Last night, I achieved a milestone, of sorts. I finished the third volume of Shelby Foote's massive (like, a thousand pages per volume) history of the Civil War (or as it was taught to me by the finest educators Oconee County had to offer, the War of Northern Aggression). I consider it an achievement, especially as I read the previous two volumes, beginning this time last year when the 150th anniversary of the war's beginnings came around (what do you get for the War that has everything?).
I knew of Foote from Ken Burns' epic documentary about the Civil War, which aired when I was a kid and helped facilitate a lifelong interest in the War Between the States. He was the kindly grandfather figure, with a slow drawl, who waxed nostalgic about the war and how it affected everyone, North and South. His writing, as it turns out, is in keeping with this kindly grandfather storytelling, though Foote was a younger man when he began the endeavor (the books were published in 1958, 1963, and 1974 respectively). I started out being skeptical that I could keep to such a protracted project of my own devising, even though all it meant was setting aside time to read about the war (I had read thousand-page books before, but I don't make a habit of it). Nonetheless, a year after I started with the first page of the first volume, I finished the last pages on my front porch.
I feel like this deserves some notice.
Anyway, in the year that it took me to read all three books (I took a break inbetween volumes, to cleanse my pallate of all such 1861-1865-related materials in my brain, before embarking on the next), a lot of things happened. I got a niece earlier last year, for one thing. She has been a pretty big part of my life since then. I also got gallstones, though I didn't know it at the time (I will always associate Roy Blount's book about the Steelers, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, with my first serious gallstone attacks). I went through ups and downs, then again and on repeat. And I discovered that Shelby Foote was a pretty damn good writer, if you could invest the time in reading his massive life's work.
Though written by a Southerner, the books are evenhanded, and I challenge anyone to find a better portrait of Abraham Lincoln in anyone else's writing. It's well worth all the time I spent in slogging through some of the less-interesting stuff to get to the things I found interesting. I might very well have saved the volumes at my local library from being deleted from the stacks, because I'm pretty sure I'm the first person in forever to check all three out at any time (and read them all the way through, to add to that).
I am awesome in my reading skills, then ;-)
Anyway, as a pallate cleanser (or is it "palate?" Spelling has never been my forte), I'm gonna read a Lewis Grizzard book.
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