New Year's Resolutions

I like lists and I like new beginnings. The beginning of each year finds me making lists and resolutions, all in the hope of becoming a healthier, thinner, fitter, more productive person, but it doesn't always work. The fitness goals falter because I am generally lazy, but  I also blame cedar pollen, which fills the Austin skies with a yellow haze and reduces me to a sneezing, itchy-eyed, energy-sapped dud every January.
This year I came up with a resolution that is much more appealing than diet and exercise and can be accomplished indoors - reading! I have been collecting books for a couple of years now and have focused on Newbery-award winning children's books, but I have not read them, so that is the project and the resolution. I will read the Newbery books in chronological order. I would love to do it in a year, Julie and Julia-style, with the thought of a future movie documenting my race to the finish, but there are 90 Newbery-medal winners and I am not sure that reading has enough drama to have movie potential. Can you picture Meryl Streep in a chair, turning pages faster and faster as the calendar approaches December 31? Me neither.
So I embark on this project, with no hope of movie fame, but much anticipation of what I might find between the covers of these books, each of which was determined to be "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published by an American publisher in the United States in English during the preceding year." [You can find more information about the Newbery Medal at the website of the American Library Association.] I have already read a few of the books. I remember From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler with particular fondness from my own childhood. I also had great fun reading Holes, by Austin's own Louis Sachar, with my daughter, but most of these books will be new to me and I am excited to read them.
The first Newbery medal winner, published in 1921, was The History of Mankind, by Hendrik Willem Van Loon.

It is an interesting choice. It is almost 500 pages and follows human history from the time we waded out of the water to World War I.  I am enjoying the book though it is hard to imagine any child seeing this book as a treat. Not surprisingly, the book has a particularly Anglo and Eurocentric perspective that would probably give a modern historian fits and would have Howard Zinn rolling over in his grave, though Mr. Zinn might be happy to learn that Mr. Van Loon was teaching his young readers about the concept of plutocracy. The chapter on Carthage describes it as  "ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group of . . . merchants who met in a back room. . . and regarded their Fatherland as a business enterprise which ought to yield them a decent profit." Van Loon noted that this system was only as successful as the economy."As long as there was plenty of work and wages were high, the majority of the citizens were quite contented . . . but when no ships left the harbor, . . there were grumblings and there was a demand that the popular assembly be called together as in the olden days." Hmmmm. . . #Occupy Carthage anyone?
As I write this, 150 pages into the book, Carthage is gone and the Roman Empire has fallen. I am looking forward to this journey. Feel free to travel with me.