It was not my intention when I started blogging in August of 2009 to so frequently use personal experiences and the first person pronoun.  However, it has often been the personal anecdotes that readers have responded to, proving that the MHSAA’s younger staffers were correct when they advised me that readers want not only to learn something from a blog, they also want to get to know the author.  So more and more I find myself launching a blog from personal experience.

Which brings me to the response I gave recently to a loved one who was pressing me for gift ideas – things they might give me this holiday season.
 
Except for some new socks, there’s nothing I need as a gift this holiday season; and what I want I’ve already obtained myself.  Books!  What I really need – like a lot of you – is the gift of time to actually read them.

How I wish I could use the “12 days of Christmas” to do nothing but sit, undistracted, to touch base again with some iconic classics like The Catcher in the Rye; Gone With the Wind; A Moveable Feast; Look Homeward, Angel; War and Peace; and many others I’ve either never read or didn’t fully appreciate when I did.  Or to read a dozen newer books, already acquired, that await me. Here they are:

Fiction

• One Man’s Bible, by Gao Xingjian (1999).
• The Confession, by John Grisham (2010).
• Stone’s Fall, by Iain Pears (2009).
• The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver (2009).
• Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier (1997); also Thirteen Moons (2006).
• The Loop, by Nicholas Evans (1998); also The Smoke Jumper (2001) and The Divide (2005).

Non-Fiction

• Oracle Bones:  A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, by Peter Hessler (2006).
• Moral Ground:  Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, Kathleen Deen Moore and Michel P. Nelson, Editors (2010).
• After-Shock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, by Robert B. Reich (2010).
• Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, by Joseph E. Stiglitz (2010).
• Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, by Clay Shirky (2010).
• The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (2009).
• Hard Goals:  The Secret to Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, by Mark Murphy (2011).
• Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine, by George Dohrmann (2010).
• The Autobiography of Mark Twain – Volume 1 (2010).

Yes, I know, that’s 18 books, not 12; and Twain’s colossal autobiography should count double or triple.  I just couldn’t contain myself.  And anyway, in his recently published memoirs, My Reading Life, the southern novelist Pat Conroy says, “I could read a million books and still consider myself a half-baked, mediocre thinker.”  Me too.