1997 Reading

January

The Town by William Faulkner. Part of the Snopes Trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion. Going through Faulkner quickly was rewarding. I can see his county as a real place. Only someone who spends so much time in one place understanding relationships and knowing the stories could create such a work. It serves as a chronicle, a record of a place for those of us that did not stay or pay enough attention. This incredible sense of place may be equaled or exceeded only in Thoreau.

Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts. See below.

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

    Within two years we have the joy of two accessible books on reading. The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts and A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. Both beg the question, "What is reading?"
    Reading, as expressed in these books, is two things. One, the focus of both, is deep reading. Through their quite different experiences, Birkerts and Manguel try to articulate what deep reading (Birkerts's phrase) is but the reader gets a better sense of its meaning by reading the books and absorbing their experience. To do so leaves an aftertaste akin to that of a fine wine.
    Birkerts's experience closely mirrors mine. Although I was in a different discipline—anthropology—we share occupation of common time and intellectual experience. He, like me, dreamed of being a writer—a writer of fiction—as the only admirable goal for a deep reader. Manguel's experience is of a different sort. Raised in Argentina, he studied the classics as few outside the nineteenth century or Eton have.
    Birkerts's book is in two parts: an autobiography of reading and a cautionary tale on the dangers of reading outside the form of black ink on white bound pages. Manguel admits and accepts no limitations on his reading, illustrating an incunabula of Ovid and a CDROM of Shakespeare.
    The final question, barely hinted by the first, is that in the time of Harold Bloom's Canon, is this of and about elitism? I point to Manguel's illustration of a slave reading in 1856 South Carolina, of the library of the Arkansas sharecropper of Charles Kuralt's On the Road, a Mississippi fireman entering the select club of Southern writers and then I know, there is room for all in the deep reading room.

A Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

February

Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. A most interesting writer. A child of the 1960s, with all the negative that goes along with that, she is now a born again Christian, but hey, don't let that turn you off. she most definitely tells it like it is. Writing now from the future (1998) she is a regular columnist of Salon Magazine. This book is a journal of the first year of her son, Sam.

Selena by Gordon Willey. Archeologists will recognize Willey as one of the finest and greatest of the grand old men of American archaeology. In his retirement, he has turned to the mystery novel. Quiet, sophisticated prose set on the north Florida Gulf Coast.

The African Queen screenplay by James Agee. Agee was simply one of the literary geniuses of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, like so many at his level he found equal company only in the bottle and left us decades before we were ready. His books, movie reviews for TIME, screenplays for The African Queen and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and his magnum opus, Let us Now Praise Famous Men, a production he shared with Walker Evans, form a literary and sociological record with few equals.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shiels

March

Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe. As I finish Of Time and the River, I realized it is 62 years old. The protagonist was 24 and the book is set in 1924, thereby requiring Wolfe's own birth year of 1900. Is that beyond my temporal reach to understand? Does Paris, do people, if now alive, of 97 years of age, have any thing to say to me?
    By me posing these questions and you reading to this point, we both agree answers to those questions are yes. I knew people born in 1900, in fact, ALL my grandparents (I knew them all) were born before 1900; one was already 14 years old then. They had things to say to me about work, life, and war. Does Wolfe?
    He speaks in the vacuum of the lost generation. So many of his age and more so the few added years of my WWI veteran grandfather's age, died in the War to End all Wars. He--and his perennial character Eugene Gant, here in his debut--wander about 1924's France obstensively to write but as with other American expatriate writers in Paris, spending more time in drink and debauch. The text flows from an after the fact memory dump on his New York apartment floor with Max Perkins awaiting the manuscript.
    Wolfe's fictionalized account of his Paris stay could be literal or imaginary; it matters little. What is significant about Of Time and the River is that thread which sews it into the quilt of American expatriatism in Paris. Many exist but Giovanni's Room, The Merry Month of May, The Sun Also Rises come to mind. Shared greatness of these works come not from moralizing, superiority, or role model creation; nothing so trite exists in them. They serve as reflections of internal experience knowable only to the protagonist, the writer does his best to bring that experience in a form we can assimilate, a form we may indeed experience if we, as Birkerts calls it, do deep reading of the texts.
    They are not experiences any person would willingly undertake or encourage others to undertake; perhaps that is a chief latent value of the literature of truth--it presents experiences in all its dimensions. They are not experiences the new writer should ape for his or her book. But they do posit the central notion of experiential fiction: You must tell the truth. Experience is, after all, the "river that goes on forever."
    As Eugene showed us, you cannot, no matter your appetite or perseverance, read everything written about human experience. You have to experience it.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Ted Kajenski's model?

Booked to Die by John Dunning You probably would not be here if you did not like books. Dunning does. The business of rare books. His mysteries weave the business into the plot. Well done.

The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley. Second time around. Book lovers in Mobile still mourn the loss of their only downtown used bookstore named for Morley's complete with a letter of permission from him.

Spartina by John Casey. Was there a point to this?

The Secret Diary of William Byrd 1709-1712. For those of us forced to read some of Byrd's tamer work in high school literature, you should see this! Quite an amazing record kept by a Virginia "gentleman" in a form he thought would remain unreadable to all but himself. Finally, a little honest American history.

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. Having majored in sociology, I had heard the story about the WWII internment of Japanese Americans so often it made me tired. I was appalled and ashamed for my country. So, I did not come to the reading of this book a willing victim. But, since my wife presented it to me on my birthday and I had a cross-country flight to keep my mind off of, I began. If you care about words and sentences and how they are put together to form this beautiful and expressive English language, then you must read this book.

April

Perused the Sacramento bookstores every Sunday. The month spent in managing the cultural resources part of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flood recovery effort.

Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler.

The Untidy Pilgrim by Eugene Walter A 1997 article in the Mobile newspaper suggested this book should have been Mobile's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It has a strong sense of place (Mobile) and a strong sense of time (the late 1940s). Walter died in 1998.

The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature by Gilbert Highet A plethora of detail on the influences but an enjoyable read for long, lonely Sunday afternoons.

May

The Endgame by Samuel Beckett. Harold Bloom calls this a great work. I confess that on the first reading, I did not get it.

New Stories from the South 1996. A buck in a Sacramento bookstore. Couldn't pass it up. A "new" story by William Faulkner.

A Portrait of a Woman by Maya Angelou. I did not know she had a life before the President's inaugral. A rich one. Perhaps even exciting. A worthy read. By the way, what did happen to the son?

June

Faust, Part II by Goethe. A Faustian bargain saved in the nick of time by the buns of cherubs.

Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner

The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning The business of rare books. His mysteries weave the business into the plot. Well done.

July

Alfred the Great by P.J. Helm Thank you Alfred for English.

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. But Nick Adams doesn't!

Martins Hundred by Ivor Noel Hume. Early American history.

An Exile by Madison Jones. Later made into the movie I'll Walk the Line. Jones is the retired writer in residence at Auburn University. War Eagle!

Dairy Queen Days by Bob Inman. OK but age 40 sensibilities in a 16 year old.

Firestorm by Nevada Barr. Another mystery by a Park Service ranger about a ranger. This one, while fun to read, highly implausible.

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. Merton promulgates his thesis that man was given, by God, "a nature that was ordered to a supernatural life." Could be. But it equally could be that through his rise of consciousness brought about by the action of complex systems in his developing brain, man as a species became so egotistical as to place himself above the other animals and ordain, for himself, an everlasting life to complement his perfection of evolution. To which Merton may have responded "Ecce eris tacens!"

August

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Before I worked for the Army (in my case, the US Army Corps of Engineers) I thought this was all a bunch of silliness. But I am here to tell you every word of it is true!

A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir

Joe by Larry Brown. You just gotta do what you just gotta do.

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. How could anything be so good and so funny. The movie is amazingly true to this fine book. It is a good day to read.

Endangered Species by Nevada Barr. Set on Cumberland Island, GA.

Return to Earth by Buzz Aldrin. Moving account of his space travels and his depression. But, not as good as I hoped it would be.

September

A front porch conversation with an old friend and fantasy writer, Tom Deitz

A Canticle for Lebowitz by Walter Miller. This book defined the post-apocalyptic genre.

Trips in Time by Robert Silverberg

The Wonder Book of the Air by Cynthia Shearer. By the curator of Rowan Oak, Faulkner's house.

October

Black Ship to Hell by Brigid Brophy. She tries to prove--through references to the classics, Shakespeare, and Freud that man is a destructive and self-destructive species driven by sex. While that may not be news, she builds an intellectual argument in a classic inductive manner.

Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff. A narrative tour of NYC.

Man's Unconquerable Mind by Gilbert Highet. My copy came from the estate of Walter Gibson a.k.a. Maxwell Grant (Creator of "The Shadow"). No, you may not have it. Highet had a fine mind. I only wish is that he was still with us.

The Second Common Reader by Virginia Woolf. I simply could not walk out of A Cappella Books at Little Five Points in Atlanta without buying something. Little Five Points was a favorite haunt of my great grandmother and is now of my older son. And this is a very fine book. She closes with

Yet who reads to bring about an end however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards--their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble--the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."

November

Freud by Peter Gay I have a deeper appreciation of a man who was far more than the father of analysis; he was an intellectual.

Ruined by Reading by Schartz. Yes, indeedy and loving it!

December

Great Books by David Denby. Early on in online discussion groups, I heard criticism of this book. Some thought Denby had trivialized Lear by talking about his mother in that chapter. I think far from it. How can any of this be worth doing if we do not form time to time relate what we have read to ourselves?

Henry VI, Part I by William Shakespeare. An unpleasant portrait of Joan of Arc. Henry VI was too naive to rule.

The Immortality Option by James Hogan. Hogan is one of the most innovative hard science fiction writers. Coming from an engineering background, his novels clank with the presence of technology. I mean in a good way. Where his physics are made up, they sound right and after all we have a story to tell. His earlier novels on time travel are some of my favorite entertainment reads. I think that his Giants trilogy, of which this is the fifth book (I didn't name it a trilogy, his publisher did long ago) go beyond simple entertainment to a thoughtful consideration of how we deal with those different.

Updated: December 12, 1998
Links below updated June 29, 2008
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