Another monthly challenge to myself: read a book, and report on it here (to keep me honest.) These will not be terribly in depth or insightful reviews.

Of all the challenges I am giving myself in 2011, this is one of the hardest. I am so out of the habit of reading books, particularly fiction, that it feels like a chore. This will change, I reckon.

For January, I read Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon.

I wish I could go back in time and read this as a teenager, I would have loved to have been swept up in such a rich and rewarding story. It’s an adventure yarn, pure and simple — even illustrated with old-school plates you might have seen in a book like Treasure Island. It’s easy to read, too — even though it’s dense with names and places and history, I do not feel compelled to backtrack or consult the (imaginary) index.

Chabon can write with such a deft and humorous hand. His protagonists (a Frankish Jew named Zelikman and and Abyssinian mercenary named Amram) are the perfect foils. I related in particular to Zelikman, who was moody and prone to blackness. To wit, in talking about his physician’s practice:

“I don’t save lives,” Zelikman said. “I just prolong their futility.”

Chabon also describes his motives for writing this book in the Afterword, which makes me very happy, in a DVD-commentary kind of way.