Category Archives: Books

What I’m Reading Now: May 1, 2018

The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888; Easton Press edition, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth, 328 pp.)

Unlike many people—and for reasons I can’t now fathom—I never read Robert Louis Stevenson as a boy. Not until my mid-30s did I read Treasure Island, and then 10 years more elapsed before I got around to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Now another decade has gone by before reading The Black Arrow, Stevenson’s wonderful tale of history and romance set during England’s War of the Roses (1455-1485). (Still to come: Kidnapped, along with nearly everything else he ever wrote.)

I’ve read and re-read Treasure Island, and it’s safe to say that Stevenson is now one of my preferred authors. His short story “The Body Snatchers” has long been a favorite, a tale of supernatural horror that I’ve dipped into many times over the years on blustery winter evenings seated before a fire. No less than Arthur Conan Doyle considered Stevenson’s story “The Pavilion on the Links” (no, it’s not about golf) to be the height of perfection. It has the distinction of being one of the first short stories in the world.

Despite his reputation, Stevenson is not a children’s author. That label dogged him in the years immediately following his death, but by the middle of the 20^th century he had rightfully taken his place among the distinguished writers of English literature. His work speaks to anyone who loves a good story, great writing, and the thoughtfulness of a man who puzzled over the ambiguities of the human condition but who never professed to fully understand it.

Stevenson suffered most of his life from tuberculosis, and he traveled restlessly across the globe from one place to another seeking relief and good health. He finally found it in the South Pacific but died tragically in 1894 on the island of Samoa from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was only 44.

He lies there still, buried on Mount Vaea, with his own haunting poem, “Requiem” on his tombstone:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

What I’m Reading Now: April 24, 2018

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The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, 256 pp.)

I first discovered Clifton “Kip” Fadiman 30 years ago through a battered copy of his 1960 book, The Lifetime Reading Plan, found while prowling the stacks at Oxford Too, that beloved now-defunct used bookstore in Atlanta’s Peachtree Battle Shopping Center.

Fadiman became one of the 20^thcentury’s most public of public intellectuals after anti-Semitism kept him out of the academy. The head of the English department at Columbia noxiously informed him in the 1920s, “We have room for only one Jew,” and the seat was filled.

Instead, Fadiman extolled the virtues of reading everywhere he could in the public arena, from books to newspaper essays to 10 years as book editor of the New Yorker. For nearly 50 years he served on the board of the Book of the Month Club, which played an outsized role in determining post-war America’s reading tastes. He was on the board of the Encyclopedia Britannica for 40 years and became one of its most public faces in that pre-Google age when it held unchecked authority for all things factual. In radio’s latter days and in television’s infancy he hosted a highly popular program called “Information Please” (not unlike NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”), where he might ask the panelists to close their eyes and try to remember the color of their ties. He wrote countless forewords, anthologies, and book reviews, co-wrote the mammoth The Joys of Wine, and published four editions of The Lifetime Reading Plan before his death at age 95 in 1999.

The Lifetime Reading Plan celebrated unashamedly the Western Literary Canon, though to his credit the 4^th edition of the Plan, written with John S. Major, included for the first time many volumes of the Eastern Canon as well.

Fadiman’s advice was sound: The Great Books could enrich our lives and help us “avoid mental bankruptcy.” Take your time, he advised: “They should not be read in a hurry, any more than friends are made in a hurry. This list is not something to be ‘got through.’ It is a mine of such richness of assay as to last a lifetime.” I’m still reading the books on Kip’s list and plan to have a bookmark in one on my last day.

The Wine Lover’s Daughter is a moving tribute to Fadiman the father, reader, and yes, wine lover, from his daughter Anne, no slouch herself. Kip was enormously proud of his daughter and rightfully so. Her book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award, and I devoured her collections of bookish essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007).

There’s much more about wine here than books (disappointing to this bibliophile), but we do learn that Kip read 80 pages an hour in his prime. No wonder he could read so many books. Tragically, his last decade brought near-blindness, but—reader to the end—he happily embraced the joys of audiobooks.

After her father’s death—on Father’s Day, no less—Anne Fadiman lovingly scattered his ashes on “a few carefully chosen graves” in Concord, Massachusetts—those of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Bronson Alcott.

It was a beautiful gesture, a fitting closure to the life of a Great Reader.

What I’m Reading Now: April 17, 2018

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Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited by Jonathan Yardley (Europa Editions, 2011, 351 pp.)

Jonathan Yardley served for almost a third of a century as one of the great book reviewers at the Washington Post. The other of course was and still is Michael Dirda. They are two of the foremost literary critics of our time and between them, their books will lead you on to countless other literary treasures, both well-known and obscure.

For nearly seven years between 2003 and 2010 Yardley published longer essays about “notable and/or neglected books from the past” in a Post column with the same title as this book. He ultimately wrote 97 essays, 60 of which appear in this volume, while the remaining 37 are conveniently available at www.neglectedbooks.com.

Yardley delightfully meanders his way through these 60 titles, only five of which I’ve read already but I’m happily adding many others to my list, including: Reveille in Washington, 1861-1865 by Margaret Leech; The Dreadful Lemon Sky and the rest of the Travis Magee novels by John D. MacDonald; The Reivers by William Faulkner, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, as well as others by Nora Ephron, Roald Dahl, John Cheever, Timothy Crouse and H.L. Mencken.

While Dirda’s style is light and friendly (I’ve extolled his virtues elsewhere on this blog), Yardley is curmudgeonly and refreshingly grumpy. Some of his juicier bon mots: Gore Vidal and Henry Adams are “overrated and unreadable”; David Baldacci and Allen Drury write in “execrable prose”; Joyce’s Ulysses is “a book I simply cannot read.” He proclaims J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye one of the worst books in American literature: “the combination of Salinger’s execrable prose and [Holden] Caulfield’s jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.” In the space of a single review of a Rose Kennedy biography in the Post but not in this book, Yardley called her cold, controlling, spoiled, petty, self-indulgent, shallow, vain, and uptight, while Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was “assiduously sycophantic,” and the book itself littered with “clunky, clotted, graceless prose.”

Well, harrumph. But it’s so much fun to read.

The Post published Yardley’s last column on December 5, 2014, but here’s hoping that many of the other reviews he wrote over a 33-year career will be published in book form as well.

All of this makes me wonder: when Dirda follows Yardley into retirement, who will fill the shoes of these two literary giants? Are there other great book columnists out there I don’t know about?

What I’m Reading Now: April 10, 2018

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Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence (University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, 325 pp.)

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” So said Vincent Starrett, the author of this memoir. I agree.

I love books about books—that is, authors who write about their love of books, their collections of books, and/or the authors who wrote them.

I have an entire bookcase dedicated to them—familiar classics like The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, overlooked gems like I.A. Richards’s How to Read a Page, and more recent offerings by Nicholas Basbanes like Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World, and A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. And no book lover’s collection would be complete without all the works of Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda. I’ve got books about libraries, books about book clubs, and even one about the history of the book shelf.

Vincent Starrett was the author of the “Books Alive” column for 25 years in the Chicago Tribune. His memoir, which I first learned about, naturally enough, in Dirda’s Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books (2015), is a charming account of his lifelong love of the printed word that began with his birth above his grandfather’s bookshop in Toronto. He was part of the second wave of the Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925) that included novelists Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, poets Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay, and reporters Ben Hecht and Ring Lardner.

Above all else, Starrett revered two things that I also love: books and Sherlock Holmes. He was one of the 1934 founders of that most famous and exclusive of all Sherlockian fan clubs, the Baker Street Irregulars, along with fellow literary critic Christopher Morley—himself the author of the one of the greatest books about books ever written, Parnassus on Wheels (1917). Get a copy and read it.

Starrett collected primarily first editions, like most “collectors” as they are classically defined. I don’t share that love, I’m afraid—I care more about the words inside than I do about the edition itself. Only in the last ten years have I become a hopeless hardback-book snob, habitually “upgrading” anything I have in paper when I come across a cloth-bound volume of the same title. Alas, this is why book-collecting is known as the “gentle madness.” As Starrett famously said, “It is possible that the most misunderstood man upon earth is the collector of books.”

A final word about the quality of this particular volume: In this age of disposability, when our electronics are obsolete in one year and many publishers print their books on pulp paper that soon turns yellowish brown, the University of Oklahoma Press in 1965 could refreshingly proclaim that “the paper on which this book is printed has an intended life of at least three hundred years.”

I’m sure my iPhone and Kindle will both last that long too, don’t you?

What I’m Reading Now: April 3, 2018

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Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving (E.P. Dutton, 1944, 387 pp.)

Van Wyck Brooks is an author whose work was enormously popular in the mid-20^th century. How popular? Walk into any used bookstore and you’ll trip over his books. Time magazine, whose cover he graced in 1944, called him “the nation’s most distinguished literary critic.”

He is most famous for five volumes known collectively as “Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915,” the most well-known of which is The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, published in 1936, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The other volumes are New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940); The World of Washington Irving (1944); The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947); and The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (1952).

Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978) recounts the harrowing years when Brooks was unable to write because of a mental breakdown, and how Perkins helped him climb back out of his psychic abyss to become one of the 20^th century’s most prolific, if now forgotten, authors. Brooks himself was the focus of Raymond Nelson’s Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life (1981), and his long friendship with critic Lewis Mumford was detailed in Robert E. Spiller’s edited volume of their letters, The Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921-1963 (1970).

I am thoroughly enjoying The World of Washington Irving, being a huge fan of Irving, but the book’s canvas stretches far beyond, covering a host of other writers from Edgar Allen Poe to James Fenimore Cooper, John James Audubon, William Gilmore Simms, and lesser luminaries whose stars have long since dimmed. There is a treasury of learning here, and it is a pleasure to read.

Van Wyck (rhymes with bike) Brooks was widely lauded during his own day with awards and honorary degrees, but as Patton so rightly noted, all glory is fleeting. When Brooks died in Bridgewater, Connecticut in 1963 at the age of 77, his town decided to build a library wing in his honor. The effort died after ten years of meager fundraising, only to be revived when a California hermit who admired Brooks’s writing left the library $300,000 in his will. The wing was finally dedicated in 1980.

Eighty years ago, with the Nazis rising in Europe and with the world tottering on the brink of madness, critic Malcolm Cowley reviewed The Flowering of New England. In addition to Brooks’s erudition and scholarship, Cowley lauded Brooks for “turning back to the great past in order to see the real nature of the traditions that we are trying to save, and in order to gain new strength for the struggles ahead.”

Gaining new strengths for the struggles ahead, be they against personal demons or the next global firestorm: still one of the best reasons I’ve ever heard for reading books like this, then or now.