Reading From my Shelves, BookMarks Update #88 November, 2025

Friends: As eleven of us gathered for Thanksgiving in Vermont, the recent rains in Vermont had turned the dry brook bed in our backyard into a raging torrent, and Mt. Ascutney's summit was snow-covered. From age 4 to 80, we had much to be thankful for--loving family, dear friends, good health, and the continued ability to read for pleasure, wisdom, information, insight, empathy, and connection. We also kept in mind the many who are struggling with hunger, fear, and uncertainty about the future. Deuteronomy 10:19 commands us to “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. True words that are powerfully relevant today even after several thousand years.

My reading in November included these 10 books which I found nestled on my bookshelves in Cambridge:

Five years ago, COVID pandemic fears were at their height, and I lost access to my usual sources of random reading. Libraries were closed, and bookstores were shuttered. inspired by Susan Hall's wonderful book "Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home" in which she describes spending a year reading only books she found on her shelves, I turned to my own library then and found riches beyond my imagination. Update #22 in April, 2020 reported on that exceptonal month of reading.

I decided to repeat that experience of reading from my shelves again in November. Although a month without browsing my local libraries and bookstores (well, OK, I did browse a bit but I only bought two books.) was a bit unsettling, I once again found hidden treasures that had gone unread among the hundreds of books in my library.

The photos above show some of the dozens of books that had sat unopened for months and sometimes even years. Poetry, essays, novels, biographies, non-fiction about everything from the Oxycodone disaster to the history of painting---books and more books waiting to be opened, read, and savored.

We all have books like that in our libraries, books we just had to buy but which once brought home, seemed to disappear into some black hole---that biographies of Agnes Martin and Philip Glass bought from the remaindered pile, the three volume history of WWII, the used paperback of Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel", and on and on. These books seem to have moved inexorably from the nightstand to the library table and from there to the pile on the floor, finally finding a resting place on some high shelf in one of our bookcases in Cambridge or Vermont. Many of these books have traveled hundreds of miles with me as I optimistically carried them back and forth from 02138 to 05037 until finally accepting the fact that I would not be reading them in the near future or perhaps ever.

So imagine my joy when I found these 10 wonderful books sitting right there in plain sight----four books of essays, a book of poetry (I cheated a bit on this one since I had read it several times before), a classic detective story, a guide to healthy living and aging, a 'masterful' novel, a short story collection of sorts, and a biography. The variety was refreshing, and I loved several of these books.

I will start with "The Good Life: Lessons from the Longest Scientific Study of Happiness". First, a 'conflict of interest' alert since one of the authors, Bob Waldinger is a long time associate and friend. With that caveat and with complete objectivity, I think this is an important book for all of us who have lived long enough to sign up for Medicare. Waldinger and Schulz direct the Harvard Study of Adult Development which enrolled 268 Harvard sophomores and 456 inner-city Boston kids in 1938 and has followed them and their children and in some instances even their grandchildren with periodic medical exams, lab tests, and questionnaires about their lives. Eight decades later the authors' conclusion reads like common sense, but is backed by reams of scientific data and enough numbers to be statistically significant----a long and happy life depends on many factors (genes, birth order, socio-economic status, etc.), but the most powerful determinant is the number and quality of your relationships. If you want to be healthy and happy as you enter your 80's, try your best to have a happy marriage, lots of friends, and several deep relationships that are symmetrical in their benefits and demands. It's not rocket science, but because the book is so well written and grounded in science, it is far better than the light-weight self-help books that are the usual offering. I would have read more books this month, but, acting on Waldinger and Schulz's advice, I was busy with friends, family, and my lovely wife of 57 years!

"Kicking the Leaves" was the first book of poems Donald Hall wrote after moving with his new wife from a tenured professorship in Ann Arbor to the farm in rural New Hampshire which his great-grandparents had bought in the 1800's. Returning to the hayfields, barn, Eagle Pond, Ragged Mountain, and Mt. Kearsarge, Hall's work became richer and more beautiful. This volume has one foot in Ann Arbor and one in New Hampshire as he bids farewell to his former life and embraces the new one. I've linked five poems from this wonderful volume in The Poetry Tree on the Charles below where a click will bring you to the poem. You can also ead them and see photos of this distinguished man of letters and my long time pen pal at www.poetrytreeonthecharles.com.

Around the same time that Hall was publishing "Kicking the Leaves", he also published his delicious and delightful gossipy reminiscences of his youthful encounters with Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, T.S.Eliot, and Ezra Pound in "Remembering Poets". Through his roles as the head of Harvard's student literary journal "The Advocate" and later in his similar role at Oxford and even later in his work as poetry editor of the new Paris Review, Hall had unique access and opportunities to interview the leading poets of his day. "Remembering Poets" has now gone through three iterations, and "Old Poets" published last year in a beautiful volume by Godine is its final form. Adding interviews with Marianne Moore, Ivor Winters, and Archibald MacLeish to the original four, Hall offers 'reminiscences and opinions'. This is not high form literary criticism, but delightfully informal insights into some of the 20th C.'s greatest poets. If you love poetry, you'll love this book.

Sara B. Franklin's biography of Judith Jones, "The Editor", was an unexpected treat. Though I have always been fascinated by the relationship between author and editor and was familiar with many of the famous editors alluded to in this book, e.g. Robert Gottlieb, Jason Epstein, Sonny Mehta, and William Maxwell, I had never heard of Judith Jones. This relative anonymity was was one of the major themes throughout the book. Jones was an independent, ground-breaking, sensitive, and brilliant editor who made her way quietly but effectively through the male-dominated jungle of Knopf's publishing house for more than 60 years. Bringing writers like John Updike, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Anne Tyler, and dozens of others to publication should have been reason enough for fame, but she also almost singlehandedly changed American food culture through her collaboration with Julia Child and her French cooking. Jones, who died in 2017 at the age of 93, led a fascinating life which included long stays in our beloved Vermont where she and her husband found peace and quiet in rural Stannard, population 208.

"The Master" is Colm Toibin's fictional homage to Henry James, the American expatriate whose novels and short stories earned him widespread fame at the turn of the 19-20th C. As he had done with Thomas Mann in "The Magician", Toibin takes the facts of James' life in London, Rye, Paris, Venice, and Rome and weaves a magical story around this fascinating and enigmatic character. The child of a Newport and Cambridge family which also produced the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James, Henry never married or had a gay love and appeared to have only one person to whom he was seriously attached, though he was never able to form a strong bond with that woman either. Toibin is one of our most talented fiction writers, and this is a splendid book. Nothing much happens, but the atmosphere Toibin creates and sustains throughout is powerful and worth experiencing.

Wilkie Collins' "The Moonstone" was described by T.S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best" of modern English detective stories. Published in 1871 as a serial in the periodical 'All the Year Round', "The Moonstone" established the model for the P.D. James, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers British brand of closed door murder mysteries in which multiple characters have motive and opportunity and the reader is provided with enough clues to solve the case. The 'who done it' in this book, however, showed its age and was so slow to develop and even slower to gel that finishing its 500 pages was a bit of a trek. Entertaining initially, it ground to a finish, though my guess is that the problem was largely due to the need to keep readers eager to see a new episode each week. Interesting for historical reasons, but not worth the time.

Four books of essays enriched the month's reading, and they could not be more different from each other. The first to be published was Italo Calvino's "Six Memos for the Next Millenium". Calvino had written these essays in preparation for delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1982, but he died before heading to Cambridge, leaving us with five memos, not six. Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity were the titles of the these lectures describing Calvino's method and philosophy of writing. Drawing on examples from Georges Perec and the Oulipo group, Borges, Harold Bloom, and many European writers I was not familiar with, Calvino's lectures are a paeon to the art of reading and writing. Sadly, we'll never know what that sixth memo might have contained.

The next book was published in 2007 but reads as if it had been written today. George Saunders is one of those authors often referred to as a 'writer's writer'. Toiling away in relative obscurity as a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University for the last 30 years, he finally achieved fame with his Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Lincoln in the Bardo", though he's equally talented at writing short stories and essays. "The Brain Dead Megaphone" is his commentary on American democracy, the news media, and the inequality that befouls our society, and despite its pre-trumpian publication, it feels so current that it’s impressive that he saw this coming nearly two decades ago. In commenting about our misadventure in Iraq, he writes that it was a failure of imagination saying, “A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionly, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture.” Donald Trump are you listening???? He focuses on the Megaphone as the “composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know via high tech sources” and dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven”. And he wrote that before Fox News, Trump, Project 25, et al. arrived to promote fake news. This book is a prime example of the art of the essay and is well worth reading.

The last two books in this month's list were written by W.G. Sebald and Robert Walser, two authors who wrote in German while living in other countries. Sebald was born in Germany at the end of WWII but spent most of his adult life teaching at the University of East Anglia in England. His superb novels, “Vertigo ”, “The Emigrants“, “Rings of Saturn“, and “Austerlitz” written with the backdrop of the Holocaust would have likely made him a strong contender for a Nobel Prize had he not died at 53 in an auto accident. I was less taken with "A Place in the Country", Sebald's musings about five writers and painters. The essays were a bit of a slog since I was not acquainted with any of the men except Rousseau. The chapter on Robert Walser, however, was fascinating and led me to the final book of the month, Robert Walser's Micrographics, a strange book written by an equally strange man.

Walser, a Swiss who wrote in German, was feted by some of the best writers of his generation including Kafka, Musil, Hesse, and Walter Benjamin who described Walser's work as "One of the profoundest products of modern literature". Unfortunately, Walser's books were largely ignored by the general reading population. Living in poverty for most of his life, he spent his last 23 years in a sanitorium diagnosed as schizophrenic before dying while on a walk in the snow on Christmas Day, 1956. This book's best feature is its beautiful cover with its painting by Maira Kahlman depicting a manuscript wrapped in a newspaper featuring a photograph of the dead Walser in the snow. The book comprises 29 of Walser's micrographic essays. Originally written in an arcane German script on scraps of paper cut from random sources with letters so small they required a magnifying glass to read, each essay lacks a coherent theme or story. I found them challenging to read, but was fascinated by Walser's life and this work using his 'pencil method' of micrographia.

I hope that this selection from my library shelves will stimulate you to take a new look at yours and find some hidden treasures that you once very much wanted to read.

On a personal note, we learned this week that Dorothy Vogel had died. Dorothy and her late husband Herb had quietly amassed a world class collection of conceptual and minimalist art in the late 20th C., devoting their civil servants' salaries as a librarian and postal worker in NYC to acquire great works at low cost from new artists, many of whom later became superstars. The Vogels donated their 4000 pieces of art that had been stuffed into their rent control apartment on the Upper East Side to the National Gallery and then worked with the museum to create 50 groups of 50 works, each of which was then donated to a single museum in each of the 50 states. Encountering this fascinating collection in Maine many years ago, Susan and I were hooked and embarked on a quest to visit all 50 of the museums' Vogels. As of today, we've completed 26 of those visits. We had the pleasure of meeting with Dorothy several years ago at MOMA to tell her about our project and stayed in touch with her via email since then. We will miss this very special lady. You can read more about Herb and Dorothy and our project at https://epsteinreads.com/the-vogel-50x50-collection/. Rest in peace, Dorothy.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month is devoted to one of my favorites, Donald Hall. I've often recounted the story of how I met Hall when he was an English Professor and I was a medical student at the University of Michigan in 1970. We maintained a lively correspondence for more than 50 years until his death in 2018. His 1978 book, "Kicking the Leaves" contains these five wonderfully alive poems bridging his life in Ann Arbor and in rural New Hampshire. They are among his best.

I'll conclude with thoughts by two philosophers, the French mystic Simone Weil who died in 1943 at the age of 34 and the Danish theologian and social critic Soren Kierkegaard. who died in 1855 at the age of 42. Perhaps it was some sense of the brevity of life that led them to write the following:

Simone Weil: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity"

Soren Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

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