Resolution

One of my New Years resolutions is to read more--by which, I mean read more books. This will involve reading less of the Internets and bloggity goodness. But there is only so much time in the day. Part of this resolution is to meet my longstanding (and unmet) goal of reading one book a week, outside of work-related reading.

So far in the 007, I'm on track. First, I figuratively devoured Postwar, more than 800 pages of it, much to the surprise of Sam and, well, myself. (It's the flights to the West Coast and back, plus time at the in-laws'). That was week one. Then, for week two, I just finished Kevin Brockmeier's novel (2006), The Brief History of the Dead. It was recommended to me by a friend at work, and it was pretty good. It has an interesting premise: The dead are not really dead, but in a kind of limbo so long as someone with personal memories of them survives. So the dead get a second chance at life, depending on how long "living memories" of them survive. Meanwhile, in the world of the living, in the near future, a deadly virus called "the Blinks" is killing everyone off, until there's just one woman left alive--in Antarctica, of all places. So long as she can hold on, all the folks in the sort-of afterlife survive, too. There's something there about how each person is the whole world, in the sense that each person's memory preserves a world that no longer exists; there's the old saying that to save one person is to save the world. This may be an extended reflection on that. It's a bittersweet allegory about memory, with a number of brilliant character sketches. The novel ends somewhat limply, but how can such a novel end? It's the end of everything, after all.

Next up: I have a few options. I'm toying with alternating b/w fiction and non-fiction all year. So that would mean next is John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History. The next fiction entry, probably The Road by Cormac McCarthy, or Charles Portis's Norwood. I also have a humorous novel, Whisky Galore, on tap, so to speak.

Update: OK, so I'm about halfway through The Cold War. It's excellent, but maybe a quicker read than I thought it would be (i.e., it's not a particularly dense history, if you know the outlines). The one thing that I'm thinking now is, next non-fiction book should be about . . . Mao and China. Anyone read anything along those lines lately? Also, I'm interested in reading more about the nuclear arms race. Any thoughts?