What are you reading? Well, of course, I mean what are you reading other than this blog, which we all realize is essential reading material.

 

So, what are you reading?

 

One thing I realized while working at AutoWeek magazine was that car enthusiasts are readers, readers who will take the time to read long magazine articles and books about their favorite subjects. Obviously, I’m very glad for that. I used to write a lot of those long magazine articles and continue to write books about what I hope are their favorite subjects.

 

But I hope we all realize that there’s more to life than cars, and hopefully that reflects in our reading interests.

 

Last year I read 30 books, fewer than normal, in part because (fortunately) I spent less time in airports and on airplanes, where I pass the waiting hours reading.

 

As I review the list of what I read, I see that only nine of those books were car related (actually, I read several other automotive titles and wrote reviews of them for iZoom.com, but in some of those cases my reading was quick and for a specific purpose, not the “curl up with a good book” type of reading).

 

Faithful readers of this blog know I’m not a big reader of fiction, yet in 2009 I read five novels: two were brand new -- Blood on the Wall, a novel based around the Indianapolis 500, and The Second Ship, the first of a series based on a second spaceship crashing at Roswell. The others were Water for Elephants, The Eleventh Man, and Cotton Comes to Harlem. A friend and her husband had read Elephants and recommended it (as do I). I responded by loaning them The Eleventh Man, Ivan Doig’s wonderfully crafted and richly written story of a college football team going off to war. I heard on NPR about Cotton author Chester Himes, who started writing while in prison.

 

Everything else I read was non-fiction. Here’s that list: 

 

The Wisdom of Crowds

The Last Lincolns

A Blue Sea of Blood

The Blount Report

Roads to Quoz

The Automobile and American Life

Dean Jeffries

You Know You Should Be Glad

Everything They Had

Breaking the Banks in Motor City

Last Flag Down

We Were the Ramchargers

Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier

As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires

And the Darn Things Sold

Busted: The Rise and Fall of Art Schlister

The Journey That Saved Curious George

Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans

Winning: Paul Newman

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs

Asphalt and Politics: A History of the American Highway System

Complete Shelby

Way Off the Road

The Book of Dead Philosophers

 

Looking at that list, I realize that four of those books were written by people I consider to be friends, although, over the years, I’ve read so much written by William Least Heat-Moon, David Halberstam and Wallace Stegner that they almost seem like old friends.

 

So what are you reading?

 

I’m starting the new year with At All Costs: How a Crippled Ship and Two American Merchant Mariners Turned the Tide of World War II.

 

Funny how we sometimes read books in bunches: Blue Sea of Blood, Last Flag Down and At All Costs all are about war at sea and the people caught up in those battles. Honest, I’m not a naval warfare buff. I read Blue Sea because it tells the story of the U.S.S. Edsall. Last Flag was a freebie given to book reviewers and book store owners that turned out to be a fascinating story about a Confederate ship that keep fighting because it didn’t know the Civil War had ended.

 

I paid full Amazon price for At All Costs, because the book’s author occupied the next cubical over back when we both worked at AutoWeek, and, let’s face it, we authors need all the book-buying friends we can get.

 

--Larry Edsall