Reading

A few months ago, the Fab Four, the name of my wife's book club, read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, a work by a British author. My wife laughed a good amount when reading that work of fiction. I decided to put a library hold on that work. I tend to read more non-fiction than fiction, but will intersperse an occasional work of fiction. My wife commented that I need to read more fiction. Since, 2019 I have kept a log of the books I read, by title, author, and if it is fiction or non-fiction. I decided to tally up my findings, and I was a bit surprised at the results.

My wife has been encouraging me to read more fiction. She once said she likes it when I laugh while I read. I guess fiction can provide more opportunity for laughter than my choices in non-fiction. The book I read right before taking on Eleanor, was Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, by polymath Jared Diamond. This 470 page work was really quite interesting, but does not produce humor. The book essentially traces the geographic underpinnings to why some societies advanced (in Western sense) through technology and advancements in agriculture and others did not. Although trained in physiology, Diamond has also moved into evolutionary biology and geography. This book provides geographic and evolutionary biological reasoning to the fate of human societies. I am not sure that the geographic determinism model is as strong as he says, but he provides good reasoning. This book is in somewhat of a contrast to other books which base advancement more on an economic model. I think the two are tied together. Economies became more specialized and advanced due to agriculture and Diamond's reasoning on the geographic underpinnings of agriculture make a great deal of sense.

Eleanor cover

Eleanor, as a work of fiction was quite funny, even given the rather despondent nature of some of the occurrences in the work. Part is due to the formal language Eleanor uses, and her lack of  a "filter" or knowledge of appropriateness in social settings. In that measure, I am somewhat like Eleanor, but not near as bad. It only took three days or so to read Eleanor;  it was actually hard to put down.

Since, reading Eleanor, the wife and her book club, which she organized and leads, has read two works of fiction dealing with WWII, first was All the Light we Cannot See, and second The Nightingale. She says both are good books, but the latter was much better. I don't recall those fiction works, producing much laughter from her. She really likes reading historical fiction and right now  she is reading a book about female code breakers in London during WWII. I suggested that since she enjoys reading historical fiction about WWII, perhaps she should read some of the many works of non-fiction on WWII. Why read fiction when can get a true in-depth analysis of what occurred?  She could begin with an easy work such as The Longest Winter, about the Battle of the Bulge before working her way to more involved works, such as the Rick Atkinson trilogy on WWII. It is not like I am suggesting she read Clausewitz's tome. I have a number of books she can read that are the real deal. She, not so politely, declined my offer. She is so good at leading her book club I have suggested she run for Village Board or the School Board, her facial expression was more telling than the words she used. Her father was on his community's town board for many years. Red hair in her family is said to skip a generation, her maternal grandmother had it, but not her mom or any of her mom's siblings. Maybe the political gene skips a couple generations. Will Howie be the next politician in the Goff line?

Guns Germs and Steel cover

The statistics I just worked up from my log of 2019 to 2023 found that I read 197 books, with 30 of them, or 15.23% being fiction, the rest all non-fiction. A deeper dive yielded that I read the most books in 2019 when the wife and I were in a book club together, with the book club books being fiction. That was a book a month. That year I read 44 total books, with13 of them fiction. My highest year of reading was 2020 with 48 books, but only five fiction. My reading dropped, to 41 in 2021, with six fiction, only 33 in 2022 with 4 fiction, and 31 in 2023 with 2 fiction (or just .06% of my books read in 2023 were fiction). The pattern shows that perhaps fiction books are generally a faster read. I know in 2022 two of my books were in the Shelby Foote trilogy on the Civil War (the third in 2023), each a rather long book, the last almost 1100 pages. There were other long works in 2023, such as Masters and Commanders. War books do not produce much laughter. 

My current book, which was my wife's brothers, is a work of non-fiction but is funny, called Enslaved by Ducks. Some works of non-fiction can be funny. The wife reads mostly fiction, but does also read non-fiction, she recently finished a book about reducing waste. I wonder what percent of books she reads are non-fiction? She also reads many more books a year than I do. Probably because, as I spend time writing a blog post, she is reading.