person who feels this way? When is the last time you read a history book? Historical biography? You know, something that took place in the past but was REAL.




I don’t recall when my passion for history began, but I remember excitedly running to my desk on the first day of fourth grade so that I could see what my history book looked like. Since then, history has been my ‘thing’.  As a story, it comes easily to me, and I regard history books as leisure reading. I suppose it’s no surprise I went for a history degree. History not only allows us to understand the present, but to challenge it. Having seen the way things came to be the way they are allows us to say “Ah-hah, things don’t HAVE to be this way.” We don’t need to be so impressed by the status quo. There’s a history to everything, and the more I study it the more I realize how connected we all are. And of course, BTT is correct in pointing out that history is rife with fantastic stories — and those stories needn’t simply be entertaining. They can inspire us to action, as well.

In response to BTT’s direct questions:
My last history reads were Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne and Unfamilar Fishes by Sarah Vowell, the latter of which takes on the American annexation of Hawaii.  Biography-wise, in March I read Howard Zinn’s You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train. The events he witnessed in his life give me hope that positive political change is possible despite power and corruption.

Some recommendations:

• Pretty much anything by Joseph and Frances Gies. This husband-and-wife team of historians focus on daily life in the middle ages, and their works are completely open to laymen. In fact, I’d wager that their intended audience are people who wouldn’t otherwise read history. I’m, most fond of their Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel;  Life in a Medieval City;  and Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages. 
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. One of the best, if not the best, history book I’ve read since starting this blog. 
• A Life of her Own, Emile Carles — the true story of a French peasant girl who survived the arrival of industrialism and two world wars. Easily my favorite book acquired through university classes, this completely altered the way I viewed politics.
• On the Shoulders of Giants, a history-of-science series by Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser. This is a good way to acquire basic scientific literacy, and they wrote it for teen audiences so it’s quite readable. 
• And for a larger view,  Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which points out the geographic and biological influences in human history, and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which tells American history from the vantange point of slaves, war protesters, and the working man. 

This week the Broke and the Bookish‘s top ten list is a free-for-all. I decided to go with a theme of ‘firsts’.

1. First Book I Remember Reading:  The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss. I recently reread this, and I remembered how angry Thing One and Thing Two made me feel back in the day. They caused all that trouble and then just left?

2. First “Real” Book I remember Reading: The Call of the Wild, Jack London . It may have been a slightly abridged version, but I knew it was a real novel and not just a kid’s story. Reading it straight through on Christmas day made me feel very grown-up.

3. First Science Fiction Novel:  I Left My Sneakers in Dimension X, Bruce Coville.

4. First Series:  The Henry Huggins / Beezus and Ramona Quimby series by Beverly Cleary, starting with Ribsy.

5. First Book I Ever Read with a Friend: Roswell High, Melinda Metz.  A friend of mine read the first novel and let me borrow it: I bought the second novel and let him borrow it. This went on to the point that we read our separate copies of book four together while riding on a bus, but then he moved away, the fink.

6. First Book I Ever Ruined: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway. Checked it out in eighth grade and spilled a glass of milk on it. D’oh.

7. First Serious Book:  The Pigman, Paul Zindel. While The Call of the Wild may have been written with a serious idea in mind, as a kid I just saw it as a book about dog. The Pigman featured two very flawed main characters who undergo turmoil when a lonely old man they befriend dies as a result of their actions. I think I may have been eleven or twelve.  I also read The Pigman’s Legacy and The Pigman and Me.

8. First Serious Nonfiction:  Nothing Like it in the World, Stephen Ambrose. While I’d read plenty of history and nature books in the library, this is the first I ever read which was targeted toward adult audiences.

9. First Book by my Favorite Author:  The Positronic Man, Isaac Asimov. I checked this out after watching Bicentennial Man, though Asimov wasn’t then my favorite author, or even an author I retained in memory for long.  (Positronic Man, be it noted, is not the story  upon which Bicentennial Man is based. Its roots are in a short story of the same name.) I’m fairly certain I read a book by Asimov on the solar system before this, but I can’t remember the name…so it doesn’t count.

10. First Book I Ever Became Obsessivly Devoted To:  The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Max Shulman.   It’s a collection of short stories featuring university/campus life during the late 1940s. The main character is girl-crazy, intellectual, bright, eccentric, and exceedingly proud of himself, and Shulman’s humor in portraying him matches my appetite exactly.  You can read one of the stories, “Love is a Fallacy”, here.