Into December

When the year is written in firework displays and midnight kisses, one might look back and say it was 2012 I became a real reader. I read more books this year than any other in my life, and not just by a little. I probably more than quadruple the amount of any year prior. I never really kept track of books before -- a summary can be seen off to the right -- but here seems a delightful place to do some accounting. It is a very special way -- better than most -- to look back on a year and see what it was made of.

I sat out in the front of the Alhambra with a cute Australian -- February I think it was -- and finished Shantaram, a ridiculous story about a convict (also Australian) who escapes to Mumbai, joins a gang, and falls in love. As with other books that are supposed to inspire an Indian vacation (Life of Pi, Eat Pray Love), it did nothing of the sort for me. I still have no desire to go. I will enjoy a run around a Guatemalan volcano or sit along a beach in Nicaragua or play with a monkey in Colombia, but India doesn't resonate quite yet. Someone once told me people go there to kill their restlessness for awhile, but that is something I feel no need to kill just yet.

Sometime between my first and third visit to the Alhambra in Granada, I read Tales of the Alhambra, by American writer Washington Irving. He lived, researched, and fell in love with the place for a few months in 1829 as it was falling to decay. He traveled by mule who knows how long, from Seville to Granada, carrying a gun for protection from highway robbers. My train took a few minutes over three hours and cost 24 Euros. The Alhambra is one of the only places in the world I have ever been able to really imagine myself within a thousand year period. Somehow it is immune to the stains tourists bring hidden in their fanny-packs.

Months later before arriving in Pamplona I read The Sun Also Rises, the book that put the city and its festival on the international map. I was glad to not be there for the running of the bulls. Twenty years after his last visit, Hemingway was already fed up. He wrote in A Dangerous Summer about finding a peaceful place by a river in the woods, but not disclosing its location to the reader because he did not want to come back next summer and see 50 cars there.

I read Cloud Atlas, now a three hour movie covering 500 pages of literature, during three rainy days in Bilbao. Don Quixote was an adventure so long I can only remember reading it in Seville, a place Don Quixote never visited, but a place his creator spent time in jail.

A diary about the 1870 expedition that discovered Yellowstone, in Yellowstone. A Night to Remember around the Titanic's 100 year anniversary. An artistically written, now out of print book on Spain twice, before my first flight and after my last. Death in the Afternoon before my first bullfight. How to Be Alone when I was very much alone. Travels With Charley when I was traveling, without Charley. The Go-Getter when I was going but not getting anywhere.

What a beautiful way to define a year: adding content to a list, looking at the list and remembering the moments, looking at the moments and remembering the books. The joy, as any true reader will tell you, is not analyzing the characters and their dispositions, the authors and their pains and their gains. No, it is the hours spent alone with yourself, the wrestling with personal emotions, the rereading of passages because you know they fit somewhere, that make books a lifeline to a very real world.

I woke up unplanned at 4am one recent morning and finished the 23rd book of the year, Let the Great World Spin. The last lines stuck with me, even as I shut off the light two hours later, the sun only starting to creep in through the window.

"The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough."

And so on we spin and stumble into December.