Why I Miss Bill Clinton (and other thoughts):

When it comes to pleasure reading, I generally go for books that fall into one of the following categories:

Mystery/suspense
Biography/history
Extreme adventure

I tend to be drawn toward historical fiction, as was the case with my most recent read, The March. I can't properly claim to be a Civil War buff - I know very little of battles and generals. But I've always found that historical period to be captivating, probably for less-than-original reasons: the larger-than-life historical characters like Lincoln and Sherman, emancipation, the test of this republic's tenacity. Doctorow's narrative was vivid and his characters captivating. A couple of passages caught my attention in particular:

At the surrender of Johnston to Sherman: And so the war had come down to words. It was fought now in terminology across a table. It was contested in sentences. Entrenchments and assaults, drum taps and bugle calls, marches, ambushes, burnings, and pitched battles were transmogrified into nouns and verbs. It is all turned very quiet, Sherman said to Johnston, who, not quite understanding, lifted his head to listen.(p. 348).

Sherman's reflections: Though this march is done, and well accomplished, I think of it now, God help me, with longing - not for its blood and death but for the bestowal of meaning to the very ground trod upon, how it made every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral consequence, whereas now, as the march dissolves, so does the meaning, the army strewing itself into the isolated intentions of diffuse private life, and the terrain thereby left blank and also diffuse, and ineffable, a thing once again, and victoriously, without reason, and, whether diurnally lit and darkened, or sere or fruitful, or raging or calm, completely insensible and without any purpose of its own.

And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war. (p. 359).

The latter quote struck me particularly for its potential relevance to soldiers returning from Iraq. I will be leaving next week for Ft. McCoy to interview returning soldiers as part of the research project I'm extremely fortunate to be working on this summer. I have a feeling I'll be more than moved by some of the words I'll hear spoken there.

What's really exciting is when a book encompasses several of my preferred categories. My next read does just that - River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey. The book combines biography/history and extreme adventure. Given that I'm a Jon Krakauer junkie (highly recommend Into Thin Air and Into the Wild!), I'm excited to delve into this true story of a former president fighting for his life in the Amazonian jungle! I'll keep you posted...