For the beginning part of this year I was still reading books that I had started and not completed before I adopted the discipline of finishing every book I started. I believe that Homilies on the Gospel of John is the last book I had started but not finished.

  • The Bookseller of Kabul—this book is worth reading as an illustration of how not to engage with foreign cultures. It is ridiculously bad; the author doesn’t even make an effort to see things from Afghans’ point of view. Quite typical of the period.
  • Conceptual Foundations of Teaching Reading—I remember this was really excellent and data-driven. The best part of the book comes at the end, where the author reproduces the results of national standardized reading tests that show that—believe it or not!—none of the changes in reading pedagogy has really moved the needle on reading ability. Frankly, I think that this is because “literacy” is described in such expansive terms about processing, comparing, and synthesizing information, that it’s basically become redundant with terms such as “intelligence” or “cultivation.”
  • Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach—This was valuable; and the first edition was much better than the second.
  • Developing Adult Literacy
  • Homilies on the Gospel of John—This was Chrysostom, but (perhaps because I was sort of anxious to read through it and get on to something else) I don’t recall taking much away from it.
  • Hexameron—The science and even the understanding of the natural world is… dated. But the exultation with which Basil glories in the wonders of Creation can’t be gainsaid.
  • Second Treatise of Government—This fell apart for me when Locke remarked, almost as an aside, that if someone stole his property, then he (Locke) would be justified in killing that man, but not in taking his property back. It’s like one of those moments in math when you come up with 2 = 0, and you know that something has gone wrong somewhere, even if you don’t know exactly where.
  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
  • Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales
  • My Grandfather’s Son—What struck me about Clarence Thomas’s autobiography was that race forms so much of his personal experience, however much he tries to keep race out of his jurisprudence.
  • Bright Against the Storm—This book and the one following were written by my friend Ari Heinze. I enjoyed them, and I don’t think they’ve be received as they might be.
  • Ashes of Our Joy
  • The Turkish Jester—I enjoy a good Mullah Nasruddeen story, but I don’t think I understood a single one of these jokes.
  • Dracula—This is such a terrible book. It was so painful to read I was angry most of the time that I was reading. What kind of person writes out an entire chapter in German-accented dialect, because zat’s ze vay ze character speaks? It was so difficult to get through this book I can’t even say.
  • Stones to Schools—Of course this now needs to be read in concert with Jon Krakauer’s book.
  • A world without poverty—There’s probably a honeymoon period after winning a Nobel Prize where it seems like you can really make a diffference. I think Muhammad Yunus was going through some of that here. A great man, though.
  • Working together for literacy
  • Handbook of the International Phonetic Association
  • The New Testament and the People of God
  • Persian Grammar
  • A Man For All Seasons—Of course I heard Paul Scofield’s voice as I read the play.
  • The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
  • Jane Eyre
  • First on the Moon—This was a lot of fun. I was getting into space stuff again with the kids.
  • Henry VIII
  • A Preface to Paradise Lost—Helpful on many levels.
  • A Student’s Guide to Literature
  • The Canterbury Tales—In the original. I need to write some blog posts about these.
  • The Well-Trained Mind
  • The Remains of the Day—Probably not as good a book as the movie was a movie.
  • Notes from the Underground—For all the hype, I didn’t get much out of this. I probably need to read it again.
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles
  • A Journal of the Plague Year—Very interesting and engaging. Defoe paints a vivid picture. (It was hard to believe he hadn’t actually witnessed the events.)
  • The Jungle Book—I enjoyed this a lot. “I will remember what I was” is one of the great lines in English literature, in my opinion.
  • The Scarlet Pimpernel—Lots of swashbuckling fun, but…
  • I Will Repay— …why would you write a sequel without the main character from the original. I expected to read the series but six years later this book was disappointing enough that I haven’t read the third.
  • Biko—Biko the man was admirable. Biko the book was somewhat less so. It was too journalistic and conspiratorial for me (especially at the end). For me, the melodrama detracted from the seriousness of the events.