Friends: October brought distressing and heartbreaking news from Israel just months after we visited. A sense of helplessness and anxiety led to more walking, meditating, and reading. Nothing helped very much, but I did read a lot.

Here are the books I read this month.

Nabokov has been a favorite of mine since my Russian Literature course in college. Over the years, I've read nearly all of his novels, short stories, and poems, but this last month was a deeper dive into his novel, 'Pale Fire', his memoir 'Speak, Memory', and his career as a Lepidopterist.

Birkerts is a literary critic and editor of Boston University's literary magazine, Agni. He is a Nabokov fanatic, and his commentary on 'Speak Memory' is a deep dive into the memoir as a literary form and Nabokov's own as an exemplar of the form. If you haven't read 'Speak, Memory', I suggest you do so before reading Birkerts. Its first line is one of the best ever written: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Finally, Nabokov, in addition to being the best writer to never get the Nobel Prize in Literature, was a lepidopterist from an early age, collecting butterflies on his family's estate outside St. Petersburg. When he fled the Bolshevik Revolution and later the Nazis, he emigrated to America and landed a part-time position as the interim curator of lepidoptery at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). Working there from 1941-1949 while also teaching literature at Wellesley, he studied his favorite Blues, many of which he collected himself in Appalachia and Colorado. I had the pleasure of viewing his collection of specimens, notes, and drawings at the MCZ recently, and the professor who gave me the tour referred me to 'Fine Lines', perhaps the most arcane book I've ever read. Its introduction and ten essays on Nabokov the scientist and writer are accompanied by hundreds of his line drawings of male butterfly genitalia and wing patterns that enabled him to make discoveries of speciation and evolution. While his work was largely dismissed in the 1940's, it has recently been verified using modern DNA analysis and big data computing. 'Fine Lines' is not a book I'd recommend for everyone, but I loved spending hours leafing through its pages and feeling close to this amazing writer and butterfly collector who lived only a few blocks from us in Cambridge during his Harvard years.

Hemingway has been a hero of mine since I read 'The Sun Also Rises' in high school. His experiences always seemed larger than life---driving an ambulance in WWI as an 18 year old, living in Paris in the 1920's with Fitzgerald, Stein, et al, reporting from the front in the Spanish Civil War, marrying four times, and living hard and fast in Havana, Key West, and Idaho. He won the Nobel Prize in 1954 after the 'Old Man and the Sea' resuscitated a career gone stale, but beset by failing health and depression, he committed suicide in 1961 providing an early dose of reality to my adolescent years. 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' is a great read, at least in part because of the ideological purity of the Spanish Republican cause. In one of those 'Really?' moments, I learned that another childhood hero of mine, Duncan Renaldo who played the Cisco Kid on 1950's black-and-white TV, had a minor role in the 1943 movie version of the book.

Borges, like Nabokov, is a master of the surreal. His short stories in 'Labyrinth' are fantastic in both senses of the word. From a 19 year old boy who has total recall of every detail of his life after being thrown from a horse to a country that is missing from every edition of an encyclopedia but one, his stories are fascinating, clever, and brilliantly conceived. He's another writer who deserved the Nobel.

How to give you an idea of the other nine books without occupying too much memory in your computer???? Here's the brief summary: Read Lydia Davis for her clever short stories, some as brief as three lines and none longer than 20 pages. She describes them as "very short and sometimes, boldly absurd." Her "Marriage Moments of Annoyance" series of 10 stories are finely cut jewels and led to a number of 'aha' moments. Here's the entirety of one of her stories entitled 'Fear of Aging': At twenty eight, she longs to be twenty-five again." .

Read John McPhee's 'Tabula Rasa'. I'm about half way through reading his 32 books, but this 92 year old author keeps turning them out! 'Tabula Rasa' is his third book in the last ten years. It collects his thoughts and observations about ideas which he had in the past but never turned into the long non-fiction essays and books that have made him famous. Definitely worth reading.

Read 'A Raisin in the Sun', Lorraine Hansberry's 1954 play that made her the youngest woman and the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. She died only a few years later, cutting short what would have been a spectacular career. We saw the play last month, and whether you read it or see it, you will be struck by the powerful depiction of prejudice, poverty, and limited opportunity that a brave and loving Black family faced in the 1950's and still, too often, do today.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month is a tribute to three of our great American poets who have died in recent days. Louise Gluck, a Cambridge and Vermont neighbor, died on October 13, three years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. She wrote about disappointment, rejection, loss, and isolation, but in lyrical and spiritual language. Her 'Vita Nova' is an ode to childhood and the possibility of recovering those feelings in old age. Charles Simic, a Serb whose family emigrated to the US in 1944 and who attended my high school, died earlier this year. A recipient of a MacArthur Award, a Pulitzer, and the Wallace Stevens Award, his poem, 'In the Library' is a wonderful melding of books and angels in a library overseen by Miss Jones. Richard Howard died in 2022 at age 92, a Pulitzer, National Book, and American Book Award winner. A student of his eulogized him with these words: "Reading was Richard’s primary occupation. His New York apartment was covered in books, floor to ceiling, interrupted only by a desk, a few places to sit, a bed in a book-lined alcove (which was also home to Mildred, Richard’s life-size stuffed gorilla), and the bathroom, adorned with dozens of small portraits of famous writers, glaring at anyone who dared use the toilet." My kind of guy! To avoid presenting only dead poets, I've also included a poem by a 93 old writer who is, thankfully, still alive. Gary Snyder was one of the Beats and continues to write wonderful poems. I love 'The Map.'