Newsletter: a wintry mix ...
A good start to my favorite time of the year ...
The last couple months have involved the interplay of family, travel, and winter. This mixture calls for a combination of short books that work on flights and between meals and long books to settle into amidst rain and (we wish) snow. While I am well into both the long book and winter stage as I write this, I must share what was a remarkable string of wonderfully brilliant, very different books that share the gift of great writing and … brevity. In each of the following, I will reference the book with an excerpt from my only slightly longer review found on vaughnstackofbooks.
Baumgartner by Paul Auster is a short novel “written by an adult for adults. What does it mean to get older? To get to the place where middle age is in the rearview mirror and OLD age is visible on the horizon on certain types of days? Paul Auster, the auteur of post-modern writing, has begun to get there …”. This is NOT the opaque and slightly pretentious post-modern work that makes Auster an acquired taste. It is as accessible as it is honest.
Years ago, Entertainment Weekly (at its height as a critical voice) used to beat the drum slowly on the great overlooked series, The Wire. I loved both the series and the magazine’s determination that people watch it. I feel that way about the late Cormac McCarthy’s final pair of simultaneously released novels: The Passenger and Stella Maris. “If Oppenheimer, with its 3 ½ hour length, dense plot lines and often relentless dialogue can draw in just under one billion dollars worldwide, I think a serious reader can read one or both of these unique novels. I apologize for the obnoxious dare. I am very likely projecting my frustrations with the Nobel nominating process and its indifference to McCarthy … “
“Especially in these fraught times, I look for contemporary commentary indirectly – through history or literature. It is in the latter that Stephen Greenblatt’s succinct and utterly accessible Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics is just what the doctor ordered …”. This provocative gem is a great literary takedown and a disturbing historical alarm. It is so instructive at so many levels that one simply wants to fly to Cambridge and sit in the back row of Greenblatt’s class.
“Pritchett’s perfect prose and Hofer’s evocative photographs capture a city (circa 1962) losing its imperial sheen and decades away from its international rebirth. The book is a civic and national history brilliantly structured around the growth of London itself …”. It helps to love London and to be a bit familiar with English history. Because it is dated, you have to take the last bits with a grain of salt. If you believe as I do that Samuel Johnson was right when he said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”, London Perceived is a treat to be revisited before each trip to that vast, densely textured city.
I was recently asked by Jeannie to photograph the SEVEN books that most profoundly shaped my life. She asked me not to ask why but the uncertainty was a pleasant one that manifested itself in the beautiful painting that will grace my next letter. It is the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. Selecting the books was not easy and the more I thought about, it only got harder.
Childhood and adolescence are filled with books and stories that shape one’s life. Some are serious, some are sublimely simple and others are the product of a young idiosyncratic mind. It is very hard to measure books from your youth according to the criteria of my wife’s question. Thus, to qualify for Jeannie’s List, the book had to be read after graduating from college. Next, if fiction, I will have read it at least twice. If non-fiction, its pages must be littered with marginalia and I had, at least, begun to write about it. Finally, it had to be a book I would hand to a graduating student without question if I hadn’t already taught it.
Saving Jeannie’s List for the next letter, I will try to remember as honestly as possible the books of my youth that left the greatest mark. One of the following will make Jeannie’s List and it will be absolutely NO surprise which it is. Here is a “youth list” of SEVEN in vague chronological order.
1. The Ladybird history book series circa 1963 … big print, simple language, 50 small pages, fully illustrated … a tour of English History so Anglophile that it would make Winston Churchill blush. It likely provided the first spark of a lifetime interest in history and Britain. The yeast in the making of a WASP … my mother brought them back with her after visits to London …
2. (a tie) The 8-volume pictorial history of the Civil War that I flipped through on the floor of my grandparents living room in Atherton every time I spent the night (which was frequently). I wore the bindings out. My grandfather willed them to me and they occupy a place of honor on my bookshelves. This “flipping” started at a very young age and clearly laid the groundwork for the Civil War trilogy of Bruce Catton that ended with his triumphant Stillness at Appomattox … read in 9th grade, it formalized my endless interest in the Civil War … it was the first of many long military histories.
3. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke … it was science fiction that eased me into my love affair with fiction and Clarke’s masterpiece is still a book I hand out. It blew open parts of my mind that never closed.
4. The short stories of Ray Bradbury continued this move into fiction … they amazed me with their beauty and simple but real profundity … they might have been my first taste of the sublime.
5. The Great Gatsby … it was the first book I finished and then promptly reread … It has never stopped shaping my life in one form or another ranging from going into teaching to writing a book to this newsletter.
6. King Lear … taught by my beloved mentor Jim Durham at Cate in a class of five, it qualifies because I confess that I have not reread it in its entirety since that year in high school … back in the winter of 1973, I not only got a glimpse of the greatness of Shakespeare, thanks to Jim I actually understood it - most of it … as a testament to the wonder of that teaching moment, I may refer to Lear more than any piece of literature when talking about - most anything.
7. Essays of Jonathon Edwards … please keep reading!! This is not as pretentious as it may sound … only a few essays … but in a section with a brilliant university professor who showed me what it felt like to “crack the nut” of a great mind.
Writing this I realize the arbitrary nature of my criteria but when it comes to reading and books, it has always been an effort to establish some order amidst the chaos of choice and enthusiasm. In this spirit, I choose to address the final SEVEN in a separate newsletter.
Here’s to winter … a bit more appreciated these days.