2024 Books I Read, and other stuff

Shakespeare once again dominated my reading schedule, and not just because I can read a play in an afternoon. For the record, this year’s plays were Macbeth, Merry Wives of Windsor, Comedy of Errors, and Much Ado About Nothing. There is also some Shake-related nonfiction in the 2024 list, a little on the academic side but worthwhile reading nonetheless.

Notably, this year’s list is shorter than in past years, though I did dip into some short story and poetry collections. I blame my fractured vision (cataracts) and attention span (Olympics, college reunion, comedy improv with Clay Aiken). Here’s my year, in roughly chronological order:

1. The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham (fiction; re-read). Not the only first-person autobiographical tale on the list, but not by design. I’d read this many years ago and remembered liking it, but couldn’t remember why. Philosophy, I guess: A nonmaterialistic hero wants everyone to be happy. I like that.

2. The Brothers Karamazov, F. Dostoevsky (fiction; re-read). More psycho-philosophical fiction. Handy to have class notes in the margins of my college-days paperbacks so I could continue underlining themes and significant passages. I seem to have a fondness for the nonmaterialistic hero who wants everyone to be happy type. Note: this list only takes me through March. Slow reader with distractions.

3. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (fiction; re-read). Hm. Curiously unambitious choices so far. I usually like to mix things up. Jane’s first story probably could have used some paring of extraneous characters, as I much prefer the Emma Thompson script. But it’s far more sophisticated and engaging than …

4. Mount Vernon Love Story, Mary Higgins Clark (fiction). George and Martha Washington as Hallmark Channel love interests, a bit too “she gazed into his soft gray eyes” for my taste. Blech. Still, it seemed sufficiently well-researched to merit becoming a nice giveaway to new donors to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, a very worthy cause.

5. Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments, Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, eds. (philosophy). Apparently a collection of New York Times columns, though I suspect the readership and the authorship were the same demographic. I skimmed through the topics that interested me—morality, religion, race, women, the future. There was something in the discussions about women that annoyed me when I read it back in April, but I’m too lazy to re-read that stuff. Much, much more interesting is …

6. An Unfinished Love Story, Doris Kearns Goodwin (history, memoir). Doris specializes in writing about the great men of American history, but here she truly makes a case for the historic greatness of her own husband, Dick Goodwin (Kennedy speechwriter best known to some of us as the guy who went after the Quiz Shows back in the day). And like Doris’s stories of other American heroes, she does not forget their ladies—in this case, herself. So you say you want a love story? This is it! Now I wish she’d write that George and Martha thingy.

7. Ocean Breathing, Barbara Mathias Riegel (fiction). I admit I bought the book because a dear friend’s mother wrote it. I like to be supportive, and the story takes place in our familiar neighborhood. The first-person narrator is dealing with severe anxiety, which she only begins to overcome when other people’s problems supersede her own. A less-than-gentle therapist (or reader) might say “Get over yourself.” She does.

8. Shakespeare’s Language, Frank Kermode (literary studies). Survey of how Shakespeare’s command of language (metaphors, motifs, and stuff like that) matured from play to play and advanced the English language along the way. Maybe a little academic, but like Shadowplay (a survey of the plays through the lens of religious and political conflict), an interesting way to review the plays and Shakespeare’s greatness.

9. The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse (fiction; re-read). Speaking of a master of language! Not that Wodehouse advanced the English language itself, but he sure had fun with it.

10. Philippe Halsman: A Retrospective (photography). One of the great portraitists of the 20th century, showcasing some of the greatest personalities of the time. Yes, we like looking at celebrities. Halsman made them jump for him. Literally.

11. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (fiction, though likely autobiographical). A first-person narrator reflects on his life, and it’s a ripping yarn. There are people! Things happen! It’s how I can get through an 800 page book gladly, whereas with some remembrances-type fiction I can’t get through four pages (I’m looking at you, Proust and Joyce).

12. Shakespeare’s Sisters, Ramie Targoff (literary history). Okay, it got a good review in The New Yorker and it had Shakespeare in the title, so I bought it. Targoff covers the work of four key women who wrote at the same time as William but were not in fact related to him. Well worth reading, but I’d quibble about the book’s title.

13. Headlong, Michael Frayn (fiction). Art history in a comic mystery! What a fun book.

14. The Bully Pulpit, Doris Kearns Goodwin (presidential history, biography). While Teddy Roosevelt made the cut for Doris’s top four presidential leaders (with Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ), the well-liked and judicious William Howard Taft had a lot going for him. Another one of my heroes who wants everyone to be happy? Despite their epic rift, Doris gives William and Teddy a happy enough ending to make me cry. (Also sobs-inducing, the Titanic death of Archie Butt, their mutual friend and security man.)

15. Circe, Madeline Miller (fiction). A “Wicked”-type retelling of familiar myths from the witch’s point of view. Richly rendered language thick with metaphors and similes, if you like that. I did.

16. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (ghost story). Rereading this every year might become a tradition for me, along with watching as many different versions as possible (from Magoo’s to Patton’s, er, George C. Scott’s). There is no perfect rendering of the story, however, other than Dickens’s. They all leave something necessary out or put something unnecessary in. And I think Scrooge was really more indifferent than angry or hostile. Scott’s rendering of the character wins on that point.

Confession: I broke my rule this year about finishing everything I started to read. As mentioned above, I couldn’t make it into Proust’s Swann’s Way, for its lack of characters and actions. This is also the reason I couldn’t make much headway into 2025 from the old Coates & Jarratt futurists shop. I spent a career making futurists’ writing accessible to nonfuturists. The book’s many scenarios of new technologies and future problems were devoid of any human beings doing anything. I just couldn’t take it.

The real 2025 looks promising, bookwise: I spy James by Percival Everett at the top of the pile!

Love, hosaa

Happy New Reading

Books of 2022: Reading List

Or, technically, read and re-read books. Mostly off my own shelf, but also borrowed and reviewed titles.

Listed in chronological order of my reading:

1. The Essential Gandhi (1983) wherein I find he’d never written “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” or something like that. Bookmark the Quote Investigator, which suggests that Gandhi may have spoken these words on multiple occasions, but didn’t use it in his published articles—none in this anthology of his writing, to be sure.

2. Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice (1993) by Mark J. Plotkin. An ethnobotanist’s sensitive journey through the Amazon to discover how the environment and cultures heal (or kill).

3. A Land of Ghosts (2007) by David G. Campbell. More botanical research in far western Amazonia. A little less culturally and environmentally sensitive than Plotkin’s book, in my opinion. Good on the history of imperial exploitation and the collapse of a resource-based economy (rubber) when synthetics are invented.

4. “What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?” (2022) by Arthur Krystal, New Yorker, January 24. Somewhat stream of consciousness reflection on our quarantine. The kind of thing I wanted to write.

 

5. In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (2018) by Nathaniel Philbrick. More Washington than hurricanes, and actually more about how much the French Navy helped America win independence. I love Philbrick’s writing. Will read more.

4. The only book so far that I just could not get myself to finish reading: Loon Lake (1979) by E. L. Doctorow. One of my favorite writers, and I don’t mind a fractured and confusing narrative; it was the child rapes I could not abide. Bought it at the thrift store, and it’s back in the outgoing thrift bag.

5. All’s Well That Ends Well (play) by William Shakespeare. Re-read. I get a lot of the comedies mixed up, so it’s worth a second or third or fourth indulgence. I love smart heroines like Helena the doctor’s daughter.

6. Maggot and Worm, and Eight Other Short Stories (1969) by M. M. Liberman (who shared my birthday). Stories from before he was my Grinnell professor. It can seem strange reading several first-person stories with different protagonists, and especially strange when you know (knew) the author. Literature that reminds me why I never wanted to teach (or write) literature. (I liked but didn’t love it.)

7. Great Expectations (1860) by Charles Dickens. (Re-read) How come the only thing I remembered from my initial reading decades ago is the decaying bridal gown on the jilted Miss Havisham? Anyway, a good reminder of why I love Dickens: character, language, theme, and perfect storytelling. How come I only have five Dickens books on my shelf? (GE plus Pickwick, Oliver, Two Cities, and the Carol)

8. Silent Spring, and Other Writings on the Environment (2018 Library of America Collection) by Rachel Carson. The poisoning of the baby boom. Brought back memories of the green plastic poison-injecting stick Dad had us use to treat the dandelions at one house, the mandated gypsy-moth spraying at another house, and the sweaty bandanna Dad wore up at our orchard in West Virginia, working his own poison-spraying machine. Amazed we all survived. Rachel’s own life chronology had me weeping.

9. The Editor (2019) by Steven Rowley. Novel about a writer who is blown away to meet his glamorous editor, Jacqueline Onassis. I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction (I know, I know), but I picked it up because: Jackie. A good companion to the Clint Hill memoirs of guarding the Kennedy FLOTUS.

10. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991) by Daniel Yergin. Borrowed from my brother’s bookshelf, with a boarding-pass bookmark indicating the timeliness of the book when he started reading it. I do like resource-focused histories, and this one is a good study for me in the geopolitics. More enlightening, though, is the role of energy and other resources in war. Logistics. Came up again with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as in General Grant’s memoir (see below).

11. Emperor of the Air (1989) by Ethan Canin. Short story collection. More first-person literature. Six months later I don’t remember any of the stories, but I remember enjoying the writing. When this collection came out, Canin was working on his first novel. He did a story reading at one of the long-gone bookstores in town. I miss those days. I remember telling him, as he signed my copy, that I wrote my first novel in three weeks. Obviously it never got published. (But see how long it took me to read his work.)

12. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1991) by Doris Kearns Goodwin. A more psychologically analytical critique than I was expecting in a biography. She reveals more of LBJ’s breakdown in the-end-of-presidency years than is hinted at in Robert McNamara’s memoir (see below). Note: Also on my bookshelf but not yet read is John Dickerson’s The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency, which deals extensively with Johnson but also with the most-recent one-termer. I need more time before I consider this a safe “history.”

13. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992) by Daniel J. Boorstin. I expected more art and artists in this, but “creation” includes the creation of ideas about creation itself. So: mythology, philosophy, and religion. Nonwestern thought is included, but not as extensively as Western. Not many women, but, as I noted in my notes, “Thanks for Virginia Woolf.”

14. “The New Dress” (1927) by Virginia Woolf and “The Madonna of the Future” (1887) by Henry James (both in one of my anthologies, Masters of the Modern Short Story, 1955). The stream of consciousness by Woolf apparently was revolutionary (per Boorstin, see above). James’s “madonna” was about the artist who would portray his madonna but [SPOILER ALERT] never did, so it was really an unactualized work of art. Which you could say is what the future is.

 

 

15. The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885; my cheap 2012 edition with multiple typos collects volumes 1 and 2). Describing his early years, Grant reveals a wry sense of humor but little of his personal life once he meets and marries Julia Dent. And of course he died shortly after his account of the Civil War. Since Grant had spent time as a quartermaster, much of the war strategy was about getting food and arms to the men. It was also about resources and geography. Logistics! (See The Prize, above.) If only, if only he’d been able to write about his presidency. I imagine it would resemble McNamara’s In Retrospect. Their accounts of the wars they directed were remarkably similar, high on personal responsibility, low on assigning blame.

16. A Room with a View (1908) by E. M. Forster. All I remembered from the movie was Daniel Day Lewis as Cecil. [SPOILER ALERT] I didn’t really see the happily-ever-after ending coming. The novel is included in an anthology with Howard’s End and Maurice. On my list of books to clear off my shelf, but I guess I should read the other two first? The movies were really enough.

17. Art as Therapy (2013) by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong. On understanding art as a way of working out our own lives. Maybe. The lessons are well laid out, but I can’t see taking the book with me every time I go to a museum to look at art. Maybe Visual Intelligence by Amy Herman is a better choice for looking at art and seeing the world (outside of oneself, that is).

18. Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943) by Max Shulman. Midwestern American humorist (viz. “Dobie Gillis”) looks at college life and the intellectual (or anti-intellectual) influences of the day as proposed by the variety of co-eds the guileless protagonist pursues. Much of the fun is with the naming of characters, more heavy-handed than even Dickens and Wodehouse: Yetta Samovar, the communist; Alpha Cholera, the fraternity.

19. Voluntary Simplicity (1998) by Duane Elgin. Anecdotal, survey-based. The psychological impacts of changes individuals made in their lives for the sake of environmental preservation and just simpler living. I would like to have had more how-to pointers and lists. I guess that’s the magazine editor in me. From my notes: “I feel like I’m trying to read the safety instructions card while the plane is going down. It’s 2022 and here we go.”

20. A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway. One of those classics I’d never read, but what great writing! A slice of World War I (medical corps of Italian campaign) I know nothing about, mixed in with a love story. I’d read two of the other novels in this collected works (The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises) but not For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’ll have to read/re-read all eventually.

21. Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984) by Fay Weldon. Lecture-y but tender. Made me want to re-read Emma, which I have done (see below).

22. “Phaedo” in The Portable Plato. Dialogue. On the death of Socrates and the immortality of souls.

23. Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s (2010), edited by Robert W. Rydell et al. Academic companion volume to the exhibition at the National Building Museum, which was overloaded in the captioning (hence my purchase of the book). Essays are scholarly (lofty but flat), and the reproductions are crap. Interesting, nevertheless, for the art and cultural history.

24. Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare. One I’d never read or seen. How sad! The story, I mean.

25. The USS Emmons: Eyewitness Accounts from Survivors of the Battle of Okinawa (2020), transcribed by Cheri Yecke. Re-read in preparation for presenting a copy to the Navy Heritage Center (Robert Smith, archivist). I still think it’s better than a Spielberg movie.

 

with Rear Admiral Frank Thorp (ret_USN)
at Navy Heritage Center

26. Breaking New Ground: A Personal History (2013) by Lester R. Brown. The life and work of my favorite “futurist,” an environmental and agricultural researcher and policy analyst who started life as a tomato farmer. (His writings about sustainability in The Futurist had the most influence on me personally.)

27. Art of the Twentieth Century (1976) by Maurice Besset. One of my college textbooks, which I probably only dipped into at the time. Really kind of appalling how hard it is to read textbooks. I’m surprised I learned anything in college. Also appalling how few women artists are included. Love me some Paul Klee, though, and he’s treated well here. (Yes, I’ll say it: I’m a Klee-mate.)

28. “Extricating Young Gussie,” aka “The Man With Two Left Feet” (Saturday Evening Post, 1915) by P. G. Wodehouse. Noted as the first appearance of Jeeves. (I needed something to help get me through Art of the Twentieth Century.)

29. King John (play) by William Shakespeare. Another one I hadn’t read or seen before. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys right away without actors showing you. But once you get to beloved young Prince Arthur you know. And you cry your eyes out.

 

30. How Right You Are, Jeeves (1960) by P. G. Wodehouse. Included in a three-volume collection with Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1962) and Jeeves & the Tie That Binds (1971). There’s no point to summarizing the plot. The language is the thing.

31. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995) by Robert S. McNamara (with Brian VanDeMark). A survey of the mistakes and failures that comprised the Vietnam War. Like General Grant in the Civil War, McNamara is reluctant to blame anyone, including Johnson, for all that happened. But, he emphasizes, Johnson should have been less secretive. See Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on the subject of Johnson’s pathological need to control all information.

32. The Republic by Plato. Last of the dialogues included in The Portable Plato. Terrifyingly accurate description of the tyranny confronting us as the threatened successor of democracy (due to growing popular resentment of some people’s profligate expression of their rights and freedoms). On educating the future guardians of his ideal republic, Plato (in the character of Socrates) argues against teaching literature (fiction/poetry), such as is found in Homer where it is unauthentic (lies). I thought he was being sarcastic, since he cites Homer a lot. If Plato is the imitator of Socrates, does that mean he, too, is removed from Truth?

33. Beyond Identities: Human Becomings in Weirding Worlds (2022) by Jim Dator. Sociology, futurism, memoir, diatribe. Reviewed for Foresight Signals. Dator is one of the best known and most revered futures academics of our time. I liked the memoir and (Trump-directed) diatribe parts the best.

34. Emma (1815) by Jane Austen. Re-read because Fay Weldon seemed to admire it the most (see above). Well, yes, it is pretty perfect. None of the melodrama of scoundrels defiling maidens (Wickham, Willoughby).

35. Much Ado About Nothing (play) by William Shakespeare. Still my favorite comedy. Re-read in preparation of seeing modernized version at Shakespeare Theatre Company (Spamalot alum Rick Holmes as Benedick).

36. Wait Till Next Year (1997) by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Memoir: on being a young girl who loves baseball, specifically the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson. A detailed and moving reflection on the 1950s and its terrors, from polio to McCarthyism. DKG herself is as interesting as the subjects she writes about as a historian.

 

37. The Stranger (based on Stuart Gilbert’s 1946 English translation) by Albert Camus. A novel about a seemingly disengaged man who is tried for a murder but is really found guilty for not feeling sorry enough about his own mother’s death in a nursing home. His biggest emotional outburst is directed at the cleric who foists religious beliefs on him at the end. Contemporary readers either view the narrator as a monster or “diagnose” him as having Asperger’s syndrome. But is he not “existentialist” in the sense of accepting present conditions (such as his mother’s death) as they occur? His intolerance of heat and bright light suggests sensory issues, but I wouldn’t call his nonbelief in the afterlife “monstrous.”

37. The Tempest (play) by William Shakespeare. Re-read in preparation of seeing Teller’s magical interpretation at Round House Theatre. I’d forgotten how much of the play was about forgiveness. (The RHT production’s magic tricks were distracting, but I forgive it. It was a jump-to-your-feet standing ovation performance.)

38. Becket, or The Honour of God (play, 1959) by Jean Anouih. Henry II and Thomas Becket the martyr. Sorry, hated it. Henry and Thomas were both pretty despicable. I remember seeing T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral years ago, but I don’t remember disliking the story this much. Maybe someone could recommend a good history?

39. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) by John Irving. Religion, baseball, the 1950s, Vietnam. Friends and mothers. Broken people. It’s been a while since I’d read John Irving. He is masterful with the details, just as Doris Kearns Goodwin is with her own memoir of the same era and themes. The narrator (author?) is as angry with Reagan as many of us (specifically Dator, see above) have been with Trump.

*Addendum: At some point while reading the Gen. Grant memoir I took a Sunday off to re-read Othello, again in preparation for attending a related production, Red Velvet, at Shakespeare Theatre Co. Sunday afternoons have always been good Shakespeare-reading times, going back to my Shakespeare Readers days.

I find memoirs to be my favorite window on history. I loved every one I read this year, from U. S. Grant to D. K. Goodwin. As for the history plays, Shakespeare’s kings, Anouih’s martyr, I will only say my mind’s eye is an insufficient interpreter. Give me dramaturgs, directors, designers, and actors.

There was also more philosophy and religion in my readings than I even expected with my Gandhi and Plato, to wit, Camus’s Stranger and Irving’s Owen Meany. These readings are broadening my understanding of misunderstandings. And I like how Irving describes faith itself as a miracle.

Lastly, turning obsession into an art form (and trust me, the point of this was not puzzle solving. It was inspiration), a compiled layout of the privately printed Stories My Words Tell. Nobody seems to have gotten the point of it. I apologize for the "stories" not being legible. Inquire within. Love, hosaa

Stories My Words Tell, C. G. Wagner.
Hint: open the image link in a new tab and zoom in.

Reading 2021: A Lotta Books and a Little Sky

 Unlike other end-of-year book lists, this isn’t a list of favorites published during the previous year. This is just me going through what’s been on my bookshelves for a long time (recommended unit of measure: decades). 

An exception to that general principle is Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, read within two days of receipt and highly, highly recommended.

As I did last year, I mixed classic and not-so-classic fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, humor, short, long, and interstitial magazine articles (New Yorker, mostly; Smithsonian continues to neglect art and art history). Once again, my goal was to finish everything I started, even if I didn’t like it much. There’s something to be said for reading what someone took the trouble to write. Karma, or something. 

My 2021 reading list, in somewhat chronological and/or thematic order:

• The Iliad, Homer. Mythology. A Victorian-era prose translation.
• The Odyssey, Homer. Mythology. Same, but read a few months later. Some critics have called Iliad a man’s story (wars and such) and Odyssey a woman’s story (romance, and a virtuous hero who reminded me quite a bit of Russell Crowe in Gladiator).
• Bulfinch’s Mythology, excerpts on the Trojan War and the Fall of Troy—to help figure out what happened in Iliad and Odyssey.
• Joy in the Morning, P. G. Wodehouse. (Re-read.) Fiction, humor. Jeeves.
• John Glenn: A Memoir. One of my virtuous heroes. I love how he loved his wife, Annie.
• Where No Man Can Touch, Pat Valdata. Poetry; women in aviation history. Timely reminder that women had the right stuff, too.

• Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts. History, women. Referring to women by their first names rather than last makes the stories more intimate, but harder to keep track of who’s who. 
• 3 Plays by Thornton Wilder, to wit, Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker. (Re-read.) We’re getting Our Town this season at Shakespeare Theatre Co., but somebody really needs to stage Skin again. 
• A Pale View of the Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro. (Re-read.) Fiction. Prepping myself for the anticipated new book. And you can never have enough Ishiguro.
• Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro. Fiction. Technically science fiction (artificial intelligence, human enhancement), but if you only read it that way, you miss the point and pain and pleasure of Ishiguro’s storytelling.
• The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton. Philosophy, sociology. What’s it like to be an office worker (accountant) or somebody who checks on power lines or sells aircraft parts? These activities to earn money to live life seem rather pointless to de Botton, who comes off kind of judgey in this.
• Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll. Children’s fiction. Another one of those books I never got around to reading before. Can’t remember it now. (Pass judgment on my powers of retention, not on Lewis Carroll.)
• American Discoveries, Ellen Dudley and Eric Seaborg. Nonfiction—outdoors, memoir. Shortly after my former co-workers left The Futurist they took on the project of connecting the various hiking/biking trails from California to Delaware. They also got engaged! 

• Ninth Street Women, Mary Gabriel. Art history, biography, women. Five influential modern artists in mid-century New York: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hardigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell. I look for them now in every museum. Again, I notice, women biographers refer to their subjects by first name. Only five main ladies to keep track of, but I still had to look back at the chapter title to remember who I was reading about. (I have almost no retention anymore.)
• Raven Girl, Audrey Niffenegger. Fantasy. Art and storytelling, evidence that fairy tales are not passé.
• The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy. Poetry, biography. More about Jackie later on the reading list.
• Persuasion, Jane Austen. (Re-read.) Fiction. Maybe my favorite Austen heroine, the overlooked and undervalued Anne Elliot.
• Lincoln and Shakespeare, Michael Anderegg. History, biography. Really overly academic treatment of Lincoln’s fondness for the theater and for Shakespeare in particular. Good tidbits on American theater, but sourcing and citing is numbing to a casual (non-academic) reader.
• Seventeen, Booth Tarkington. Fiction. Oy. This sample of early 20th century Midwestern humor doesn’t really age well. Or do we accept minstrels and suburban prejudice as “of the era”? I did like his Penrod, though.
• My Brother, Grant Wood, Nan Wood Graham et al. Art history, memoir. Nan loved her brother deeply, recounting his life endearingly though perhaps not fully. Some things just aren’t anyone else’s business, and I appreciate the more-relevant focus on Wood’s art and influence.
• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens. (Re-read.) Fiction. My notes record that I was bawling my eyes out at the end. I do love my virtuous heroes, even if it takes them the whole story to get there.
• Moon Shot, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton (et al.). Memoir, history, space program. A bit of de-mythologizing after The Right Stuff. And a slightly different take from John Glenn’s on that famous confrontation among the rival Mercury 7 astronauts. Bear in mind that all memoirs are exercises in self-justification, to some extent. Probably.
• Cymbeline, Shakespeare. Play. Nice reunion of lost sister and brothers. Shakespeare makes you cry whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy.
• Myths of the Greeks and Romans, Michael Grant. Mythology, literary history. Overview of origins of myths and how different cultures adopted and adapted similar stories. It’s academic but not daunting. [Note, this is the point when I picked up Odyssey.]
• Woe Is I, Patricia T. O’Connor. Grammar. Not to be used as a reference: It’s not set up like a Strunk and White or AP Stylebook, and anyway O’Connor’s preferences are out of date. I broke my rule of not writing in the margins, but this book needed amendments.

• Is Sex Necessary? James Thurber and E. B. White. Humor, satire. A fake academic treatment on the subject. With Thurber’s cartoons.
• All the Time in the World, E. L. Doctorow. Short stories. Chilling stories told in Doctorow’s straight-forward, seemingly acritical, in-the-moment style. Most pertinent to today, I thought, were “Walter John Harmon,” about a cult leader, and “Jolene: A Life,” a young woman drifting through life into sexual servility.
• The USS Emmons: Eyewitness Accounts from Survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, transcribed by Cheri Pierson Yecke. Better than a Spielberg movie. 
• The Book of Will, Lauren Gunderson. Play. How Shakespeare’s colleagues collected and recollected what they could of Shakespeare’s scattered works to compile the First Folio. Which almost left out Pericles (a favorite of one of Gunderson’s characters).
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Shakespeare. Play. Of course. I loved how his daughter, Marina, dealt with pirates and procurers. The power of innocence is that it can bring out the best in people. Even fiends.
• And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini. Fiction. Brother and sister (and many others) in Afghan in tumultuous times. I don’t know why this stayed on my shelf so long, unless because I read a bad review. My favorite Hosseini book yet.
• Inventing Leonardo, A. Richard Turner. Art history. My late college professor’s comparative study of Leonardo studies through history. Academic. Led me to:
• Leonardo the Florentine, Rachel Annand Taylor. Art history, biography. Taylor was a poet and obviously a classical scholar. It took forever to read this, with having to Google-search every other reference. But in the end I feel I know Leonardo and what motivated him: Beauty. It also seems clear Leonardo was almost universally loved and admired for his charm and grace. I kept picturing him played by Colin Firth. Hope that’s okay.
• My World and Welcome To It, James Thurber. (Re-read.) Short stories, humor. It’s odd how racist the humor could be at times, mostly lampooning a character’s maid’s dialect. Still, Thurber was the author of some of my favorite themes, such as not mistaking a container for the thing contained. And “you can look it up.”
• “Symposium,” Plato, in The Portable Plato, edited by Scott Buchanan. Philosophy. Dialogues on Love. Actually pretty funny. Socrates could be a hoot, apparently.
• Mrs. Kennedy and Me, Clint Hill. Memoir. Jackie Kennedy’s bodyguard tells a riveting tale. Hill’s admiration borders on infatuation but doesn’t go over the line. His sense of guilt in not saving President Kennedy (he was guarding Mrs. Kennedy, not the president) is heartbreaking. The bit about keeping her away from Onassis was somehow funnier than it should have been.
• The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family. Photography. Richard Avedon’s portraits of the Kennedy family between election and inauguration. Interesting look at how editors chose which images to publish from the contact sheets, and how Avedon teased the images into art.
• Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand. Play. Courtly love, misguided romance. Or something. Cyrano wields words and swords. 
• The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford, plus A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens. Literary history. I’m not sure I’ve seen a definitive version of the Carol, or none that pleased me as much as the non-definitive musical versions, but it’s nice to learn the effects of a walk in Manchester on a creative mind.
• A Christmas Story, Jean Shepherd. Short stories. Repackaged stories that formed the basis of one of the all-time great Christmas movies. Midwestern mid-century humor at its best.
• Woman in the Dark, Dashiell Hammett. Crime fiction. Because what’s December without a little noir.

Finally, there was a little unpublished volume I put together myself via Snapfish, by way of Christmas/Hanukkah presents for friends and family. Limited edition (10 copies printed only), called Little Sky.

Little Sky layouts. Copyright 2021 C. G. Wagner

Love, hosaa
writing a little, reading a lot

How I Read a Moby-Book

Everybody read Moby Dick in school, whether high school or college. (And let's get this out of the way right now: No hyphen.)

I'm glad I got to read it at Grinnell under the guidance of my English Yoda, Richard Cleaver. I still hear his gentle voice extolling the virtues of Henry James--and that re-reading him is what retirement was for. I'm for Melville, however, but really can't afford to wait until retirement to enjoy my nineteenth century.

I am a slow reader. A very slow reader. I just finished rereading the beat-up paperback edition I had in college days, and it took over three years. Note the boarding passes as bookmarks. (To my credit, I did read a couple of other things during this time, too, including Doris Kearns Goodwin's 800-page Team of Rivals.)

And I read word by word, often imagining being read to by a great voice. Sam Waterston would be a great Moby Dick voice. And I scribble in the margins. I look stuff up if I can't figure it out, and there's a lot I couldn't figure out in Moby Dick. Even Shakespeare could be more accessible at times.

I have at least two hard cover editions of Moby Dick, including one that's part of a humongous (and hence unreadable) collection of unabridged Melville novels. These look nice on my bookcase. I also have a Kindle version loaded on my netbook, which I haven't inspected yet. (My "Complete Shakespeare" on Kindle omitted all of the plays that were categorized as Romances, so bye-bye Tempest, Cymbeline, and Winter's Tale.)

I have little interest in trying to read Moby Dick electronically anyway. I rather enjoyed seeing "my" notes in the margins. My handwriting was so fussy and fine in those days. And I know perfectly well, even 35 years later, those were not my thoughts in the margins. They were Mr. Cleaver's.

"Whitmanesque" on page 123. What a laugh. I might be able to pick a Whitman poem out of a line-up of Poe and something in the New Yorker, but just forget it you think I'd think of Whitman while reading Melville.

That said, there is poetry in Moby Dick. There's theater in Moby Dick. There's encyclopedias, bibles, art, anthropology, mathematics, history, and every book in every library in Moby Dick. There's not just the whale stuff, there's everything. There is quantum physics before there was quantum physics. From Chapter 41, "Moby Dick" (page 183 in the above edition):

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.

Mostly, for me, there is a philosophy in Moby Dick that has shaped my worldview since Mr. Cleaver's class sometime in the mid-1970s. In one of the many levels that Cleaver encouraged us to consider Moby Dick was Ishmael's acceptance of everyone else's worldview. And it was Ishmael who was saved. Cause and effect? That universal (even ubiquitous) acceptance is our ultimate salvation? 

I don't know. I have tried to live by that idea, though. That's one reason why I wanted to reread Moby Dick. 

A quick Internet search reveals that I'm not the only re-reader of Moby Dick to stop short on the reference to the "now egotistical sky" (Chapter 79, "The Prairie," page 335 of my edition). The question I scribbled to myself in the margin here: "God is egotistical? or man has inserted his ego into the deity's domain?"

A former-English-teacher friend of mine tried to explain something about Melville's critique of the Transcendentalists of his time. I may go read up on that at some point. (In addition to being very very slow, I am frequently very very lazy.) I'll simply redirect the philosophically inclined toward the New York Times Opinionator blog dated December 5, 2010, by Sean D. Kelly, "Navigating Past Nihilism." 

The deep thinkers of the nineteenth century were struggling over Nietsche's atheism (God is dead) and the fanaticism (exclusivity) of many religious believers. The elevation (transcendence) of humanism was one alternative. Kelly writes that Ishmael's (Melville's) acceptance of these multiple worldviews could be called "polytheism." The term doesn't quite satisfy me, but I don't want to be a stickler for semantics. Polytheism wouldn't include humanism.

But I do like what Kelly writes here:

Melville hoped for a life that steers happily between two dangers: nihilism and fanaticism. ... Melville himself seems to have recognized that the presence of many gods—many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life—was a possibility our own American culture could and should be aiming at. The death of God therefore, in Melville’s inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings. 

The pursuit of a good way of life. And as simple as that sounds, that's what it's all about. I'm not sure if that's what Mr. Cleaver was telling us back in the day, but it's a good takeaway now.

Love, hosaa

Mobied