Some 2006 Highlights and Lists
Singular 2006 Highlight
The birth of my fourth child, a son.
Cities Visited
1. Beijing*
2. San Francisco
3. Ganquan (northern Shaanxi, PRC)
4. West Yellowstone, Montana
5. Jackson, Wyoming*
6. Bozeman, Montana
7. Salt Lake City*
8. Seattle
*Visited multiple times
Notable Books Read
1. Kimball by Edward Kimball
2. Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Joseph Smith by Richard L. Bushman
3. Atonement by Ian McEwan
4. Crossing to Sunlight by Paul Zimmer
This is a self-selected collection of poems by Paul Zimmer. Zimmer, a friend of one of Rexburg's great poets, Mark Bennion, gave a very enjoyable reading on campus last March. Here is a poem I wrote one night after reading in this book:
for Paul Zimmer
Deep sleep eludes me as
Words and phrases
Traverse
My brain
Like so many train cars
Routed through
That big freight yard
In Chicago
All night long
They come and go
Clanging and clunking
North, south, east, west
A ceaseless cacophony
Of linguistic commerce
5. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
6. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage, 1995)
7. Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
8. Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China by John Pomfret
Though his experiences in China began a few years before my own, I could relate to many of Pomfret's descriptions and experiences. Here is one of my favorites, reflecting the exhiliration he felt at living in China:
“. . . Yet my existence in China wasn’t always nerve-wracking, and as I left Liu’s house and cycled back to the language institute through Beijing’s darkened alleys, an electric, irrepressible sense of joy would spread over me. I felt giddy at being in China, learning to survive and thrive in an alien environment. China was as close as I could imagine to living on another planet. Though it had some of the elements of modern life, even those reflected China’s long isolation and profound weirdness—a nuclear-armed power whose people lived in unheated hovels” (p. 13).
9. Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
John Pomfret considers this to be one of the most important books to come out of China in years and I couldn’t agree more. I learned a great deal about rural China from this book.
Fly Fishing Trips
1. Firehole River (Yellowstone National Park)
2. Madison River (Montana)
3. Warm River (Idaho)
Miles Cycled
1. An inexcusably low number, at least 1000 fewer than 2005. Will remedy in 2007.