I just finished my last cover to cover book for the year the one on Thaddeus Stevens. That prompted me to fumble around with my old website www.snowbizz.com. I stopped updating it regularly when I started this blog in 2006. That was also the year I set up a Facebook Page. Both of them were intended to give my second fleeting campaign for Congress some Internet legs. The Blog took. Facebook faded, however, I may reconstitute it as a close family and friends site since my daughter posts a steady stream of photos of my grandsons on her Facebook Page. Geez, I hate being forced to shed my comfortable old fuddy duddy.
Long ago I tried to recall all the books I’d read (other than the many children and young adult books I read to my own kids) over the course of my life. It wasn’t so hard to do this because I began compiling a reading list when I was 29. Other than two years of my Red Plan fight I kept reading a steady stream of mostly nonfiction works. My snowbizz reading list page is here and this is the list of the 2012 additions:
Walter Mondale, The Good Fight…………………Walter Mondale
Hubert Humphrey a Biography……………………Carl Solberg
Lyndon Johnson The Passage of Power…………….Robert Caro
The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson………….George H. Mayer
Lincoln, Team of Rivals……………………….Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Devil in the White City……………………Erik Larson
Thaddeus Stevens 19th Century Egalitarian……….Hans L. Trefousse
I think its complete but I also thought it was complete last night but then this morning I remembered the Robert Caro book so I had to go back and add it to the page.
The first two books were read for background on the book I’ve been laboring and stalling over for the past six years. It helped derail my 2006 campaign for Congress. This year my travails over some lousy contractors derailed my research on the scandal. Oh yeah, it also was a good excuse to drop my threatened third run for Congress. That threat helped boost my loyal readers in January and February from 8 to a dozen but the readership steadily dropped after that. It’s funny, but it looks like December’s readers will top all other months this year. I may end up with 13 for the month! That’s probably bad luck. Some of them, like my Buddy, have to hold their noses when they peer into Lincoln Democrat.
I’ve basically been retired since I was about 35. You’d think I’d have plenty of time to write my own books but since I turned a real retirement age I’ve sort of gone into super-retirement and been busier than ever. Finding time to research and write a book just keeps getting harder. Even now I feel a little guilty because the two cutest grandson’s in the world are down in the basement mesmerized by television.
Ah, but this post was supposed to be about the update of my reading list. A post about this year’s progress (or lack of it) on my my own writing project will have to wait until I get a little more grandson time.
