Reading & Walking: From Cosmology to Cartoons, BookMarks Update December, 2023

Read My Review

Friends:

As the world seems to slide rapidly towards chaos and despair, I find myself seeking solace in the company of family, friends, and good books. The reading helps stem feelings of hopelessness and helplessness in the face of death and destruction in America and abroad and provides insight, escape, beauty, wisdom, and information, sometimes all in one volume.

Here are the books I read in December.

I write this summary every month with two goals in mind. One is to suggest books I've enjoyed that you might want to add to your own 'to be read' list. The second is to introduce you to books that I found interesting and which you might not have encountered otherwise.

This month's reading fulfills the maxim,"So many books and so little time"----a graphic cartoon collection, a book about WWI, three mysteries, three books by poets, three books by scientists, two best-selling novels and a classic analysis of the novel's form, and four books about walking. Where to start and how to organize my comments????

Let's start with the one-offs. Roz Chast has been one of The New Yorker's most prolific and popular cartoonists for 25 years, and she shows why in "I Must Be Dreaming", a graphic exploration of her dreams, mostly weird and occasionaly wonderful. Geoff Dyer, a Brit who is on my 'favorite writers' short list, has written on jazz, photography, yoga, Varanesi, D.H. Lawrence, and his experience on a U.S. aircraft carrier among other topics. In 'The Missing of the Somme' his discerning eye and brilliant style are focused on the futility of WWI, the tragic loss of life (20,000 British dead before sunset on the first day of the battle), and the means by which we remember and memorialize events of this scale.

The three mysteries, 'The Secret' by Lee and Andrew Child, 'Reykjavic' by Jonasson and Jakobsdottir, and 'Resurrection Walk' by Michael Connelly provided a respite from the news, but the first two were disappointing, perhaps because they reflect the difficulty of two people writing a single book. In contrast, Connelly manages to write a winner with each successive book (This is the 25th Harry Bosch novel.) as he constantly refreshes his characters, adds new ones, and creates clever and believable plots and endings. Highly recommended.

The poetry volumes this month are both worth keeping on your nightstand, reading a dozen or so of these brief verses before drifting off with images of nature, friendship, and aging fresh in your mind. The Kooser and Harrison collaboration is superb providing many 'aha' moments, smiles, and bittersweet thoughts. The book of garden poems edited by Tess Taylor includes recipes for those veggies one grows along with poems that are perfect for the occasional read in the garden this spring, oh so far away. Rilke's classic advice to a young poet retains its vibrancy and wisdom a century after it was written and was clearly taken to heart by Kooser and Harrison in their approach to writing poetry..

If you are a science wonk, you'll enjoy Rovelli's and Barrett's books. Rovelli is one of the best science writers today, explicating complex phenomena with brilliant metaphors and diagrams while not dumbing down the science. This volume describes how dying stars create black holes which morph into white holes. Rovelli speculates that these white holes might be the missing dark matter in the universe. It's not a walk in the park, but it's worth the effort as Rovelli provides a fascinating peek into cosmology and the wonders of our universe. Barrett brings us right back to square one with a look at myths about the organ that controls the whole of human existence---the brain. Exploding seven myths about the brain, she brings the reader up to date with current understanding of how this three pound mass of jello-like substance enables us to read, speak, dream, move, and navigate through Rovelli's universe. Well worth reading but if you're only going to read one of them, go with Rovelli.

That brings me to the novels and E.M. Forster's 1927 classic, 'Aspects of the Novel' in which this erudite and oft-Nobel-nominated British writer delves into what makes the novel work. The nature of the novel and how it works are subjects that dozens of authors from Kundera to James Wood have explored, but Forster's book remains the best of the bunch. He devotes a chapter to each of the novel's components---plot, story, characters, fantasy, pattern and rhythm, but it is his chapter on 'rhythm' that I found most compelling. In it he likens the element in the best novels to a ray of sun breaking through the clouds in providing that rare 'aha moment' of beauty.

These elements of the novel and that special 'rhythm' are evident in the books I read this month by Maggie O'Farrell and Ann Patchett. Both tell the story of a love affair and a marriage, though in both books the love affair does not coincide with the marriage. As usual, describing the plot/story/characters would require endless 'spoiler alerts', so suffice it to say that I loved both books---one set in the 16th C and one in contemporary times; one involving Italian royalty and one centered on a Michigan cherry farm family. They are excellent reads by two terrific writers.

Finally, there are the four books about walking, my daily activity. When I had to give up my 40 years of running and my three marathons were behind me, I began to take a daily walk around Cambridge or our Vermont neighborhood of fields, hills, and woods. Since that time, I've averaged 4 miles/day or 1460 miles/year, a distance from Boston to Minneapolis. Hence, my great interest in books about walking and my joy in reading the four this month. (For more information about my walking, go to https://epsteinreads.com/walks/)

Thoreau's 'Walking' is the classic essay by the classic walker. Thoreau walked 3-4 hours/day in his Concord, Massachusetts neighborhood where " “in one half hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand for one year’s end to another, and where consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of man.” Inspired by Thoreau, Ben Shattuck in his Six Walks traced the transcendentalist's paths on Cape Cod, Mt. Katahdin, Mt. Wachusett, Walden Pond, and Pillsbury Island on the Allagash River as he sorted out unrequited love and found his true soul mate. Frederic Gros, a French philosopher, describes the unique elements that walking provides (solitude, slowness, silences, energy, well-being, repetition, and the elemental gravity of the act) and points out the key role that walking played in the work of Nietszche, Rousseau, Kant, Benjamin, and Rimbaud. Finally, Libby DeLana extols the virtues of the daily MorningWalk which she pursued without fail for more than 8 years and 25,000 miles, making my own daily walk look puny.

In choosing poems for the Poetry Tree on the Charles this month I drew upon the Introduction to the 'Best American Poetry 2023' volume edited by Elaine Equi in which she shares some quotes about what poetry is: "Perhaps poetry is only our way of coloring and making vibrate the silence that succeeds us, or which is contemporary with us." (Jean Wahl, French philosopher); "Poetry is that certain something we so often find missing." (Joe Brainard); "Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence." (Audre Lorde); "You can live three days without bread---without poetry, never." (Baudelaire). With those comments in mind, here are three poems that spoke to me recently by three poets as different as they could be----Emily Dickinson, W.S. Merwin, and David Budbill. The first two are well known, while Budbill wrote wonderful verse in the isolation of rural Vermont.

In closing, here are some wise words from Bertrand Russell: "The main things which seem to me to be important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection."

And the final word this month goes to E. M. Forster again: "Books have to be read. It's the only way of discovering what they contain." and "How can I know what I think until I see what I say."

Good reading and good travelling!