In Memoriam: Regina Lindsey

A very intelligent, witty, compassionate reading friend passed away last month. Regina Lindsey was my reading soul sister in so many ways; I cannot even begin to express the loss I feel. We shared many similar interests in terms of subject matter, with both of us loving to read broadly. If I read a truly esoteric work of history, Regina always came to mind as someone to recommend the book to who might actually read -- and enjoy -- it. She just got me like that. It was not that we always agreed. In fact, we often hotly debated books in terms of scholarly and literary merit. Our politics, both domestic and global, did not always align, but she was one of the few people with whom I felt that I could truly say what I felt and still come out the other side with no hard feelings.

This wonderful woman, who was almost exactly my age (our birthdays were a few weeks apart), will be sorely missed in my reading life, by our reading community, and by her family. When a member of our online reading community, Play Book Tag, passes away, we read books that they loved or books that were on their "want to read" shelf in memoriam. Over the next few months, I plan to read the following individual titles in memory of Regina:

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response by Peter Balakian 

    There was no single book that Regina coaxed me to read more. She was adamant in her belief that a genocide occurred in Armenia just as surely as it did in World War II Europe against the Jews. When I admitted that I knew next to nothing about the topic, she told me I MUST read this book and never stopped asking if I had read it yet.

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick

    I love art history and also books about great heists, especially those that involve art or jewels. Regina loved anything to do with World War II and Nazi history. She has been recommending this book to me since she read it many years ago.

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel

    This was another book that Regina absolutely adored. And I found an absolute snooze fest! I have tried twice to get through it! She kept encouraging me to keep going, that I would be completely captivated once I really got into it. I even watched the movie -- something I never do until I finish a book -- hoping it would help; despite loving the movie, my second attempt at the book was still a DNF. I am determined that third time will be a charm in Regina's memory.

The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party by Daniel James Brown

    This is one I do not actually know if Regina read. Like me, Regina was not very fond of Goodreads and did not appear to maintain her shelf there for the last couple years. Both of us were tremendous champions of Brown's more famous work, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I could not find this one on her shelf and do not remember her ever talking about it, but I am going to read it as it is an author we both loved.

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

    The night I heard that Regina had passed away, I browsed my physical nonfiction bookshelves and cried a lot of tears. There were so many titles there that she was tied to. Books we read together, books one of us read first and then convinced the other to read, books that she recommended to me that I have yet to get to (better get on that -- as her death shows, that joke we all make about owning more books than we will ever have time to read before we die is not such a joke). Also among the titles were many that she and I talked about reading together but never did. This is one of those. The Middle East is my bailey wick; Turkey was Regina's. So, this was clearly the perfect buddy read for us. Except we never got to it.

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

    The single novel that Regina recommended to me above all others was this one. As two nonfiction history readers, we did not talk fiction nearly as often. If we were going to read books together or based on each others' recommendations, they were just always nonfiction because we read a lot of books we knew nobody else was likely to read. This year, I am finally going to get to this novel that Regina so loved.

Another thing for which Regina was very well known was her love of United States Presidential history. In that vein, Regina led a group that chronologically read a biography for every single president on Shelfari, the readers' platform -- similar to Goodreads (only better) -- that hosted Play Book Tag for many years until Amazon bought it and then merged it with Goodreads (which it already owned). A couple of years ago, a few of us talked about starting a similar read on Facebook but did not end up doing it. We have now decided to do it as part of Play Book Tag on Goodreads. We will be starting with Washington: The Indispensable Man by James Thomas Flexner