THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY

 
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon, Random House Inc, 2000, 636 pp

Because I read for so many different reasons and projects (research for my memoir, research for my novel, reading for the bookstore and the 5 reading groups I attend), I sometimes read many books before I find one to love unconditionally. I've always planned to read Chabon and grabbed this one on a whim one day at the library. He won the Pulitzer for this one, so by a stretch, it fits into My Big Fat Reading Project, but it is about cartoonists from the 1940s and I've never been into cartoons. (I found out why in the book.) Anyway, it was great, absorbing, heart wrenching and I did not want it to end.

The writing is beautiful, muscular, full of words and images that put me deeply into both places and people's hearts. The stories of Kavalier, refugee from Prague, student of magic and artist extraordinaire, who can escape from anywhere and anything except his survivor's guilt; and of his cousin Sammy Clay, who can spin stories 24 hours a day, who loves men and women and children but not himself and takes the concept of loyalty to a new dimension; these stories go on and on. Every story is larger than life, like the superheroes they created, composed of feats of overcoming adversity, massive creativity, heights of triumph and sloughs of despair, all tied together by dogged perseverance and hard work.

Meanwhile, the reader learns about the rise and fall of the Golden Age of superhero comics, Brooklyn and Jews from just before World War II into the 1950s. Since this is the period I've been reading through for the past six years, it was another view for me, one I had only glimpsed in a few books so far.

This amazing author has moved right up to the top of the queue of authors whose entire oeuvre of novels I must read and I am off to the library to get The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I was never into baseball either but I am sure it won't bother me.

MY NAME IS WILL

My Name is Will, Jess Winfield, Hachette Book Group, 2008, 288 pp


The subtitle of this mildly entertaining story is "A Novel of Sex, Drugs and Shakespeare." There is plenty of sex, drugs are in abundance and there are two Shakespeares. A young William Shakespeare is coming of age, learning about persecution (his family is Catholic) and wenching, while he writes his first poetry and hangs out with wannabe actors and playwrights.

Simultaneously runs the story of Will Shakespeare Greenburg, slacker grad student at UC Santa Cruz, who gets himself involved with too many women, certain drug deals which play out at a Renasissance Faire near Berkeley, CA and tries to write a masters thesis on his namesake.

The author attempts a comparison of the religious troubles in 16th century England with the War on Drugs in 1980s USA. He comes up with many zany characters who are the highlight of the book. The female characters are all strong and wise to the ways of men and the world.

Winfield spent his early adult years with the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who abridge Shakespeare and other writers, turning them into comedy. (There is an example of this in the book.) He went on to write and produce cartoons for Disney. This career path is evident in My Name is Will and if nothing else, he makes the infamous bard accessible.

THE HUNGER GAMES

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2008, 407 pp


I have mentioned before how the bookstore where I work is located in a community just outside of Los Angeles where family values, reading, education and being involved in one's childrens' upbringing are important issues. In a word: conservative. As Young Adult literature gets edgier by the month, I am called upon as a bookseller to pronounce on "appropriate reading" when parents inquire.

It is a tricky proposition and almost always bothers me, since I consider myself an optimistic anarchist and from that philosophical position, feel that people (including kids) should read what they want to read.

So, The Hunger Games has violence. It has children killing children. It has abuse of children by an evil, repressive government. But it also has a heroine who epitomizes intelligence, bravery, loyalty and survival for all, not just herself. If I had a teenage daughter at this time in history, I would want her to read The Hunger Games.

Katniss Everdeen is 16 years old and lives each day to provide food and safety for her mother and young sister. They live in a poor outer district of a country made up of the ruins of what used to be North America. Part of the harsh control exercised by the government is an annual televised event, the "Hunger Games", in which each district must send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen, who will fight to the death of all but one survivor. When Katniss' sister gets picked by lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place.

The rest of the story plays out in a combination of reality TV, Roman gladiator games and the Greek myth of Theseus, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. It is a breathlessly exciting page turner and in my opinion beats Twilight hands down.

BOOKS

Books, Larry McMurtry, Simon & Schuster, 2008, 259 pp


It turns out that I'd only read three of McMurtry's books before reading Books, which is odd because I feel like I know this author very well. Of course I've seen the movie versions of The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment. I read Evening Star (1992) and disliked it intensely all the way through but suddenly, inexplicably liked it at the very end. I read Lonesome Dove (1985) for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and loved every paragraph. On the strength of that book alone, I fell in love with McMurtry.

I always planned to read more of his fiction but so far have not. I read his memoir of driving the interstates (Roads, 2000) and that was great for me because I was doing a lot of travel on the interstates myself at the time.

I like McMurtry because he clearly likes people, both men and women, and he revels in quirkiness; he doesn't judge; he doesn't expect everyone to be just like everyone else. He may be the Mark Twain of the 20th century.

Books is a memoir of his life as a book dealer. I have long wanted to visit his vast bookstore in Archer, TX. In Books we learn the story of how that store came to be. McMurtry is now 72 years old and he writes Books like an old man telling stories. It is sketchy, full of people no one outside the world of rare books and book collecting would know. The book men are some the quirkiest people ever. It is almost as if McMurtry is reminiscing for his own pleasure more than anything else.

But I liked it. It put me into that world. It is a niche, like Americana music or comic book collecting. Near the end he talks a bit about the fate of publishing, books, bookstores and book readers. He becomes a bit sentimental ( I mean, he IS Larry McMurtry), but he is no fool. Kind of like his characters.

TOP 20 FAVORITE BOOKS READ IN 2008

Happy New Year 2009!

This past year I read 127 books, up from 124 the year before. Once again I had a bit of trouble narrowing down the list of favorites to only 20.

Because of my job at the Oldest Children's Bookstore in America (named as such by Publisher's Weekly), I branched out to reading books for readers aged 8-12 as well as Young Adult, so I could be helpful to all the grandmothers, moms, dads, aunts and uncles who come in needing recommendations. We also sell books for adults and so I read to keep up on some current releases.

Also in 2008, I read books for My Big Fat Reading Project and covered 1954 through 1955.

All the books I read have been or will be soon reviewed here on the blog. As usual, I am highly interested in knowing what books you enjoyed in your year of reading, especially because I may have missed some good books. You can comment below this post. The easiest way is to choose "anonymous" from the list of ways to post your comments because then you don't have to fill in any other information.

Here is the list:

All About Lulu, Jonathan Evison
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
Ghostwalk, Rebecca Stott
The God of Animals, Aryn Kyle
Highwire Moon, Susan Straight
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw
Loving Frank, Nancy Horan
The Master Butcher's Singing Club, Louise Erdrich
A Mercy, Toni Morrison
Peony in Love, Lisa See
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson
Reservation Nation, David Fuller Cook
The Senator's Wife, Sue Miller
The Shadow Catcher, Marianne Wiggins
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
Three Little Words, Ashley Courter-Rhodes
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell

SCRAMBLED EGGS AT MIDNIGHT

Scrambled Eggs at Midnight, Brad Barkley & Heather Hepler, Speak, 2006, 262 pp


This summer while in Michigan for the family reunion, I paid a visit to my second favorite indie bookstore in Ann Arbor: Nicola's Books. I had with me the mother and twin stepsisters of my daughter-in-law. Ah, the 21st century family. One of the twins recommended Scrambled Eggs at Midnight so I bought it.

The story is utterly charming, taking the 21st century family theme to the entire end of ridiculous and the two-author method to new heights. In alternating chapters, the male author writes from the teenage boy's point of view, the female author from the girl's.

The girl's mom is an aging hippie divorced artist/craft person who works at Renaissance Faires, so they are constantly on the move. The boy's dad, assisted by the mom, runs a Christian fat camp for teens. The boy and the girl are both lonely, don't "get" their parents and naturally hook up.

So it is a summer teen romance with plenty of teen angst and a happy ending. As I said, utterly charming. So why didn't I finish reading it until November? Well, sometimes when you are a middle-aged woman with a mother turning 90, a husband out of work, two grown sons and three growing grandchildren, a Presidential campaign in the background noise and a tanking economy, who is writing a memoir and is up to when she started first grade, a charming teen romance doesn't always resonate.

BRIDGE OF SIGHS

Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo, Alfred A Knopf, 2007, 642 pp


I read Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls about five years ago. I liked it well enough because the characters were good, because he kept me turning the pages and because at the time I was going through big, positive spiritual changes and there is nothing like a book about small-town America to link you back to the mundane.

I read Bridge of Sighs, rushing through it rather more quickly than I probably should have, because I had a reading group discussion coming up. The rushing made me resent the many slow passages which I might have enjoyed more at a more leisurely pace. I did like the characters and their development. I admired the ideas he was expounding: do people really ever change their basic character?; is it better to be sunny and hopeful or warily cynical?; what is the ultimate effect of carcinogenic toxins on a gene pool? And the ultimate mystery of life: what is love?

The bottom line though is that I did not really like the book. Certain things annoyed me just a little too much and spoiled the overall effect. They were the above mentioned slow passages, an odd arrangement of the plot, some dialogue that didn't fit the characters and a just slightly somehow insincere quality in some of the emotions.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN

Empire of the Sun, J G Ballard, Simon & Schuster, 1984, 279 pp

Perhaps I was just not ready for another POW camp story. After all, it was only two months ago that I suffered through Andersonville (MacKinlay Kantor, 1955). I did not enjoy one page of Empire of the Sun, although there were some good sentences. You may ask why I read it, a legitimate question. The answer is, it was for a reading group and it is part of my personal ethics always to attend the meetings and read the books for my reading groups if at all possible.

This book is an autobiographical novel about the years the author spent as a prisoner of the Japanese in Shanghai during WWII. He was only 11 years old when he was catapulted from his secure and privileged life in the International Settlement, separated from his parents and left to fend for himself as a prisoner of war. Yes, he was a wily survivor and lived to tell the tale. He is not even especially bitter about it; I suppose because as a child, one is better at taking life as it comes. I couldn't help thinking about what if that had happened to my sons at that age.

I have coined another name for a genre: prison camp lit. I remembered two others I have read: King Rat by James Clavel and Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler. I am sure I will come across others in my reading adventures. Maybe next time I will eat extra protein and green leafy vegetables while taking vitamin C.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan, The Penguin Press, 2006, 411 pp


Here's what I like about Michael Pollan. He has a clear moral stance from which he writes. Because of that he is not merely a spectator but digs right in and does what he writes about. I mean, who else would actually buy a young steer and follow his life all the way to slaughter, standing literally in the shit of an industrial feedlot with his steer?

Ever since my hippie days, I've been involved with food. I was eating a macrobiotic diet throughout my first pregnancy and the breastfeeding of my son, who also was reared on the same dietary principles. My first husband and I founded Eden Foods in Ann Arbor, MI. One of my sisters and her husband had an organic farm in Pennsylvania during the early 70s. My other sister's husband was an original partner in Eden Foods and works in the natural food business to this day. Though I am no longer a vegetarian and in fact am a complete omnivore, I learned in the macrobiotic years that I could mostly be my own doctor and keep myself and my family reasonably healthy by being conscious about food.

The Omnivore's Dilemma was therefore highly interesting, especially for the knowledge of how industrial concepts, big money interests and globalization have made being conscious about food a very tricky proposition. But the true high point of this book was Section II, entitled "Pastoral: Grass", where Pollan captures the essence of ecology; what it really means to the health of all species and to the future of life on this planet. He shows us some incredible individuals who have figured out how to apply ecology to an agricultural model and who are compelled to live virtually "off the grid" to protect what they do from big industrial agriculture which goes hand in hand with big money and big government: the triumvirate that surely spells doom for planet Earth.

This is a long, detailed book. Reading it requires a dictionary AND Google, a willingness to learn new things and in the end perseverance just to get through it. But one more thing about Michael Pollan is the leaven here. He is serious about his subject but he does not take himself too seriously. Wry is what he is.

THE EIGHT

The Eight, Katherine Neville, Ballantine Books, 1989, 598 pp


This was a fairly entertaining story but it seemed to go on too long. A chess set originally belonging to Charlemagne is the center of a big chase and mystery, spanning hundreds of years across many countries and involving key world figures. There is supposedly some kind of power involved with the chess set and naturally most people want to rule the world.

Neville moves back and forth in history, includes interesting tidbits about the game of chess and covers various love stories. The 20th century part of the story is set in the 1970s during the "energy crisis" and the beginnings of OPEC. In the midst of the War on Terror, that all seems so quaint.

The Eight got a big push this fall because Neville released a sequel called The Fire just a few weeks ago. I won't be reading it.

THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell, Harcourt Inc, 2006, 245 pp


This chilling novel falls in the category of crimes against and by women. Esme Lennox was a young girl and woman who simply did not fit in with what was expected by her culture. When she reached young womanhood and her family needed her to make a good marriage to save their financial and social standing, she dramatized her final rebellion. For that she was committed to a mental institution by her father with her mother's consent. From that point on, no one in the family spoke of her. She had been vanished.

Sixty-one years later in late 20th century Edinburgh, mental institutions are being closed down. Inmates with no family are simply dumped back into society. But Esme has a great-niece, a young independent single woman who has never known that she had a great aunt. When Iris is contacted by the institution, she is faced with devastating decisions and must unravel the mystery of her family.

The novel is exceedingly well done. Set in the present with the back story coming out bit by bit, the horror of the story, the extreme twistedness of the characters and the inhumane attitudes toward a woman such as Esme drilled into my heart. Though I have known about such abuses for a long time, I felt shattered by this story. Who needs Stephen King when we have writers like Maggie O'Farrell? Apparently the horrors that mankind can dream up and then inflict on each other transcend any invented ones.

The real secret of the novel though is in the writing and in the delicate, tasteful way that all is finally revealed. You can suppress and twist the human spirit but you cannot eliminate it.

THE SENATOR'S WIFE

The Senator's Wife, Sue Miller, Alfred A Knopf, 2008, 306 pp


Since reading Sue Miller's first novel twelve years ago, when it was already a decade old (The Good Mother, 1986), I've carried the idea that she was a good writer, yet for some reason I never read any more of her novels. She has written nine of them. Well, she is a good writer, especially about women: what it is like to be female in the 20th and 21st centuries from the viewpoints of different kinds of women.

In The Senator's Wife, she contrasts two women of different generations and widely different backgrounds. Delia is the senator's wife. She is in her seventies and has spent her adult life raising children and figuring out how to deal with the infidelities of a husband who is a successful politician and whom she deeply loves.

Meri came from lower class people, had a neglectful cold-hearted mother but bettered herself through education and married a young professor when she was in her 30s. She has a career and an independent outlook though she also is very much in love with her absent minded husband.

When Meri and her husband move in next door to Delia, the women form a relationship and all their stories come out. Meri needs a mother as she goes through her first pregnancy and her reactions to caring for an infant. Delia needs a daughter who does not judge her as she deals with her aging husband's illness. Ultimately neither gets what she needs.

What I liked was that Miller makes no judgements about either woman. She does make you love them both while exposing their faults and making clear the pressures under which each made her life decisions. In that way, each woman gets what she needs from the author. This is definitely a woman's book but a good one because it is truthful.

THE MASTER BUTCHERS SINGING CLUB

The Master Butchers Singing Club, Louise Erdrich, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2003, 388 pp


Other than her Young Adult novel, Birchbark House, I have not read Erdrich before. She seemed to get mixed reviews on this novel, so I was happy to find that it is wonderful. Stellar storytelling, characters whom I now feel I have actually known, meticulous description that was never boring. This book shines in my memory, five days after finishing it, as another of the best reading experiences of the year.

The main characters are Fidelis, the butcher and Delphine, a young motherless woman. The story opens with Fidelis' return from WWI to his German village and I was at once fascinated by this man and the writer's voice.

In the second chapter, in a distinctly different voice, Erdrich introduces Delphine. She is quirky, strong, lonely as hell and nobody's fool except that she has an impossibly soft spot for her drunken father.

Fidelis emigrates to North Dakota, becomes his town's master butcher, starts the singing club and we are off. The town has immigrants, Native Americans and a grisly triple murder mystery. The people survive postwar life, the Depression and the second World War. The novel turns out to be Delphine's story and she is a completely admirable and lovable heroine. For all the grit, violence, blood and sorrow in the story, Erdrich managed to make me feel good about mankind.

BOOKS READ FROM 1954, PART SIX

This is the final post for books read from 1954. It covers the award winning books from that year.


THE PULITZER PRIZE: There was no fiction award for the Pulitzer in 1954.


THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD: The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow, The Viking Press, 1953, 536 pp

I was so excited to start this book, which won the NBA and was Bellow's breakout book, earning him a towering literary reputation; one which he built on and sustained for a long lifetime of many novels. I had read and quite liked his first two novels: Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947.) None of this prepared me for the sense of having plowed into a brick wall at the beginning of Augie March.

The writing is dense though lush with detailed descriptions of places, people and situations. Augie is the son of an unassimilated Jewish immigrant mother, who was deserted by the father of Augie and his brothers when they were toddlers. It is unclear whether or not the parents were ever married. In a small and decrepit apartment with them lives Grandma Lausch, who is not really related to them but who dominates the household. The setting is the Jewish ghetto of Chicago in the early 20th century, so everyone seems to be related with large extended families, but I have never read about a ghetto described quite in this suffocating way where each character's personality, looks, views and shortcomings are picked over like a Jewish housewife shopping at market.

I soldiered on, getting a feel for the style, the sentences, the milieus, but just feeling so outside of the story, as though I were a tourist in a land where I didn't speak the language. It was similar to reading Dostoevsky or some poorly translated Eastern European novelist from the 1940s.

Finally I went to Google and got some background. I don't usually do that anymore until I have finished a book because I have experienced disastrous effects on my reading pleasure, but I wasn't having much pleasure here and it helped. I got the literary context in which Bellow was writing: a sort of Don Quixote thing. I learned a new word: picaresque (a genre of literature in which the life and adventures of a rogue are chronicled) and a better definition of rogue (thieves, vagabonds and tricksters.) Now oriented, I proceeded and grew to love both Augie and the book.

From Depression days in Chicago to a decadent Mexican town to the film scene in Paris to New York City, associating with countless rogues without truly becoming one himself, in and out of love affairs with all sorts of women, Augie grows to manhood. He is on a quest to find his own destiny. One of the ideas in this novel that struck me and stuck with me, is that a person's personality determines his destiny. I've started looking at people this way.

There are several levels going on in The Adventures of Augie March. I'm not sure I got them all. I finished the book with the conviction that there is an innocence in the most evil of persons and a bit of evil in the most innocent. I am for sure a fan of Saul Bellow.


THE HUGO AWARD: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Ballantine Books, 1953, 165 pp

This is probably Bradbury's most famous book but I had never read it before. It is said that the book is about censorship but it is actually about the loss of literacy and the willingness of mankind in general to agree with being dumbed down and giving up their freedom to think for themselves.

Guy Montag is a fireman whose job it is to burn books and any houses that contain them. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns. He meets a young girl who opens his eyes to the actual pleasure of life and the beauty of literature. He rebels against the powers that be and eventually goes underground and joins up with people who are trying to preserve the knowledge found in books.

I had a problem with the writing. I thought it was his worst so far. But the story is a unique take on a universal theme (Keep the wisdom!) I especially liked the image of the TV room in people's houses. All four walls of a room comprised the TV screen. How prescient.


THE EDGAR AWARD: (Here we have a new award, created by The Mystery Writers of America in 1954 in its first year of existence. The award is named after Edgar Allan Poe who is considered to be the father of the detective story.)
Beat Not the Bones, Charlotte Jay, Harper, 1953, 219 pp

This deeply creepy mystery, set in Papua, New Guinea (an island off the coast of Australia), won the first ever Edgar Award. It was Charlotte Jay's second novel. (She wrote seven books under the pseudonym Charlotte Jay, one as Geraldine Jay and seven more as Geraldine Hall.) Her writing is excellent as is her plotting. The characters are fully developed and the descriptions of tropic jungle make you see the foliage and feel the heat as well as the humidity.

Beat Not the Bones is the old story of colonials vs natives told in a unique manner. A young, innocent and inexperienced woman arrives in New Guinea, determined to find her new husband's murderer, not believing the report that he committed suicide. As she gets her bearings and begins to penetrate the layers of lies and secrets as well as the tragedies of lives ruined by the tropics, you watch Stella Warwick grow up, get wise and learn true compassion.

The revelation of the truth of what happened is so well done that the reader is as puzzled as Stella until the end. If all mysteries were this good, I would read more of them. What a find!


THE NEWBERY AWARD: And Now Miguel, Joseph Krumgold, Thomas Y Crowell Company, 1953, 245 pp

In this Newbery Award winner, as always, I was won over by a tale of a boy coming of age. (Note that in 14 years of reading these winners, only one so far had a female main character.)

Miguel is 11 years old, the third son of a Spanish/Mexican family of sheep ranchers in New Mexico. His greatest desire is to be allowed to go with the men and the sheep to the Sangro de Cristo Mountains for the summer season. The sheep are taken there to escape the heat and ensure pastures of grass. He plans, he works, he prays and makes wishes, but when he gets his heart's desire it comes along with other changes that include sorrow and loss. Big life lessons are learned but conveyed by the author with tact. No preaching here.

I learned a lot about sheep.


THE CALDECOTT MEDAL: Madeline's Rescue, Ludwig Bemelmans, The Viking Press, 1953, 56 pp

This is the second book in the Madeline series and Bemelmans is the author as well as the illustrator. Madeline and her eleven roommates are out for a walk with Miss Clavel, when Madeline manages to fall into the Seine. She is rescued by a dog who goes back with the girls and becomes the object of their affections as well as the center of their jealousies and the source of trouble for Miss Clavel.

I only remember the first Madeline book from my childhood but seeing the glorious illustrations again made me go to the picture book section in the store where I work and read them all.

BOOKS READ FROM 1954, PART FIVE

The Magicians, J B Priestly, Harper & Brothers, 1954, 246 pp

I had never heard of this author until I found The Magicians in a list of important novels from 1954. I learned that he wrote many novels, beginning in the 1920s and continuing into the 1970s. He was English, concerned with peace, the nature of time and memory and was of a spiritual, though not Christian, bent. Sounded good to me.

There are magicians in this book, three of them, but they are actually a sort of philosopher/god type. In fact, they reminded me of some characters in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. They meet every so often to see what they can do about helping mankind and the world. They have certain powers which they use to affect men's minds.

Charles Ravenstreet is an unhappy middle-aged man who married the boss's daughter and made a career in a big electrical company but has now become obsolete. His wife died, they had no children and he is alone and at loose ends. He has been approached by an unscrupulous businessman who wants to manufacture and sell a drug that will keep the masses happy with their lot.

OK, this could be good. But it didn't really work for me as a novel. Ravenstreet and the magicians meet, his past bad decisions get straightened out, the bad guys get what's coming and Charles ends up happy. There is some good stuff about how all time exists at once, though Priestly is a bit vague about the future, but the events are just too unlikely and Priestly is asking to be at best mocked and at worst ignored.

Luckily the book was short and happily there are other authors and books that take these ideas and write much better and more exciting stories. I think of The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham.


The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler, The Macmillan Company, 1954, 431 pp

This is the second volume of Koestler's autobiography which starts with Arrow in the Blue, 1952). I almost skipped it and I'm so glad I didn't. I loved it.

This volume begins in 1931 when he joined the Communist party. He travels to the Soviet Union and goes on missions into Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Then he leaves the CP, is imprisoned in France in 1940 (from which came the novel Scum of the Earth) for being an immigrant, and finally makes his home in England. He covers in depth his gradual disillusionment with Communism, a story I've now heard from Upton Sinclair and Richard Wright. Koestler's story however is the most fascinating because of his brutally honest analysis of his own motives and his admission of being a "true believer" type.

I got to learn about the writing of all his novels; ones I've already read. While in prison in Spain he had a huge realization, a spiritual experience, about what life is all about. Like all such experiences, it was hard to put into words but having had a couple such occurrences myself, I so got it.

I am sad that my Arthur Koestler reading has come to an end. (He wrote more books but no more novels.) I truly treasure having known this man through his writings. To me, he is the best kind of intellectual because of his deep involvement with the world.


Revolt in 2100, Robert A Heinlein, Shasta Publishers, 1954, 192 pp

In 2100 AD, the United States is ruled by The Prophet under a strict fundamentalist type of Christian religion. Religion, mass communications and psychology are used to maintain the status quo, not to mention The Prophet's army. There are one novella and two stories in this volume.

In the novella "If This Goes On--", an underground group which has infiltrated The Prophet's government stages a coup and takes over. This is called The Second Revolution, and they try to reinstate religious freedom. Heinlein portrays The Prophet as a complete hoax, with his "virgins" and staged miracles. I also liked the way his hero has to shake off the religious and military training of a lifetime in order to become a revolutionary.

In "Coventry", the new order still uses psychology to control the population, but social offenders of the country's moral code are given a choice: undergo psychological "correction" or go to Coventry, an area of the country set in the western states, which is a lawless anarchy made up of all the misfits.

"Misfit", the final story, is about sending the youth of America into space to build space stations, providing extreme training in a sort of Marines type of setting, though it is more scientific than military. The hero is a math wizard who doesn't know how smart he is, but saves the day.

All very entertaining. I thought that the theocracy story was far superior to Vidal's Messiah, though the two books together were timely, sobering and gave me lots to ponder concerning mankind's tendency to go into fanaticism.


Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov, Doubleday & Company, 1954, 224 pp

In the front of one of Robert Heinlein' books is a chart of future history which served him as a plan for his upcoming novels. Isaac Asimov must have had a similar chart, if only in his mind, because his books keep moving into the future.

In Caves of Steel, the population of Earth had grown to over 8 billion, necessitating a level of efficiency in living space that has put most humans into cities built inside of steel coverings: the caves of steel. Only a few live in the open air, running the production of food, most of which is artificially made from a yeast base. Also robots do most of the open air work because they are not affected by pollution.

There are 50 Outer World planets colonized by humans. The Outer World inhabitants (called Spacers) work with robots, but on Earth robots are hated by most men who see them as a very real threat to their jobs. An uneasy relationship between Spacers and Earthmen is unsettled when a Spacer is killed by an Earthman.

Lige Baley, a New York City policeman, is assigned a robot partner. The story is essentially a murder mystery set into this futuristic tale of the fate of Earth. As always, there is Asimov's excellent plotting, his vast conception of society, government and economics, not to mention his strong scientific base. Also his skill at creating characters, both human and robotic, has taken a leap forward.

Caves of Steel is the first in Asimov's Robot Trilogy. Great! I get to look forward to two more.


The Horse and His Boy, C S Lewis, HarperCollins Inc, 1954, 224 pp

The fifth book in the original order of the Chronicles of Narnia is one I never read when I was a kid. It takes place during the time when Peter and Susan were High King and Queen during their first long visit to Narnia. The horse is a talking horse from Narnia who was captured and made into a war horse in a land far to the south.

The boy is an orphan who was raised practically as a slave to a poor fisherman in the same foreign land. The horse and the boy meet, have many adventures and finally make it back to their respective native lands and true identities.

It was an entertaining story but clearly a minor tale in the series. I could see about halfway through how it was all going to end and even Aslan only had a small part.

BOOKS READ FROM 1954, PART FOUR

The books reviewed in this post were all published in 1954 and were read as part of My Big Fat Reading Project.


The Dollmaker, Harriette Arnow, Macmillan, 1954, 549 pp

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I have read it at least twice over the years. It is the story of a rural country woman and her family. They leave the south during WW II so that the father can work in Detroit making war materials. Gertie, the woman, is strong and fiercely protective of her family but the poverty, grimness and industrial setting finally overwhelm her.

It is a story of incredible losses of all types but mostly of Gertie's loss of the ability to control her own life. There are many tales of the effects of industrialization and war on families and the human spirit. This one just happens to be written supremely well, so well that certain scenes come immediately to mind whenever I hear the name of the book. There is a movie but I could not bear to watch it for fear of it not measuring up to the book.


The Bird's Nest, Shirley Jackson, Farrar Straus and Young, 1954, 276 pp

Elizabeth Richmond is a 23 year old with multiple personalities who is in deep psychological conflict. Her parents are dead, she lives with her Aunt Morgan and at 25, will inherit a fortune. As the story opens her severe headaches and backaches and insomnia burst into full-blown insanity, so Aunt Morgan agrees with the family doctor that Elizabeth should be treated by old Dr Wright, a hypnotist.

The rest of the novel covers her treatment and recovery. Eventually four personalities are at various times in evidence and literally fighting it out for dominance. The events behind all this are slowly revealed, most of which center around Elizabeth's fairly psychotic mother whose death four years earlier precipitated Elizabeth's descent into madness.

Dr Wright is pretty rough as mental practitioners go and Aunt Morgan is a bit mad herself. It is a wonder that it comes out right in the end. Because the author is Shirley Jackson, there is a good amount of humor mixed with the horror.

I don't know if I liked this book or not. It is extremely weird and I did not like that Dr Wright. It may be that Elizabeth got well in spite of him but perhaps that is true of most forms of healing.


Sayonara, James A Michener, Random House Inc, 1954, 208 pp

This is a love story in a military setting. Air Force pilot Gruver is shooting down MiGs in Korea but gets sent to Japan for some R&R. There he falls in love with a Japanese dancer, even though his commanding officer and his father, also a general, have plans to marry him to the CO's daughter.

Having recently read Battle Cry by Leon Uris, I felt in familiar territory. The military is such a subculture. Michener really is a good writer and in Sayonara, includes lots of Japanese culture as well as the remaining racism and distrust toward the Japanese due to WWII. The book even gets downright sexy in parts.

So I liked it even though the tragic ending was not fully convincing.


Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1954, 251 pp

Kingsley Amis' first novel is a hilarious account of a young man trying to make it in his first year of teaching at an English university.

Lucky Jim is supposed to be one of the first of a sub-genre called the "campus novel". For sure there have been plenty since. The bumbling absent-minded professor, the neurotic female fellow teacher and other characters as caricatures are all perfectly done. Hapless Jim, with his worries, his boredom over doing what is expected, his blunders, is a type who I think will be showing up often in the 50s and 60s. It is a middle finger up to authority and hidebound tradition and old boy networks. This is the new hero of the 20th century. After WWII, life is rather absurd because the "values" of the Western white man's world have been used too many times to promote lies.

Question is: Is the world getting better from a more realistic look or just drowning in cynicism?


Lord of the Flies, William Golding, Faber & Faber, 1954, 202 pp

I was made to read this book in school. All I remember is that it upset me a great deal and I felt that I was put through something against my will. This time, I did not find it as gruesome, being older and wiser I suppose. I was drawn in to the story and, since I had no recall of the ending, I was eager to find out what happened. I did not like the way it ended, but it was his first novel so I gave him a break.

What I somehow didn't know is that Golding got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and also won a Booker in 1980. Now I must decide if I want to read his other novels. Oh yes, the theme? Brute force and meat eating win the day over intelligence and planning.

BOOKS READ FROM 1954, PART THREE

This and the following three posts cover books published in 1954, though they were not necessarily bestsellers. I chose to read these books because they are by authors who interest me or who contributed to the culture in some significant way.


The Ponder Heart, Eudora Welty, Harcourt Brace & World Inc, 1954, 156 pp

Eudora Welty is the antidote to William Faulkner. Each delves into the mind and soul of the South but Welty usually comes up happy and while a Yankee like me might still feel out of place in one of her stories, I wouldn't feel afraid or even baffled.

Uncle Daniel Ponder is perhaps not quite right in the head, perhaps a tinge simple minded, but ultimately lovable. His family was wealthy and Daniel likes to spread that wealth. He is so fond of giving away things and money that he is protected by his loving niece, who claims to be the only one who really understands him. He is also kept in check by the family banker who keeps him on a small allowance.

In a light-hearted comedy of errors, Uncle Daniel outsmarts them all when he marries a 17 year old airhead, who has no trouble spending his money but somehow ends up dead. There is a hilarious trial scene with Uncle Daniel as the accused killer which results in his acquittal but life is never the same again. So in fact the happiness does not last, I suppose it never can in good fiction, but Welty lets you down easy.


A Proper Marriage, Doris Lessing, Simon and Schuster Inc, 1954, 344 pp

A Proper Marriage is the sequel to Martha Quest (1952.) In fact it is the second volume of a series of novels called The Children of Violence. At the end of Martha Quest, she had just married Douggie, a young man from the middle class of English people living in South Africa. As A Proper Marriage opens, Martha and Douggie have just returned from their honeymoon, settled in an apartment, and Martha is learning to be a wife at home while Douggie goes to work.

Soon enough she learns that she is pregnant and while she does not feel ready for a baby and even considers an abortion (it is around 1939!), she is too far along. So she goes thru pregnancy, birth, trying to breastfeed on a schedule with a baby who constantly cries, switches to bottles and watches her daughter grow. It was all so much like what I went through in my first pregnancy and my son's early years. Bored, stuck at home, battles of will, worry about schedules, feeding, naps. God. I thought I was the only one who felt those wild swings from loving my baby completely to feeling I would lose my mind if I had to spend another minute with him.

Then comes the war, Douggie goes off, Martha figures out a bit more about how to balance out her life. Mother, mother-in-law, even girlfriends are no help and Lessing shows that all these women are trying to appear happy and competent while they suffer inside about their identity, wondering what happened to their dreams.

After Douggie returns, things go more and more wrong as Martha decides not to have another baby and gets involved with left-wing activities. Of course, no one approves and when she decides to leave Doug, he descends into all manner of childish and jealous ploys to try to keep her, just like my ex-husband did!

Reading this novel was exhilarating and devastating. I relived my early married life and remembered how tough I had to become even in the late 70s to withstand the censure I got, to figure out how to survive and to suppress how lonely I felt. No other book I've read has so accurately given voice to what I experienced. Doris Lessing is a goddess to me, a beacon of truth and a trail blazer for Western women.


Under the Net, Iris Murdoch, The Viking Press, 1954, 279 pp

This is Iris Murdoch's first novel and the first I have read by her. I was highly anticipating getting started on Murdoch and I was not disappointed. I may be somewhat ignorant of any influences she had as a writer, so to me this novel had a uniqueness about it, though I would say that perhaps Muriel Spark, Zoe Heller and Kate Atkinson were influenced by Iris Murdoch.

Jake is a sort of writer/philosopher who makes his living doing translations. In first person, Jake details his life, which is unstable; his friends, who are all quirky characters; his finances, shaky but never somehow depleted; and his escapades, which are desperate and hilarious at the same time.

Jake is a somewhat worried guy who is fussy about his living arrangements. He relies on the kindness of women but is so self-centered that he can't really love any of them. Throughout the story, he is constantly on the move partly because he has lost his most recent dwelling place and mostly because he is a hyper sort despite his depressive's outlook on life. Wherever he goes, havoc mostly ensues. He attempts several crazy plans and almost always pulls them off which seems to be because he is oblivious of "normal" behavior.

I liked the book and it made me feel free somehow. I marveled at Murdoch's ability to get inside the heads of all the male characters. In fact, the females were rather flat and stereotypical. There is a brilliance in this short novel and I am looking forward to more.


Messiah, Gore Vidal, E P Dutton & Co Inc, 1954, 250 pp

Gore Vidal writes a completely different book every time. Messiah is a sort of literary sci fi. A nondescript guy from Washington State, while working as a mortician's assistant, had a revelation that death is not bad. When he tells people about this, his hypnotic eyes win them over and he gets followers.

He is not a leadership type though, so between an intellectual historian, a PR man, an odd woman who claims to be 2200 years old and knows millionaires plus another female devotee, a major world religion is built.

The intellectual historian tells the story from Luxor, Egypt, where he is in hiding at the end of his life. He had a falling out with the "church" after lots of bad stuff happened and had to get away fast. This is satire of a high order and pretty well done. 1954 saw the rise of Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham as well as television. Vidal just took all that to the limits of "what if" while exploring the tendency to religious fanaticism in our culture.

What is amazing is that Messiah was shocking and titillating in 1954 and now seems rather mild. The other night I saw Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center". As bad as 9/11 was, it was made so much worse by television. Could we lose our religious freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria? You bet.


Black Power, Richard Wright, Harper Brothers, 1954, 351 pp

In a non-fiction account of his visit to the Gold Coast, Africa (now Ghana), Wright covers the history of the slave trade and the current state (circa 1954) of this country. I suppose the book takes its place in the body of literature about Africa which began in the 1940s with Cry the Beloved Country. I am getting a picture from these books of the scene there in the years leading up to the liberation of African countries from their colonial masters.

Wright is quite the intellectual and has come full circle since his autobiographical Native Son, 1940 and his autobiography, Black Boy, 1943. He is a better writer, though Native Son was one powerful novel. In Black Power, he analyzes the effects of the breakup of native tribal culture and the difficulties of making the transition to 20th century Western industrial culture.

I was impressed and intrigued throughout. Wright's descriptions of the jungle, the weather, the tribal rites and the poverty were devastatingly rendered. I was left wondering if mankind was not better off in ancient times when though primitive and superstitious, people lived a more wholistic life somehow. Nature, spirituality, family, community were more aligned it seems, but that may be wishful thinking when looking back from these stressful and spiritually bleak times.


The Greek Passion, Nikos Kazantzakis, Simon & Schuster Inc, 1954, 432 pp

In a small Greek village in the early 1920s, a tradition among the inhabitants is to choose certain residents once every four years to re-enact the Passion of Christ at Easter. These persons are selected a year early so that they may get into character during a year of preparation. Kazantzakis uses this device to show how a corrupt priest, the resident Turkish lord, and other town notables deny the true teachings of Christ while the persons chosen find themselves dramatizing the Passion story in their very lives.

The book starts slowly and I thought it would be a complete slog but the story drew me in. It is much more a political polemic than a religious tale, though the author's Christian views are clearly an influence. The main characters are rich and complex though the writing (at least in translation) is a bit lumpish. The lightheartedness of Zorba the Greek is nowhere in evidence.

I would have to say that while Kazantzakis had a good idea for a story, he didn't quite pull it off.

BOOKS READ FROM 1954, PART TWO

Today's post covers the second half of the top 10 bestsellers from 1954.


No Time for Sergeants, Mac Hyman, Random House, 1954, 214 pp

This hilarious story was #6 on the list for 1954. It is the best spoof on the military that I have read so far, mostly because it is succinct and contains no bitterness. Will Stockdale is a backwoods Southern boy who gets drafted and tells his tale from his laconic and fairly clueless viewpoint.

He is forever trying to be helpful and to act like a good soldier, though he doesn't take shit from anyone and has a poor concept of rank. Of course, this throws an entire monkey wrench into any military operation in which he takes part. His superiors simply don't know what to make of him. He always speaks his mind and has no awe of officers or superiors, all of which should get him into a world of trouble, but this is the military, so he ends up a hero.

An excellent light-hearted read.


Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck, The Viking Press, 1954, 273 pp

Ah, Steinbeck. How I love this author. Sweet Thursday, at #7, is a sequel to Cannery Row and takes place in the same town with many of the same characters. It is post WWII now and Doc is in a bad frame of mind. In fact, he has three minds going at once: upper, middle and lower, and while he feels he should be making something of his life, his lower mind knows that he is lonely and it is getting him down.

So his friends over at the Palace Flophouse go to work hoping to help him out. There is a new girl in town trying to work at The Bear House, but she is not really cut out to be a whore. In this hilarious tale of matchmaking, Steinbeck puts all he has into play: his deep understanding of people, friendship, love and loyalty.

I did not want the book to end. As much as I love East of Eden, I love the Cannery Row books even more. I don't know of too many authors who can embed their philosophy of life so unobtrusively into a novel.


The View from Pompey's Head, Hamilton Basso, Doubleday & Company, 1954, 409 pp

The intriguing title of this 1954 bestseller (#8) was a big letdown when I found out its meaning, as was the book when I finally read it. I'd had this book on my shelves for many years. I picked it up in some since forgotten used bookstore, buying it only because I was attracted by the title. Then it turned up on the 1954 bestseller list, which explains what it was doing on the shelves of used books.

Pompey's Head turned out to be a small town on the Georgia coast. The story is about a man who grew up there, fled in his early 20s to become a lawyer in New York and finds himself back in Pompey's Head in his mid 30s on an assignment from his firm. So there is a present time story going on which sounds promising because it is about a reclusive author, but which takes forever to be told because the back story and memories of the lawyer turn out to be the real story.

Both stories have disappointing non-endings and I figured out the mystery surrounding the reclusive author character about halfway through the book. Hamilton Basso was one of those New York City editors of mags like "The New Yorker." He aspires to write like that crowd but doesn't measure up. If I want a story about the insane social practices of Southern towns, I would much rather read William Styron or Eudora Welty.

Oh well. I still like the title but it is another way not to judge a book.


Never Victorious, Never Defeated, Taylor Caldwell, McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc, 1954, 549 pp

I've read several books by Taylor Caldwell over the years and there is just something a little skewed about her. This one was the #9 bestseller of 1954. It is a saga about a fictional family near Philadelphia whose patriarch started a railroad in the days of the Robber Barons.

The main characters are Cornelia de Witt, the ruthless, practically immortal granddaughter of the patriarch and Allan Marshall, son of a poor Irish railroad worker who invents an automatic coupler, becomes wealthy and marries Cornelia. These two are surrounded by a vast cast of family members, businessmen, financiers and politicians. Allan Marshall, a lapsed Catholic, has a brother who becomes a priest, thus bringing in the religious angle which so often features in Caldwell's books.

Cornelia is another strong heroine, which seems to be a theme in 1954, but is practically soulless. Allan suffers great anguish of soul. Most of the other characters just want money. There is an extremely odd political view being put forth in this novel which centers around evil men who are in a conspiracy to destroy freedom in the world for their own greedy and power-hungry reasons. Though a common view in many books today, especially science fiction and thrillers, this is the first time I've come across it in bestselling fiction, unless I take into account the Lanny Budd series by Upton Sinclair. But while Sinclair was an avowed socialist, Caldwell has some kind of Libertarian, Jeffersonian, Constitutionalist thing going and lumps communism, socialism and fascism together as the enemy. She seems to have no problem with monopolies that create wealth out of the sweat of workers, as long as free enterprise is kept sacrosanct.

I must say that Caldwell's writing is better than usual here. She still goes overboard on descriptions of nature and the hysterical element in certain characters, but though long, the book was a good read.


Benton's Row, Frank Yerby, The Dial Press, 1954, 280 pp

Then I came to the end of Frank Yerby Top 10 bestsellers. Eight of his formulaic stories have now passed under my eyes, and he actually got better in the last two. Benton's Row is set in the south, covering four generations of two families beginning in 1842 and ending after WWI.

In this novel, Yerby has taken on a more literary voice. In fact, he sounds positively Faulknerian at times. His characters are deeper and more complex and the drama is less predictable. Historically there is not much I have not read in other novels of this period.

Though he went on publishing novels up to 1985, none of them are on the top 10 lists, so I am done with Frank Yerby at last.

BOOKS READ FROM 1954, PART ONE

In this post are my reviews of the top 5 bestsellers of 1954


Not As A Stranger, Morton Thompson, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954, 696 pp

The #1 bestseller of 1954 is a huge, dense but rich story of the making of a doctor. Lucas Marsh was born in the early 1900s to a father who dealt in leather goods for horses and carriages and a mother who studied phrenology and other esoteric spiritual texts. The marriage was highly strained financially and sexually, causing Lucas much anguish and confusion, but from the age of seven he had found his calling: medicine. Between his hours at school and home, he secretly followed the small town's three doctors on their rounds, trying to learn what he could.

Despite his parents' protests and a dire lack of funds, Lucas made it through college and medical school. In a moment of desperation, as he is about to be expelled from med school for lack of money, he marries a nurse. He doesn't love her, she is an awkward, unpopular young woman of Swedish descent, but she is also the very competent head nurse of the hospital to which the medical school is attached. She is devoted to Lucas and pays for all the rest of his schooling.

Lucas is something of a genius and his single-minded intensity and sense of mission makes him a highly unsociable and inflexible character. As he move into his first practice as assistant to an aging doctor in a small town, he runs into "real life" for the first time and must come to terms with dishonesty, malpractice, politics, society and women.

I found this a fascinating book. There is no sense of any Roaring Twenties though those are the years of the story. The financial crash of 1929 plays a part but what was most interesting was the detailed account of the state of medicine in that decade. Quite an unexpected read for 1954.


Mary Anne, Daphne Du Maurier, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1954, 351 pp

Another bestseller by Du Maurier hit #2 in 1954. It is historical fiction based on the life of the author's great great grandmother, who lived in England from 1776 to 1852. Mary Anne was born poor, made a disastrous marriage, but used her beauty and intelligence to become the mistress of the Duke of York, the man responsible for England's army in the days of Napoleon. After she falls out of favor with the Duke, she achieves fame and notoriety by publishing books about the nefarious activities (in which she and the Duke participated) involved in getting military placements for certain men in exchange for money.

In plain terms, Mary Anne was a high-class prostitute. I've read about such a character in many novels and did not find much new to the genre here. As long as women are considered by men (and sometimes themselves) to be the second sex, there will be women who use their bodies and their intelligence to gain protection and wealth from men. Alas and sigh.

Du Maurier is a master craftswoman when it comes to fiction, so Mary Anne was a good read. Mary Anne herself underwent a share of suffering but her prime philosophy in life was that girls just want to have fun and mostly she did. To her credit, she fought like a mother lion for the rights and safety of her children.


Love is Eternal, Irving Stone

I have discovered that I missed this book, thinking I had already read it because I confused it with Immortal Wife, Stone's 1944 historical novel about John Fremont. So I will have to read it and report later. Love is Eternal is the story of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and was the #3 bestseller in 1954.


The Royal Box, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Julian Messner Inc, 1954, 303 pp

Another book by this author who has become the Danielle Steele of the 40s and 50s in my mind. This one was the #4 bestseller in 1954. Fortunately, I only have one more of her books to get through in this reading project.

The Royal Box is written as a mystery, in the format of an Agatha Christie. It is even set in London for the murder with the back story and finale in New York and Texas. The characters include an actress, an American businessman, an impoverished upper class English woman and her daughter, as well as an American journalist. The royal box is an actual theatre box in London, originally built for the Kings and Queens of England, should they choose to attend the theatre.

The whole thing is fairly predictable. The murderer is found, the women in the story all have happy endings and while I remember who was murdered, I already forget whodunit.


The Egyptian, Mika Waltari, G P Putnam's Sons, 1949, 503 pp

The Egyptian was the #1 bestseller in 1949, the first year it was translated from Finnish and released in the US. In another of the examples of the synergy between publishing and movie making which began in the 1940s, this book made the bestseller list again, coming in at #5 in 1954, due to the release of the movie in this year and its nomination for an Oscar. According to Wikipedia, The Egyptian was the most sold foreign novel from 1949 until the mid 1980s when The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco gained that distinction.

The Egyptian is excellent historical fiction set in the time of Egypt's history when the Pharaoh Akhnaton attempted to change the country's central god from Ammon to Aton, whom he believed to be the one true god. This almost brought about the downfall of Egypt. The time is 1300 BC.

The protagonist is Sinuhe, an adopted orphan and a doctor. He is telling his life story which was bound up in the Pharaoh's and led to his exile from Egypt. He is a healer, a pacifist and feels unable to cope with the violence and dishonesty of his world. Waltari wrote the novel to express his disillusionment with the world after WW II, which I saw in the novel as I was reading it. The book is long, it took a while to read but was good and entertaining throughout.

MY BIG FAT READING PROJECT (AGAIN)

Below is an edited reprint of a post from July 2005. Its purpose is to explain the posts that will follow in the next several days and to describe my research method for the memoir I am writing.

My Big Fat Reading Project

I am a maker of lists. I like to organize the things I do into plans and
programs. So when I found myself reading more than ever a few years back, I
felt I needed a way to approach the vast body of fiction that I was
attempting to devour.

At first, I used what I call the Alphabet System. I stole this from Francie,
the main character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. (One of my
all time favorite books, because it is the story of a girl in Brooklyn who
rises out of poverty through reading.) Her habit was to go to the public
library every day, take out a book and read it. She just started at the
letter A and went on. This was a pretty good method for me because I
discovered many authors I liked (such as Richard Adams, Edward Abbey and
Joan Aiken) as well as a few I didn't like (Kobo Abe and Alice Adams, to
name two.) I didn't know it at the time, but I was developing taste.

Then I started researching the whole American Literature scene and also
learning about current literary writers who had deeper things to say and
were thus not appearing on the bestseller lists. OK, I will admit, Oprah had
an effect on me. I also read a few biographies of writers and learned that
many of the best learned how to write by reading, not by going to college.

Finally, a few years ago, my sister sent me a book called Legacy, A
Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Personal History by Linda Spence, 1997, Ohio
University Press. She thought I should write my story and the story of our
family, at least to hand down to our children and grandchildren. I had
another book I was using to get up to speed on modern fiction writers, The
Reading List, Contemporary Fiction by David Rubel, 1998, Henry Holt and
Company, and was working my way through the complete books of Toni Morrison,
Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood and others.

One day I was surfing the web on all things about books and came across a
curriculum posted by a professor at some Southern college. It involved
reading the top ten bestsellers from each year, decade by decade and writing
papers on how books and literature were both a sort of report on culture and
an influence on its direction.

Suddenly it all came together. MY BIG FAT READING PROJECT. I would read the
top bestsellers of each year of my life and relate these books to what went
on in those years and how I was influenced by it all as I moved thru my
life. So I printed out the bestseller lists which this professor had so
kindly put together and off I went. I was born in 1947, but I decided to
start my reading in 1940 to get a feel for the world I was born into. I also
added about 10 other literary books to each year.

I began this project in July 2002. I am now just about finished with the books for 1955. That means it has taken me over six years to read sixteen years worth of books. It is a looooong project which could last me the rest of my life.

That is fine because I have discovered something about being a
middle-aged woman. My kids are grown, my music career flopped, my marriage
is 38 years old (it is good and he is my grand passion but I am really used
to him) and I need a project that gets me excited everyday and will go on
for years; that has new and unknown factors to look forward to each day;
that is creative.

I have learned so much from this reading: more than I ever knew I didn't
know about World War II; how earnest and wholesome people were in the 1940s;
that family was the true glue that held society together; that Christianity
made for bestsellers back then; that the war and the Industrial Revolution
and Communism/Socialism were all beginning to erode all those values and to
create chaos. It is a fascinating study made through fiction.

I read other things as well, which I also write about in this blog. Sometimes
I just can't stand to read another book from over 50 years ago and go off my
plan to read the hot books of today. But I wanted to explain why I will be
writing about all these old books I am reading.