#94 - My Year-End Reading Review

Watch This!; A Crawling Exhibit; A Year in Reading

Hello, my friends,

We are very quickly approaching the end of the year and time is slipping by despite my attempts to grab it as if it is completely covered in baby oil. As an antidote to the society’s speed, I listened to the audiobook of Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel, which chronicled the 27 years that Christopher Knight spent alone in the Maine woods as well as his eventual capture by police (he burgled a lot of cabins for supplies) and jamming into society. Besides the story, Finkel delves into the idea of silence and solitude, particularly their challenges and benefits to humans. Personally, I enjoyed the logistical details of Knight’s experience and the descriptions of how he viewed nature. Now I’m listening to Anita Diamant’s Living a Jewish Life, which is certainly a different experience. I did start 2024 reading Abigail Pogrebin’s My Jewish Year, so I suppose this is a fitting book to end the year.

“Mattathias the Hasmonean” (1894) by Boris Schatz

Watch This!

It isn’t often that I write about consumer objects that I like. There are plenty of places online where you can get recommendations and reviews for just about everything. Yet, I did make a purchase this year that has exceeded my expectations, the Casio W-217HM-9AV (3454) watch!

The Casio W-217 (gold) in action!

I wanted to track my running times, and since I don’t usually carry my phone while running, a wristwatch with a timer was the next best thing. I chose this specific one because it was cheap (like $30 from the Casio website with shipping), simple to operate, and has a satisfying 1980s style (though according to Casio Fan Magazine, this model was released in 2018). My intention was to only wear it while I was running, but I’ve ended up wearing it several times a week!

The face is elegantly designed so it’s easy to read at a glance — while there’s text around it, all the digital display has is the time, day, date, and a tiny AM/PM/24HR. If I ever used the alarm, there would also be a little bell. Nothing extraneous there. Plus, the diameter isn’t gigantic, and the whole thing is light (and also there is an orange backlight!). I like that.

An uncomplicated design provides exactly the info I need quickly and efficiently.

My typical philosophy on purchasing clothing and related items is to spend more on quality since I expect to be using them for a long time. Case in point, a few days ago I saw a photo from 2009 where I was wearing the same sweater that I happened to wear the other day! It’s the same with watches, I own four and all except for the Casio were bought pre-COVID. Barring any major accidents with the body of the watch, there’s no reason I won’t still be wearing it in 10 years.

A Crawling Exhibit

I’ve been doing research on the history of library outreach lately and it’s tough to read library history without running into kooky and amusing stories. For instance, in the early 1930s, in order to draw people to their building, the Enoch Pratt Free Library was mounting various book exhibits in their exterior windows. Kate Coplan was the head of the department that designed these displays. In a 1993 article in American Libraries called “Memories of Enoch Pratt Free Library”, Ms. Coplan reflected on an unforgettable feat of publicity:

While I was attending a bridge party one night at a friend's home, another guest, who was secretary to the owner of a local fruit concern, reported that that morning, a stevedore unloading a shipment from South America had discovered a tarantula on a bunch of bananas. I pricked up my ears. "Do you think," I asked, "that your boss would let me have the tarantula?"

"Of course," she replied, "I'm sure he would be glad to get rid of it."

Bright and early the next morning, I sent one of our helpers down to the fruit company with a small glass jar in the lid of which some air holes had been punched. Fortuitously, when he returned a Baltimore Sun reporter was seated beside my desk looking for a story. Naturally, the reporter was intrigued by the tarantula, and decided to write a few paragraphs. But before leaving my office he suggested that my container was too small for its purpose, and if I cared to send a messenger to his rooming house, his landlady could provide a larger empty jar from his room. "Is it strong enough to hold the tarantula?" I wanted to know. "It's held stronger stuff than that," he replied.

Well, when the reporter's story was published the next morning, it created a good deal of interest. Seeing this, his city editor assigned him and a staff photographer to do a follow-up feature. I enlisted one of our prettiest women staffers to hold the jar smilingly in the Rouse Building's basement for the picture-taking session.

The feature became one of Baltimore's best conversation pieces. Pratt patrons brought flies and bits of meat to feed the star attraction on exhibit. Every type of conveyance, from a Rolls Royce to a laundry truck, stopped whenever traffic allowed so that its occupants could ogle the display. The library's collection of spider literature circulated to an unprecedented degree, and the reporter kept hanging around, hoping the tarantula would get loose in the stacks. Meanwhile the telephones were ringing off the hook with people begging for the small invertebrate at the close of the exhibit. Eventually we gave the tarantula to the Natural History Museum of Maryland.

If you liked this doozy of a tale, you’ll be interested to know that this was not the only live specimen that Ms. Coplan made into a library ambassador. Later on, a 15-inch-long turtle in a glass case was lent as an exhibit but it escaped!

Thankfully it did not go far and neither book nor reptile were worse for wear.

Considering this story last week, it occurred to me that if I gather enough colorful happenings I could put together a book called Wild Tales in Public Library History. Why not?

“The Spider” (1940) by Alexander Calder. Note: Not a tarantula.

A Year in Reading

For the past 15 years, I have kept track of every book I’ve read from start to finish. I forget which website I started on but eventually my tracking went to Goodreads until that website mangled my account, and for the past maybe 6-7 years it’s just been a simple spreadsheet hosted in Google Drive. I used to write a short review for every book but I only do that sporadically now, though I still rate every title from 1-4. Four is the highest rating and it means that the book was either life-changing or that it carries out it’s purpose flawlessly. By this time I know what I will likely enjoy and don’t typically finish books I hate so the most common rating is 3. This means I enjoyed the book but it isn’t extraordinary. Here are my ratings for this year (I have three books currently in progress and I may finish one or two of them before 2025, but I’m not so concerned about that here):

1: 0
2: 11 (22%)
3: 32 (63%)
4: 8 (15%)
TOTAL: 51

Interestingly, I read ten more books than last year and the rating percentages are almost identical. Let me see break it down in some other ways:

• 22 (43%) of my books were audiobooks this year, which is nearly half. Also not unusual.

• 11 of the books were comic books or graphic novels, most by or somehow related to Jiro Taniguchi. This is fairly unusual. In a typical year I go through several stretches of the visual genre, but not all surrounding the same author. If you’ve been following HMF, you’ve seen my reviews of Taniguchi’s work.

• I read 25 works of fiction this year. I thought this was slightly higher than usual but actually, last year I also had a nearly 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction. The fiction this year was mostly comics and novels and a little bit of poetry. Last year, I also read a couple of plays but only four novels. This year I read 14 novels and short story collections but no plays. The novels were deliberate because in the first half of the year I delved into modern Japanese literature.

As you can see by the ratings above, I liked a lot of what I read this year. I could just post all of the ones with the highest score but I’m not sure that’s right. There are some titles with lower scores that I seem to think about frequently. I’m going to post my top ten here (not in any order) without the silly ratings:

• On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers

• Walking Man by Jiro Taniguchi

• A Distant Neighborhood by Jiro Taniguchi

• Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power by Marc Wortman

• Nonviolent Communication: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values by Marshall Rosenberg

• Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian by Stephen Rosenfield

• Raising LGBTQ Allies by Chris Tompkins

• A Storyteller’s Story by Sherwood Anderson

• The Thirteen-Petalled Rose by Adin Steinsaltz

• So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin by Steve Martin and Adam Gopnik

A key theme among at least three books on this list (Rogers, Rosenberg, and Tompkins) is that they all come from a psychotherapeutic POV and encouraged introspection for me. They taught me how to understand myself better but also changed the way I related to the world. I’m grateful to have come upon them (and have a chance to interview Chris Tompkins).

“Gardeners” (1891) by Karoly Ferenczy