A Memoir, A Novel, and Selected Poems, BookMarks Update August, 2023

READ MY REVIEW

Friends: It's a time when the garden is losing steam, the days are getting shorter, and the nights are getting cooler. Another lazy August gone, but one that brought these wonderful books my way. Here are the ones that I read last month:

While I occasionally choose a theme for the month's reading in advance, this month was pleasantly random and included four volumes of essays about books, three novels, a selection of poems by my favoriite poet, and four works of non-fiction from the true tale of a shipwreck in 1741 to commentaries on current political issues----a bounty of riches.

First, the essayists. Carlo Rovelli's unusual mixture of chapters on contemporary Italian politics, classical philosophy, and cutting edge science didn't really work for me, but his chapter on Vladimir Nabokov's writing and his work as a lepidopterist at the Harvard Museum of Natural History made reading the book worth it.

Michael Dirda.the Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post book reviewer put together a seemingly endless lists of books to be read in seemingly innumberable categories, and again, among the overabundance of material, there were golden moments,such as this quote from Emerson "There are books ...which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences." Dirda then goes on to write a chapter about one's Interior Library that completely resonated with my goals for BookMarks. Worth browsing.

Spinnen's rather dry tome about books was a touch too Germanic for me, but was saved by a chapter on the various motivations for building one's personal library. As I looked around my Vermont shelves, his comments about one's library as a personal collection, a "somewhat quirky archive' which serves as a 'tangible visible document of one's life as a reader" felt spot on.

The outstanding book of the month for me, however, was Peter Orner's 'Still No Word From You', a deeply felt exploration of his youth and his life of reading. The book comprises 107 brief chapters that alternate between memoir and literary criticism, and, like his previous books, it's full of the sadness, joy, and depth of both life and reading. What distinguishes Orner's work from the others are the beautifully fashioned sentences and paragraphs. Here's a brief example of his craft as he writes about a novel by the little-known Wright Morris: "I read 'Plains Song' again this week. I read it to remind myself again, because I have forgotten again, how the things I think I'll be able to hold on to, my family, my young kids, my work, will be outside of my grasp soon enough. The bewildering inconsistency of time." That repetition of 'again' three times in one sentence brilliantly sets one up for that inconsistency of time. Read his books and enjoy the beauty of the language and the introductions to little known authors and books listed conveniently in the final pages.

Turning to the three novels, I had a clear favorite---Dennis Lehane's 'Small Mercies'. Lehane writes about Boston better than anyone since George Higgins, and this often violent tale of South Boston's turmoil during the court-ordered busing integration of South Boston High School in 1974 is particularly well done. I became deeply involved with the characters, and the final resolution was so powerful that I re-read it the next day just to fully grasp it.

Another Irishman, John Banville is a likely future Nobel laureate, and his Dublin mystery novels featuring the pathologist Quirk and the police detective inspector, the Protestant blue blood St. John Strafford, are top notch. I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Lock-Up'. And speaking of Nobel Laureates, I read Peter Handke, an Austrian Nobel Prize winner from 2019, but didn't enjoy 'Across' at all. Maybe it suffered in translation; maybe it was just not a very good book; or maybe I just missed the point.

Whether you're a devoted reader of poetry or someone who cringes at the thought of reading 'Two roads diverged...', you should try Donald Hall's 'Selected Poems'. I met Hall when I was a medical student and he was a professor at the University of Michigan in 1971, and we began a five decade correspondence, always by pen and paper, his letters typed by his secretary and edited by him with a black pen. His journey from married professor to a divorced, depressed man to a new love, a return to his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire where he had spent his youth's summers, and finally, the loss of his beloved wife are reflected in this book's poems. Savor this book in its entirety, or if you find that daunting, try his three poems hyperlinked below.

The non-fiction this month was particularly varied, from political philosophy to 18th Century history, from contemporary politics to backyard nature observation. The books by Michael Walzer and Matthew Desmond were excellent. Walzer, at age 88, remains one of our most thoughtful and articulate political philosophers, and his take on 'liberal' as an adjective rather than a noun, was thought-provoking and worth reading. Desmond tackles the question of why the richest nation on earth continues to mire 10-15% of its citizens in poverty and concludes that this is a result of political choices by each of us, the outcome of advantaging some to the disadvantage of others. It's an important book.

The title of David Gann's 'The Wager', does not refer to a bet but is the name of a British warship that ended up wrecked on an island off Chile while searching for a Spanish galleon filled with gold and silver in 1741. The book tells a tale of nearly unimaginable hardship and is well-written with a surprise ending. It reminded me of one of my very favorite tales, 'Endurance', the story of Ernest Shackelton's ill-fated voyage to Antarctica in 1914. and compared well in the telling. Gann's work shows that history can be as gripping as a Lehane detective story. In contrast, while 'Stranded' has some lovely drawings by the marine biologist author, Maddelena Bearzi would do better in the future to stick to dolphins and drawing. No need to dip into this book.

The Poetry Tree on The Charles this month features six poems which appealed to me because of their deep insights into the stages of life that I seem to be either going through or approaching. Three are from my all time #1 poet Donald Hall's 'Selected Poems', one by his wife Jane Kenyon, one by a Canadian poet named Robyn Sarah, and two by other American super-star poets, Kay Ryan and William Stafford. They take us from adulthood's special love through loss, stopping to note our denial of time passing along the way.

So many wonderful phrases from the past.... Here are two that caught my eye this month. From C. S. Lewis: “Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back, everything is different?” and this one from Trotsky,"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man." I doubt if this confirmed Anglican theist and this revolutionary Communist have ever been quoted in the same paragraph before!

Wise words arrive via many vehicles these days. This wonderful quote from Rabbi David Wolpe landed in my email inbox last week as part of the Jewels of Elul series leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days. I found it to be very comforting: How to keep balance when so much life is fired at us point blank? The social media messages, the bills and obligations, the people demanding our attention and craving our love, all of it crowds in on us and we stand solitary in this world amidst a thousand pushes and pulls. During those blessed moments when we retreat to reclaim some calm, we are sure to return to an even greater volume of noise and necessity. In these pages you will find wise reflections, reminding us that we are flawed, partial beings. We are not built to be “completists” - as the Rabbis say, each of us leaves this world without half of our wishes fulfilled. We simply will never do everything we could or hope to, and acceptance is part of balance. “The world is too much with us” wrote the poet, but we do have control, we have breath, we have stillness, we have choices. There is joy in what we can do, as opposed to regret in what we cannot.

There is no perfect equilibrium; we rebalance every day.

Good reading and good travelling!