Car Books

Reading in the car

I’ve known that Caroline tracks the books she’s been reading and listening to and has been doing so for years. She started the list back in 2012 when she was endeavoring to read all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction and needed to track which ones she read; this was also part of her goal to read more novels as the two of us both share a passion for non-fiction. Tonight, I learned that she’s also been keeping track of books we’ve completed while out driving. For those who don’t know, Caroline doesn’t like driving, and most of the time, when we are both in the car, she reads to me. I’d like to share when this started, but we are both relatively uncertain; while I thought it was while we were in Germany, she insists it wasn’t until we were in America [In my memory, our first shared book experience was Moby Dick  – Caroline].

Had you asked me a day ago, I might have guessed that Caroline has read a dozen or so books to us in the past nearly ten years. This would have been based on feeling like it takes us months to get through a book, for example, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson clocks in at 1024 pages. I could easily see us needing nearly a year for a tome that big, but nope, according to Caroline, we started it on July 10, 2014, and finished it on December 13 of the same year. So, not only do we read books faster than I thought, but they are read incredibly fast. From early 2012 to October 14, 2021, or about 9.5 years, we shared 49 books we can account for. There are a number of titles we spent a day to a week trying to find a groove with that didn’t work out; those are not listed, only the books we’ve finished while driving around America. The idea that we’ve jointly read five books a year on average in the car is mind-blowing, but as I started going through the list, every one of those books came back to me.

Note regarding the first book below titled The Plum in the Golden Vase (real author unknown although it is listed as Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, which translates to “the Scoffing Scholar of Lanlin” according to Wikipedia), this massive work arrives in 5 volumes (estimated 850,000 words) with nearly 3,800 pages of dense text and a wide cast of characters. Caroline and I have used this tome as a kind of commercial interlude between other books we are reading. After a number of chapters from other titles, we’ll return to this 400-year-old Chinese novel to pull in a chapter or two before returning to the primary book we’re reading through. As of this post, we have finished the first four volumes and are about to start on the final book. This 10-year journey into the life and death of Ximen Qing will leave a gap after we’re done, but we are heading into The Water Margin, a.k.a. Outlaws of the Marsh and The Plum in the Golden Vase is a kind of spin-off from that novel, so we are not straying far.

The Water Margin by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong comes in just below the 850,000 words of The Plum in the Golden Vase and will be read simultaneously with In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust at 1.27 million words that we started recently. I find this arrangement interesting because we’ll be dividing our time between these monumental Chinese and French novels interspersed with other books about science or history. This doesn’t take into account what we read at home.

Anyway, without further adieu, here’s that list covering early 2012 to October 2021:

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 1 – Read between 2012 to 2015

The River of Doubt by Candice Millart – Unknown to April 2012

Victorian London by  – Unknown to October 2012

Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal- October 2012 to November 2012

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson – November 2012 to January 2013

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt – January 2013 to April 2013

The Vikings: A History by Robert Ferguson – May 2013 to August 2013

How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman – August 2013 to Feb 2014

The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg – Unknown to August 2014

The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg – September 2014 to November 2014

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby – February 2014 to March 2014

Humboldt by Gerard Helferich – April 2014 to May 2014

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms by Richard Fortey – May 2014 to July 2014

The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson – July 2014 to December 2014

Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall – January 2015 to March 2015

Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco – March 2015 to April 2015

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 2 – 2015 to 2017

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – April 2015 to May 2015

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo – May 2015 to June 2015

Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey – June 2015 to August 2015

Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth by Chris Stringer – July 2015 to September 2015

The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson – September 2015 to October 2015

East of Eden by John Steinbeck – October 2015 to November 2015

The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire by A.H. Sayce – December 2015 to Unknown

The Root of Wild Madder by Brian Murphy – Unknown to July 2016

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder –  August 2017 to October 2017

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 3 – December 2017 to August 2019

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – January 2018 to February 2018

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan – February 2018 to May 2018

The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization by Nicholas P. Money – June 2018 to July 2018

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter M. Judson – July 2018 to October 2018

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett – November 2018 to November 2018

Handywoman: A Creative Life, Post-stroke by Kate Davies – November 2018 to November 2018

Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow – December 2018 to December 2018

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman – December 2018 to August 2019

Kabloona by Gontran de Poncin – January 2019 – February 2019

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis – June 2019 to July 2019

Barons of the Sea by Steven Ujifusa – August 2019 to October 2019

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 4 – September 2019 to October 2021

Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti – October 2019 to December 2019

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan – January 2020 to February 2020

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann – February 2020 to August 2020

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard – August 2020 to January 2021

The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray – January 2021 to April 2021

Tales from the Ant World by E.O. Wilson – April 2021 to April 2021

The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson – April 2021 to July 2021

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey Smith – July 2021 to August 2021

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust – September 2021 to (currently reading)

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 5 – October 2021 to (currently reading)*

*Edit: Part 5 of The Plum In The Golden Vase pulled us in hard, and its 420 pages were zipped through in just a few weeks. We closed out this incredible journey on November 5, 2021.

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