Keeping track

In the very first class I took for my grad program, my professor recommended that we all keep a notebook where we record the titles and details about books we've read. I started to do that the following summer, which is now four years ago. Then came baby. And more grad classes. And four years' worth of papers to grade. And moving. And all that stuff. 

That notebook, in which I took careful notes about the seventh Harry Potter book as well as C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters, Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, and Anne LaMott's Grace (Eventually), gradually faded into obscurity only to be resurrected last summer as a grad-school notebook for my Dickens class. (Interestingly, it started life as an ill-fated workout notebook, where I kept track of how much I lifted and what settings I put the machines on and number of reps at Powerhouse Gym in Morris, IL the summer before I got married.) It's now, sadly, tattered and full of boring notes about Pickwick Papers. 

But who am I kidding? I don't have time anymore to write full-page summaries of every book that I read, including my evaluations, number of stars, and important quotes. It's impressive enough, these days, to read a non-school book beginning to end, though I've done a better job of that this summer than I have in recent years.

So, if only to remind myself (and my "mom-brain") what I've read lately and why, here's a breakdown (roughly in the order I read them) for 2011 (not including YA novels, because those take like 2 seconds to read and I totally don't digest them):

1. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
2. White Noise by Don DeLillo
3. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
4. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
5. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson
6. Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney
7. Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse
8. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
9. Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides
10. Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
11. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
12. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
13. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
14. The Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
15. Austenland by Shannon Hale
16. Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares
17. Daisy Miller by Henry James
18. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane
19. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
20. The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells

Books I've re-read:

1. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chestnutt