However, I figured it would be the readers who would miss out--why should they go bereft of my own two cents on what's worth reading solely because of short-sighted editors who insist on corresponding only with accomplished, insightful professional writers rather than suburban malcontents? (Although Jesus, check out Newt Gingrich's entry--he only talks about one stupid book. And a stupid one, at that.)
Looking over what I read, I see I came up short in vocational, politically utilitarian books. Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal was a useful wakeup call to those still under the impression that the Democrats are working in favor of liberal progressive causes, but coming out as it did in March, it may have been mistimed. Noam Chomsky's Who Owns the World was vintage Chomsky, but reading it carefully enough, you can spot passages that go back decades, so again, I can't get wild about the timing. And while it was fun, in a masochistic sense, to pick apart Crimes of the Educators, a polemic about how the public school system is indoctrinating our children by refusing to teach them the World of God as given in the Bible, I couldn't help thinking the book would have done better during the 80s or 90s, when the culture wars were more barbed and less sub rosa than they seem to me today. So as a politically active reader, I failed miserably this year, and I'm sure that reflects a certain insularity on my part. If you want to blame someone for Donald Trump's ascendancy, apparently you can blame me.
This insularity I enjoyed, however, had nothing to do with any sort of ideological bubble. What happened was, I kept grabbing weighty, 19th century tomes off the shelf and diving into them; when I came up for air and found we'd elected a lunatic into the White House, I desperately tried to find connections between my self-imposed syllabus and our brave new world of Trump. War and Peace has Napoleon, so there you go. Eliot's Middlemarch cautions us against short-sightedness and selfishness, so we can make it a primer for coexisting peacefully with our pro-Trump relatives; likewise, Scenes of Clerical Life neatly illustrates the conflict between public perception and inward suffering, which will come in handy once Trump's voters discover how badly they've been had.
I can't make any pretense for spending months wallowing in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit. I found them absolutely delightful, and am more than willing to forgive the author for his caricatures and stereotypes (less so the more overt racism I found in these books), since even the more heavy handed moral didacticism and barbs against debtors' prisons and hypocrisy of the well-to-do still resonate in the twenty-first century. Just listen to how we talk about the poor, still, today. (And if you want to get lost in the controversy and behind-the-scenes drama of Pickwick, invest in the two to four weeks necessary to absorb Steven Jarvis's wonderful Death and Mr Pickwick.)
Looking ahead, however, I need to read more temperately, and with an eye to the work ahead of us in 2017. My wife is nagging me, lovingly and quite correctly, to write more, and this is advice harder to ignore considering what the year is likely to look like. In Why Write, Mark Edmundson warns the writer, aspiring and veteran, that dedicated, successful composition and revision means setting aside the drug, the comfort, the nutrient and balm of reading in order to do the heavy lifting necessary to produce readable prose. I read Zachary Petit's how-to early this year to see how you could make money out of it; I read Edmundson to remember how hard and worthwhile it is.
If I can resist the siren song of Bleak House an extra hour a night or so, maybe the next year will be more productive. And yet, as I hope my own notes on these works indicate, viewing the world through the lens of literature has its own value, which is not to be easily forsaken in these troubled times.
