Re-reading Old Friends: BookMarks Update #79 January, 2025

A good old-fashioned Vermont February brought subzero temperatures and snowstorms with drifts of several feet---perfect weather to stay inside and read. The grandchildren had other plans for me, but I managed to read the following 13 books in February:

A number of you have asked how I choose a theme for these monthly updates. In most months, I look at what I've read after a couple of weeks and see if a theme has emerged which might guide my reading for the rest of the month. Occasionally, as in last month's theme of artistic creativity, I'll select a theme at the beginning of the month and then choose my books with that in mind.

This month was a combination of both approaches. I began the month deciding to read humor with the goal of relieving some of the tension resulting from the daily news of the musk/trump destruction of democracy. I was inspired by the great humorist S.J. Perlman's quote I came across in the Writer's Almanac: "I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom smashers, a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws." As a former scientist and mad in both senses of the word, I began to read some of the great humorists of today.

If you want some good laughs you can't go wrong with Woody, Dave and Steve. Allen's "Side Effects" is 45 years old but his slapstick irony hasn't gotten stale, and some of the lines had me laughing out loud, e.g. “It has been four weeks and it is still hard for me to believe that Sandor Needleman is dead. I was present at the cremation and at his son’s request, brought the marshmallows.” If you like silly, inappropriate, bad taste humor, read Woody Allen. You don't have to approve of his behavior as a father.

Many years ago, I used to roar out loud every Sunday while reading Dave Barry's column in the Boston Globe, and once I forgave him for naming his dog after my granddaughter, I again found myself laughing at his weird take on today's world. The seven lessons in "Lessons from Lucy" are not profound, but they offer good advice which I hope to put into practice in daily life. He conveys these lessons with his characteristic zany humor: "Getting old sucks. Oh sure some people claim it doesn't suck and by some people I mean AARP. AARP, as you know is the last sound you make before you die. 911 Operator: This is 911. Do you have an emergency? Caller: Yes. It's my husband. He collapsed to the floor and his face turned blue and he's making a weird noise. 911 Operator: What kind of noise? Caller: It sounds like aarp. 911 Operator: OK, I'll send a hearse." Well, you get the idea--sophomoric and requiring Depends if you have a weak pelvic floor but a great distraction from the daily bulletins from D.C.

Steve Martin's book differs from the others in that it's a real memoir, one about a very funny and talented person. " Born Standing Up" is a treat for those of us who lived through SNL's early years and the Johnny Carson Show. Along the way, the incredibly talented and funny Martin can't help but interject comic stories and lines into this fine book.

When I realized that reading humor wasn't relieving my daily angst, I wandered a bit randomly among the next four books. "All the Beauty in the World" by Patrick Bringley tells the story of how he took a job as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC after his much-loved older brother died of cancer at 26. Who would have guessed at the the unseen elements of this job, the backgrounds and lives of the guards, and the spectacular variety of souls who stand quietly in the corners of galleries while we gawk at Renoirs, Titians, and mummies? I'll never look at a museum guard in the same way again.

Daniel Silva has had a very successful publishing franchise since 1996 featuring Gabriel Allon, the former Director of Israel's intelligence service and a world-class art restorer. I read "Death in Cornwall" since we are spending three days in southwest England in March, and I wanted to get a feel for the countryside. This book didn't really accomplish that, but it was a rip-roaring good story. Unlike so many one-book-a-year mystery/thriller authors, Silva has maintained his fastball in this the 24th entry to the series. This is a great read for your next plane ride.

I'm auditing James Woods' course on "The Essay" at Harvard College this semester. The course starts with the classics, Montaigne, Orwell, and Woolf, and then moves to more contemporary practitioners of this wonderful literary genre, among them J.D. Daniels. I'm sorry that I'll be in England when Wood lectures on this book because I'd like to hear why he chose it. I didn't enjoy it at all, and others may have shared my opinion since Daniels seems to have disappeared after "The Correspondence" won two literary prizes in 2013. He's published nothing since then, and I can't find any references to him on Google. Maybe Wood can enlighten me about Daniels when I return.

Several of you suggested that I read Samantha Harvey's "Orbital", a beautiful contemplation of man, earth, and the universe. We spend several days with four astronauts (American, English, Japanese, and Italian) and two cosmonauts in the International Space Station as they go about their daily exercises, meals, bodily functions, experiments, and reports on a super-typhoon bearing down on the Philippines. I was tense throughout as I anticipated some cosmic disaster about to befall these six people whom I had come to know and like, but the book has no sensational plot, only a deeply felt love for our fragile planet and man's infinitesimally small place in the universe. A beautiful book worth reading for its fine prose and metaphors. (N.B. James Wood positively reviewed this book in the December 18, 2023 issue of 'The New Yorker')

Having read a novel, a book of essays, a thriller, and a memoir, I turned to re-reading some of my old friends. Many authors promote the re-reading of favorite books. Patricia Meyer Spacks has written a whole book about it, "On Rereading", and one of my favorite essayists, Anne Fadiman wrote "Rereading" about this practice in 2005. The message in both books is that, like Herodotus and the famous river, you can never read the same book twice for you're not the same person the second time around. That was certainly my experience as I sat back and enjoyed these excellent books once again.

Doris Grumbach is a fascinating woman. Married for 31 years and raising four daughters in NYC while writing novels, memoirs, and serving as an editor at The New Republic, she left her husband late in life and joined another woman in rural Maine. They ran a bookstore in the small town of Sargentville, and when her partner set off on a book buying trip, Grumbach was faced with the eponymous "Fifty days of Solitude". Her reflections on work, loneliness, friends, and life comprise this fine book which a NH artist friend gave me 20 years ago. I loved the cover, a New England winter scene dominated by a snow covered field. With some digging, I discovered that the artist was alive and teaching at UNC-Wilmington. I contacted him, and the 19th of Donald Furst's 50 print edition of 'Into White I' hangs in our Cambridge house, a daily reminder of this fine book.

"Maigret on Holiday" was one of the first Simenon books that I read, and I only hazily recalled the plot details. I remembered the initial death in this mystery where, in contrast to most Maigret books, the bodies piled up, but the subsequent murders had faded from memory. It's one of Simenon's best, and despite my preference for his investigations that take place in Paris, this story set in the sea-side village of Les Sables was excellent. The book also provided me with an insight which had failed to strike me over the years. Jules Maigret, like Lee Child's Jack Reacher, is the personification of one of fiction's great tropes: a stranger rides into town. Both Maigret and Reacher always seem to pop up in strange places where evil is being done. They fix it, restore order, and move on. Simenon remained great through all of the 74 Maigret books. Child lost his touch after his 25th or so several years back.

It will not be a surprise for any reader of my BookMarks updates to see the inclusion of one of Donald Hall's books on this list of re-readings. I've been reading and re-reading Hall for more than the 50 years. During that time, we became pen pals, exchanging letters about reading, poetry, the Red Sox, the New England climate and other quotidian events. We had met in Ann Arbor in 1970 when he was my wife's English professor and I was a medical student. Hall's poetry-in-prose description of the four "Seasons on Eagle Farm" is a classic that could only have been written by someone deeply a part of the landscape. Hall's great-grandfather, Ben Kenniston, bought the farm on the southern slope of Ragged Mountain in New Hampshire in 1865, and Hall's mother was born there. He spent his childhood summers on the farm, living with his grandparents, Wesley and Kate Wells, and Hall and his wife, the accomplished poet Jane Kenyon, left Ann Arbor, decamping for the family farm in 1975, writing and living in rural NH until their deaths. This handsome volume is a beautiful ode to a place and a way of life that have largely disappeared.

I first read Allen Lacy's "Farther Afield" when I was a novice gardener, eagerly searching for information about how to plant vegetable and perennial gardens on our then new Vermont property. Lacey's book was published in 1986, one year before we bought our home in Brownsville, Vermont and began to play around in the dirt. This book and a few others have been instrumental in inspiring and guiding our efforts which nearly 40 years later have resulted in two dozen new trees (including one for each of the four grandchildren!), a large, productive asparagus patch, perennial beds among our 12 acres of brook, stone walls, and woodlands, and literally hundreds of hours of pleasure and effort. On this reading, I found Lacy's book to still be useful and a pleasure to read.

It's hard to write about John McPhee without sounding over the top, but this 92 year old master of the long essay and the book-length exploration of esoteric topics is exceptional. I have his 41 books on a shelf in the guest house in Vermont and have read nearly all of them. While "Rising from the Plains" is not among my favorites, it's an excellent example of his style. He finds a topic of interest from oranges to Bill Bradley playing basketball at Princeton in 1967, from birch bark canoes to remote Alaska rivers, and then he finds a fascinating person engaged in that world to accompany and educate him, weaving a compelling story about the topic and the person. My favorites are the Bradley book and the one about Frank Beardon who was headmaster at Deerfield Academy for 68 years, but McPhee's geology books are the ones that garnered the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 after three previous nominations. This book tells the story of Wyoming's geology through the life of David Love, named the first Legendary Scientist by the American Geological Institute. McPhee starts the book with the story of how Love's mother, Ethel Phoebe Waxham left Wellesley College with her Phi Beta Kappa key and traveled to a one room log cabin in central Wyoming in 1905 by train, stagecoach, and buckboard to teach the eight pupils at the Red Bluff Ranch. Love's life makes for a great story worth reading if you can get through the rocky geology that accompanies it.

Finally, there's my old friend, "Ethan Frome", Edith Wharton's masterpiece written in 1911, ten years before she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. I loved this book from the first time I read it decades ago, and for many years I was in the habit of re-reading it every winter, sitting by the wood stove on a snowy winter night, single malt scotch in hand, and a few quiet hours in which to read it from cover to cover in one sitting. It never failed to move me, and this month's reading felt very much the same. Each time I read it, I come away with another detail or two, and this was no exception, but the main value is the splendid writing and the tragic plot. If you don't know it, read it. You won't be disappointed though you will likely be left sad about the fates of Ethan and Mattie.

As I sit here at my computer in mid-February, I am looking out on a scene that has not changed much during the last 200 years---our old white farm house sits nestled next to Bible Hill Road under 3 feet of snow and with more coming down. It's a classic New England winter scene and one which brings to mind my two favorite New England poets---Robert Frost and Donald Hall. Here are two poems from each of them, one echoing the winter scene outside my window and one looking ahead to the glory of springtime's awakening.

In conclusion, here are some words of wisdom from Proust whose seven volumes of "Rembrance of Things Past" I will almost certainly never read but who wrote the following about reading referring to it as "This fruitfull miracle of communication in the bosom of solitude."

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