Reading so far on this pass through life

1998

January

Fallen Man by Tony Hillerman. I really cannot remember anything about this book to separate it from the rest of a fine body of work. By that you should assume that I do not think it is an example of his best work.

Henry VI, Part 2 by William Shakespeare. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Hey Bill said it, not me!

Henry VI, Part 3. Favorite quote: Not that I fear to stay, but love to go.

Richard III. Set in 1483, written in 1592 or 1593. A most evil king. Both Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellin bring depth to the play. Favorite quote: A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.
The depravity of Richard III is so difficult to imagine that we site emotionless and let the words make events. When we finish, we can check another check mark on our W.S. reading list. Are we, at the end of this most difficult century, inured to monsters? Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein have dulled our senses.

Comedy of Errors. A separated at birth twins story. Favorite quotes: A man is master of his liberty. ...but there's many a man hath more hair than wit.

The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. Written 1593. Most unspeakable violence in a play. Thoughtful quote: Is black so base a hue?

The Taming of the Shrew. According to internal evidence, shrew here was then pronounced shrow. Great quotes: That wench is stark mad. Kiss me, Kate. tis the mind that makes the body rich. Better once than never, for never too late.

Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach. Her book about her legendary bookstore frequented by all the Paris writers. A nice read.

Two Gentlemen of Verona. Elizabethans held love for a friend stronger than that between a man and a woman.

Oh how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away.

Love's Labor Lost. People are still trying to understand what this is about.

Richard II. History as the conflict between two individuals.

February

Romeo and Juliet. Gang warfare by Shakespeare. As pointless then as now.

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck

Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. Flow is, I believe, to be found elsewhere.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. A motivating book on writing by one of this decade's most original writers.

[I perused as many Seattle bookstores as my meeting schedule would allow near the end of the month.]

April

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. I guess San Francisco is really as they say. Somewhere between a fun and strange place to be.

American Renaissance by F. O. Matthiessen. Matty Matthiessen, while extremely short lived, gave us much in this send up of the founders of one version of the American religion. A book to read (covers Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, among others) and to keep for reference. See also his Oxford Book of American Verse.

Citizen Soldiers by Stephen E. Ambrose. A chronicle of the everyday GI on the horrible trek through Europe in 1944 and 1945 that made it possible for us to share information on whatever we choose and in English. A moving book.

May

Along the Edge of America by Peter Jenkins. Ever think about running away and doing the Gulf Coast in a boat? He did.

Justine by Laurence Durrell. Oh why did I not buy a set of the Alexandria Quartet! A must read for those who appreciate good writing. It seldom gets better than this. Period.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. If I got the point of this book, would that make me smart? Nice read though.

June

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Ok, I missed it as a kid. So sue me. If you haven't read this is a decade or three, you owe it to yourself. Some parts are as dark as Night of the Hunter.

A Year in the Maine Woods by Bernd Heinrich. Not Thoreau but a year that even today is theoretically possible. Please throw me in that brier patch!

July

Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by Robert D. Richardson Jr. Why do books like this have to end? I particularly enjoyed learning of the influence of William Gilpin, English landscape artist and architect on Thoreau and that Thoreau was as smitten by Goethe's Italian Journey as I was. Even more since he did a translation.

Italian Journey by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Fine, fine, fine. An appendix (his) describes Carnival in Rome. Neither Mobile nor New Orleans could hold a candle to this one.

Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan. His futurology already sadly off but his power to think--and make us think worth most of the pages.

August

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. I bought this book for my mountain-reared wife. My first attempt to read resulted in failure; the book read like a freshman writing project. A second attempt got me though to his first recitation of Bartram. Hearing Bartram again and thinking of him on his eighteenth century trek while following this protagonist on his nineteenth trek held me interest at least enough to finish. I object to the modern sensibilities of the main character. His psychological makeup in the book was not a Civil War or even an Appalachian character.

Travels by William Bartram. Mark van Doren edition. Well, after Cold Mountain I just had to reread the source! Bartram is a book everyone from the south should read. At least once. And if you live in Cowford, well....

Beach Red by Peter Bowman. I discovered this little gem of a novel in verse in a thrift store. I noticed the book club mark on the rear so looked it up at www.bibliofind.com to find that it was a 1945 Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club. I don't know if that is negative for you, but just read the book. It has something to say about what the soldiers that went through World War II for our freedom had to go through. A great compliment to James Jones's trilogy.

September

Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak. An OK book about time travel. His best work, The Way Station, to follow.

It's All over But the Shouting by Rick Bragg. A memoir of growing up in the piedmont of Alabama. A moving tale of an abusive PWT father and a loving, supportive mother by the New York Times reporter now stationed in Atlanta.

Mind of the South by W.J. Cash. To much has been written about Cash for me to attempt a meaningful review here. The 1991 Vintage edition has an excellent introductory essay by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a leading historian of the South.

October

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. Certainly the most accessible piece of writing by the most expatriate of all American expatriates of all time.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Now I understand why he has a book entitled Slowness. It is not an unpleasant read though and may, may, offer some insight into society during the Communist period in Czechoslovakia.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

The Way Station by Clifford D. Simak. The finest science fiction book I have ever read, four times. Pastoral and interplanetary travel. What more could you want?

Blind Descent by Nevada Barr. The latest in a series of mysteries by former National Park Service Ranger Barr. Each of her stories is set at a National Park; this one the Lechiguila section of Carlsbad. A good read for a mystery.

November

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Mann belongs on the must read list of every serious reader. This is Mann at his best.

Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose. Meriwether Lewis. April 7, 1805: "Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. This little fleet altho' no quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for thier safety and preservation, we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousands miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. however, as this the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the colouring to events, when the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. entertaing as I do, the most confident hope of succeading in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life." [All spellings of Lewis sic.] Ambrose adds his fine commentary and ties the Lewis and Clark route to modern geography. Makes you want to join the herd of Winnebagos that will retrace the journey on its upcoming bicentennial!

Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes. A literate World War II espionage novel. How do I say she was the wife of Gilbert Highet without being sexist? Highet was the Harold Bloom of his day, only nicer.

King John by William Shakespeare. I am sure this had more meaning to English play-goers. It gave them, albeit creatively, a bit of their history. Harold Bloom says the Bastard is the one developed character. I agree.

December

The Merchant of Venice. Shylock does has a sensitivity that surprised me on this reading. My school read and the performance seen did not reveal this. I suppose though that it was easy for Shakespeare to be magnanimous since very few Jews lived in England in his time.

Beach Music by Pat Conroy This week, my reading has taken me through Beach Music. There is much to this book I find contrived and overwritten. Yet, as I near the end and see it more as a whole, I realize the difficulty Conroy had in writing what is at least partially his story. His previous books have been about others in relationship to him; Prince of Tides and The Great Santini about father; The Lords of Discipline about military school students more tragic than himself. Beach Music comes out of this struggle as both a work of art and an opportunity for self-relection.

Diary of an Early American Boy by Eric Sloane I saw these books beginning in jr high when I began to work in the school library (Lanier Jr. High, Macon, GA--Go Poets!) but I was never quite sure what to make of them. Reading this, I am still uncertain about Sloane's direct historical accuracy. However, I do know that he draws a niceness about the past that I just don't think was there. His landscape drawings are neat and clean. New England may have been neat, but I doubt the sterility he portrays. I did enjoy the drawings of tools and water power.

Writers at Work, Second Series I have and have read all of this, some of one and four. Somebody send me three. Plimpton's (and I might add Eugene Walter's) Paris Review writers' interviews are simply great reading.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro How many books come out in a decade that treat the language with the respect this novel does? One, two, four? Then to learn that Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki not London! If action, thought, feeling, and writing define one's nationality, then we must call Ishiguro a full and complete Englishman. Just read it and let me know if you agree. The fine movie starring Anthony Hopkins closely follows the book and has the same respect for English and the English.

As the year ends, I start Goethe's Poetry and Truth (Parts One to Three) Volume 4 of the Princeton Goethe: The Collected Works in 12 Volumes. Goethe was born the year my Seckinger ancestors left Germany for Georgia, 1749. I am sorry they missed him (but glad I'm here). It is clear to all historical and literary minded that Goethe greatly influenced a different way of looking at Man and nature and art in his eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I believe his words can also be read with profit by us. And so readers, I wish you Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Good Reading!

If you need an out of print book, give Fireside a try. It is a real bookstore run by real people. Until next year, thanks for reading.

Ernie Seckinger
December 19, 1998