Small Sacrifices. Please kill me if I ever mention reading any true crime again. I read this because I was planning to include a famous true-crime writer as a character in my own novel, but after I finished this I just could not do it. I hated this book, I hate all the true crime I’ve ever read, I think most of it reflects a fundamentally racist worldview, and I hate Ann Rule. Ick.

Under the Banner of Heaven. I have read very little unassigned nonfiction over the last four years, to the point where I’ve decided that reading nonfiction is kind of a waste of time, and I have decided it’s time to get over that. So I started with Krakauer because he is always entertaining even when he is writing about something scary or disturbing.

Most of what I have to say about this book I already said in the discussion at the Usual Suspects, but now that I have finished the book I’m inclined to be more charitable to Krakauer. As I was reading I occasionally thought he was making some unwarranted connections, but overall I think the book worked, and I think he raises (although without really answering) some very good questions about the nature of taith and how we fit religious beliefs into contemporary society. I do think the book would have been improved if he had included some of those meditations in the early chapters, because from the reviews I see that I was not the only reader who sometimes wondered whether his focus was the true crime story at the center of the novel, or the history of the Mormon church, or something larger than either of those stories. A roadmap might have helped me to know why I was reading what I was reading.

Krakauer has been accused of being unfair to the Mormon church, or of confusing the fundamentalist sects with the mainstream church. I didn’t see that; I thought he was eminently fair, but again, I think his point was broader than a lot of the LDS reviews of the book seemed to think it was, and maybe he would have gotten a better reception had he made that point a little earlier than the final chapters of the book.

My favorite section, by far, was the discussion of Ron Lafferty’s religious beliefs and schizophrenia. I’m still trying to sort out what I think about that.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. I love this just as much as I loved it last year. This was one of the books I forced on my poor husband during a road trip last week, and he liked it, too. The book club will begin discussing this one next week. It is a great read, and although it probably does not reveal much that is new information about slavery to a reader now, I still consider it an important read if only to see how political discourse has been watered down and tamed and made more polite since Douglass wrote.

Walden. You know, I really like Thoreau, more than I like Emerson and almost as much as I like Whitman. But you don’t need to read this entire goddamned book. Nobody needs to read the entire goddamned book. “Economy” and “Where I Lived, & What I Lived For” contain everything of interest, and then for the rest of the book it just seems like he is getting crazier and crazier, and not in an interesting way. Stop after the second chapter, that’s my advice.

A Room of One’s Own. I did not read this until about five years ago. I should have read it much sooner; I should have read this in college or in high school. A whole chunk of women’s history was a mystery to me for a long time, after women had finally gotten the vote but before they entered the work force. I think this book is a reasonable primer on that missing time, although Woolf is only concerned with upper class women and my own grandmother was probably working in a factory when this book was published.

What is more interesting to me is reading this now, after having read some feminist theory, and seeing how in many ways she is not saying anything different than what Irigaray (who even shares her narrow socioeconomic focus) and some of the other French feminists said decades later; she just says it in a way that doesn’t make me want to jump out of a window.