More on What I Read Last Year

On the way back to Seattle from my friend's bachelor party, I started reading Conrad's Outcast of the Islands. The novel was unremarkable, although I'll keep reading Conrad, but in the notes I learned that one of Conrad's main sources was Alfred Russel Wallace's Malay Archipelago. Since I happened to have a copy of Wallace on my shelf, I read them at the same time. The main things I learned from Wallace and from the Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, is that 19th century travelers loved killing animals, drinking coffee, and getting sick.

I did indeed finish the Decameron, as I anticipated, and read it's cousin, Arabian Nights, or at least the first of three volumes. The Decameron took about 4 years for me to read since I would put it down when the stories started to blur together. There were some real gems, especially about putting the devil into hell and a man trying to turn his wife into a donkey, but it doesn't even compare to the genius of Arabian Nights.

Regarding Marx's Das Kapital vol. 1, I've never had so little to say about such a big book, which is basically how I felt about Anti-Oedipus. One of my goals for the year is to find a few things to say about Marx. Briefly, though, I was less attracted to the economic theory and more attracted to reporting on working conditions and labor history, and Marx's style. I'm about 50 pages from finishing a collection of his journalism, and plan to read quite a bit more of him and about him this year.

Trollope's Autobiography was better than his novel, the Eustace Diamonds, which I expected to be quite a bit more hardboiled than it was. The most memorable episode from Trollope's autobiography is when he visits Brigham Young while traveling across America. It's a brief meeting. (Incidentally, Francis Parkman talks a lot in his book on how all the travelers are terrified of Mormons.)

Last year marked a return to genre fiction for me, which I continued by reading the Bonehunters, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons. I don't see my self going whole-hog back into genre fiction, or picking up random titles, but I'll at least finish out these two series and a few others.