A Year of Hundreds and Thousands

Recently there's been a rash of books based on the idea of doing something -- or not doing something -- for a full year. Just off the top of my head, for instance, there's The Year of Living Biblically. That one sounds like it might be funny and I intend to read it once my library gets a copy. And then there's Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, a book I both read and enjoyed, although it didn't seem to have any lasting effect on me. Author Judith Levine's willpower really was admirable but unfortunately I was left only with the very vague-est of desires to stop buying things and a much stronger one to try SmartWool socks. Those socks were one of the few things Levine seemed to have real trouble doing without -- she raved about how perfectly they kept her feet warm. And I'm not sure, I can't quite remember, but she may have actually broken down and purchased a pair. So immediately upon finishing the book of course I rushed out and bought a pair myself. ( I can't say I share Levine's high opinion of them, though. They made my feet itch.)  Now I'm afraid to read the wildly popular Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.  If Kingsolver broke down at some point during that year and ate a foreign, over-processed cheezie, or even wanted to eat one and wrote about it, I don't want to know about it. Otherwise  my New Year's Resolution diet will be right out the window.

Over the past couple of weeks I've noticed another trend -- book titles featuring the word "thousand." I think the main culprits are A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Street of a Thousand Blossoms.  You can't walk into a bookstore right now without those two frantically waving their multitudes at you from some shelf close to the door. Those titles just make me feel tired. I feel as if I couldn't possibly deal with a thousand splendid suns right now. Maybe a couple of splendid suns, tops, plus three mediocre ones thrown in for good measure but that's about it. And frankly the idea of a street covered in a thousand blossoms just makes me worry about who gets to clean up the mess. (I don't care to watch action movies for the same reason.)  Now I know that using the word "thousand" in your title is not necessarily a new thing. After all, Tales of a Thousand And One Nights has been around for some time now. But possibly it's recently become a little over used. And I'm not sure why, exactly, but tossing the word  "thousand" -- or even just the word "hundred" -- into your title seems like a kind of lazy shorthand for "this book is in some way exotic."  I do understand, though, that neither the title A Bunch of Splendid Suns nor The Street of a Lot of Blossoms has quite same ring. It's a problem.

Hundreds and Thousands I've Already Read and Enjoyed:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan.

Hundreds and Thousands I've Been Meaning to Read, Would Read, or Have Already Read Bits of And Plan to Finish Reading At Some Point:

Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.
Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories by Yiyun Lee.
Hitty: Her First Hundred Years -- an award-winning story about a doll's first one hundred years of life.
One Hundred Dresses-- an award-winning children's book about a girl who only has one. By Eleanor Estes, author of the most excellent The Moffats.
City of a Hundred Fires by Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco.
Hundred White Daffodils -- bits and pieces by New England poet Jane Kenyon.

Hundreds and Thousands I Feel Somewhat Conflicted About Reading:

Shorts in a Wad: One Hundred 100-Word Stories -- You know I love short short stories. But for some reason I hate the word "wad." It's one of those words I can never remember how to pronounce. I know that's a bit like being unable to remember how to spell the word "the" but it's the truth.
Hundred Camels in the Courtyard -- On the one hand, it's four short stories about smoking marijuana. On the other hand, it's by the very excellent Paul Bowles. If anyone could write excellent short stories about smoking marijuana -- and I'm dubious about that -- he could.
The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years -- On the one hand, it's about a Kazakhstani man who is thwarted by the Soviets as he attempts to bury his friend in an ancient cemetery. On the other hand, it's about a Kazakhstani who is thwarted by the Soviets as he attempts to bury his friend in an ancient cemetery. 

Hundreds and Thousands I May or May Not Have Read But Could Quite Happily Do Without:

A Thousand Tomorrows -- the first in a series of Christian romance novels.

Maybe this will be My Year of Reading Hundreds and Thousands. Or maybe not.

Comments

[babelbabe]

this post totally cracked me up.

If you need a pleasant diversion, Street of a Thousand Blossoms might do it. Not my usual fare, but I enjoyed it. Enough to think about reading some of the author's other books.

and I just started The Year of Living Biblically. Entertaining enough, although I read his first book and find this one much the same - entertaining in small doses but impossible to read straight through. Forgive my indelicacy but they are perfect, ahem, bathroom books.

[ta]

Terrific post. I wish I could get myself together enough to write fun witty posts! As for the numbers, have you seen the numbers book challenge? http://numberschallenge.blogspot.com/
There seem to be a dizzying array of book challenges these days. We were putting together a list of challenges over at Read This! http://danversreads.wordpress.com/
and the number is staggering considering some people seem to join every challenge going. I think you are safe to read Animal Vegetable, Miracle, there are no big breakdowns except cranberries. She's pretty reasonable to start with. It's funny, I haven't read any of the hundreds or thousands books you have mentioned. I must be living in a cave.

[Anna]

. . . and on the third hand, The Day Lasts More than a Thousand Years (which I don't think is a literal translation of the title) is about loss of traditional Kazakh identity and lifestyle under Soviet rule. Kind of a Central Asian Tolstoy-esque saga. It took me a while to get going, but it really grabbed me after a while. There's just not much fiction out there having anything to do with Central Asia.

But then again, I never made it through One Hundred Years of Solitude . . .