2010 Reading List

I've been putting together my 2010 reading list. Here's what I've come up with so far.

The New Republic, John Lukacs
- A history of the United States in the 20th century by the best historian of the last half-century, originally published in 1981 I think. I'm already halfway through it.

The Big House, George Howe Colt
- Got a copy of this, as did all my siblings, for Christmas. I had the idea for this very book, including the title, about 4 or 5 years ago.

The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry
- The first in a series of novels based in a fictional Kentucky town.* I've heard much about Berry's agrarianist thought and I'm interested in reading it.

*Interestingly, I've actually been to this man's home in a small Kentucky town. My Dad -- who gave me this book -- is fascinated by his writing. On a road trip to Wisconsin several years ago with my parents, we three stopped in Berry's small town and eventually found his residence so my Dad could meet him. I thought it was kinda creepy.

Outliers, Malcom Gladwell
- I started this book one day while substituting at a middle school last fall. I found it on the teacher's desk, cracked it open while the students were working, and couldn't put it down. By the end of the school day, I was almost 100 pages into it -- about a third of the book.

At Fenway, Dan Shaughnessy
- Shaughnessy, or "CHB"*, writes sports columns for the Boston Globe and is the idiot responsible for creating the "Curse of the Bambino" in a book of that name he published a while ago. He's basically a muckraker and a jackass, but will occasionally write some decent stuff. This book was given to me as a gift a couple years ago and I've never gotten around to reading it.

*"CHB" stands for "Curly-Haired Boyfriend". The term refers to Shaughnessy's curly hair, of course, and was coined by the famously cantankerous Carl Everett, a Red Sox player of the late 1990s/early 2000s. He was not a fan of the writer, and once threw out the nickname to another journalist. It stuck.

The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler
- This book outlines a theory concerning human civilizations. Basically, the theory goes that all great civilizations are cyclical, with a beginning, middle and end. Spengler used the four seasons to illustrate the rise and fall of the civilizations throughout history, and to make his argument that Western civilization has entered its "winter" phase, meaning that it's almost dead. He wrote this in the 1920s.

Men at Work, George Will
- Yes, that George Will. Another baseball book. Another gift I haven't read yet.


Wish list -- or, books I don't own but would like to read:
- the aforementioned Outliers
- Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
- Freakonomics
- The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy (pretty much anything by him)
- any of the Rabbit books by John Updike (I got halfway through Rabbit, Run once.)
- The Machine: (large subtitle about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds), Joe Posnanski


That's it. Obviously, I'm gonna have to find some more books to get to my goal of 20 this year. I'll take suggestions, recommendations, and donations.