Month 31: The introduction of non-fiction

Month 31 of 260 (11.92 percent)

Size of list: 86,513 pages (9.8 percent above start)

Pages read: 15,858 (18.33 percent)

H-list: 4,464/23,114 (19.31 percent)

N-list: 6,211/36,694 (16.93 percent)

O-list: 5,595/26,705 (19.41 percent)

Finished: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Reading: The Fires of Heaven, Masters of Modern Soccer

In order to get out of entirely genre fiction, and even out of entirely fiction, I read Maya Angelou's memoir (or at least the first volume of said memoir). This also got me into a book club my wife organizes, which is nice, because this reading has been a solitary activity, so it was good to vary it, and sit down at the end with a bunch of other readers who highlighted themes of the book.

The book deals with Angelou's life from her earliest memories at about age four to the end of her adolescence, in the period of the Depression to World War II. Like most stories about the era of segregation and before, I feel an impotent rage at the cruelty of white people, especially the dentist who won't care for a child with a raging toothache.

The highlight of the book is a trip to Mexico with her father, who gets so drunk that young Maya has to drive a car down a mountainside. This is where she spends the most time on any one day; it stands in sharp contrast to the revelations of the last three pages or so.

Another highlight was a series of parallel stories in which blacks worked to prove to themselves their superiority, first through Joe Louis' boxing, then through religious revivals in which they assured themselves of their status in heaven. It's part of the human situation, I guess, that those who are oppressed seek ways to fight back even if only spiritually, to restore their own pride.