Leslie's Omnibus

Book Your Ticket

I really enjoyed keeping a list of my reading last year, so here's the kick-off to my 2011 monthly reading list.

January - 4

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Laura Hillenbrand[1]

Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume I, Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and Other Editors of the Mark Twain Project[2]

Rab and His Friends, John Brown[3]

Don’t Tell Me Words Don’t Matter: How Rhetoric Won the 2008 Presidential Election, Joel B. Pollack[4]*


[1] By the author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend, this story of Olympic miler Louie Zamperini who survived Japanese prison camp in World War II. An outstanding read.

[2] Authoritative is the word, too. The book is a very strange hybrid of very serious people passing on very serious background material, thought and facts about a very irreverent author who refuses to cooperate with their seriousness. I read all the notes, skipping nothing but the bibliography. Given that this book is 760 pages long, my reading list is short this month!

[3] This short story by Twain’s dear friend John Brown was mentioned in his autobiography a couple of times, so I put the autobiography aside, ordered this on Kindle, read the short story, and then bounced right back to the autobiography. It helped me to flesh out Twain’s friend.

[4] Pollak ran against my current representative, Jan Shakowsky, in the last election. Thus my interest, in this book. He’s a very persuasive writer with some very good points, no matter whether you voted for Obama or McCain.

*Read in paperback.

Leslie

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