Readus Interruptus, BookMarks Update April, 2023

Read My Review

Friends:

I spend a lot of time looking at my bookshelves in Cambridge and in Brownsville, sometimes just enjoying the array of multi-colored covers and fonts, sometimes re-experiencing the joy and pleasure of old friends, and sometimes despairing at the 'so many books, so little time' situation. There, among the throng of books on the shelves and piled on the floor, the end tables, and every other available surface, I always espy dozens of books with a bookmark protruding from their pages---literally a forest of bookmarks.

These are not books which, finding their prose insufferable or the topic deadly boring, I had chosen to abandon. The 'I don't like it' books are quickly stripped of their bookmarks and exiled to a used book store or to one of the Little Libraries that dot our neighborhood. Rather, the bookmarked-books are books which I enjoyed but which were temporarily set aside when life intervened.

In April I decided to focus my reading on those 'interrupted' books and as a result eight of the eleven books that I read this month were ones that I had begun sometime in the past and now returned to.

The books by McPhee, Solnit, and Gottlieb more than repaid my decision to pick them up once again in mid-stream. I had initially been put off by Gottlieb's first essay on 'near death experiences,' but once I got past that opening, I loved his name-dropping, erudite, critical observations of writers, musicians, and dancers. I had failed at least three times to get into Solnit's exploration of Orwell's work and his garden's roses, but the fourth time was the charm. It's a terrific book filled with Solnit's learned apercus and her deep dives into rabbit holes that result in delightful side stories. McPhee remains at the age of 92 one of America's great non-fiction writers, and this fifty year old tale of his canoe trips and the fascinating people he meets in Alaska remains vibrant and engaging.

I can't say the same for Osmundson's 'Virology' and Goldstein's 'Experience of Insight'. The former has some valuable information written in clear and concise prose about viruses and their impact on our world both during the early days of the AIDS epidemic and the current COVID era, but his frequent lapses into the details of his personal, gay sex life reminded me of why I had stopped reading this book. Likewise, Goldstein's 50 year old book was repetitive and nowhere near as compelling as his more recent works on mindfulness. Neither warranted finishing though I soldiered through to the end, if for no other reason than to recover the bookmark.

The book about Pinardi's art like all of those published by Boston's Pucker Gallery combines beautiful photographs of the intriguing and compelling paintings by this recently deceased artist with a fine narrative. The book is worth a look but even better would be a visit to the Gallery to see the real things.

Reading 'The Aeneid' has been on my 'to do' list for years, and this month, I finally finished it. If you think Aeneas had a tough time getting from Troy to the founding of Rome, try reading about it! Lots of impossible Greek and Trojan names, tons of gore, innumerable interventions by those pesky gods who must have not had much to do on Mt. Olympus, but it is a classic. I read it as a tribute to my high school Latin teacher, Miss Violet Zielke who through all four years not only taught me the Latin that helps me with the daily NYT Crossword but who also gave me eight A's to help my GPA. Reading both the Fagles and the Heaney translation of 'Book VI' highlighted how challenging it can be to translate poetry, in this case more than 9000 lines of Latin hexameter. A final conclusion: It was worth the slog!

Finally, I broke up the 'readus interruptus' theme with two of my favorite contemporary authors, Colm Toibin and Billy Collins. Toibin's new book of essays is engaging (How can it fail to be when the first essay begins, "It all started with my balls."). Collins devotes his latest book to a new genre for him, very short poems, many of them clever, but not very weighty. In neither case was this the authors' best book, but each was still far better than the average work out there.

So, for those of you are faced with an array of books with bookmarks stuck somewhere between the cover and the afterword, give them a close look and return to those which had initially pleased you. For my part, a few dozen protruding bookmarks remain to be revisited, and I hope to do so in the coming months.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month features the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney who was born in Northern Ireland in 1939 and who died in 2013. Heaney was a neighbor in Cambridge where he was a Professor at Harvard from 1981-1987 and the Poet in Residence from 1988-2006. During that period he was awarded, among many other honors, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". His poems are beautiful evocations of family and friends, his native Ireland and the Troubles, nature, and what else, but of course aging and death. His final poem, 'In Time' written about his granddaughter two weeks before his death appeared later that year in The New Yorker.. Here are some of his beautiful works.

Last month's update had a review of Henry Marsh's 'And Finally', a neurosurgeon's musings on his own terminal illness and impending death. In that book, Marsh quotes Immanuel Kant as follows: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me".

And here, once again, is this extraordinary quote from Lewis Thomas that has elicited a great number of comments.

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond....

Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member or our own species unique. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing."

Good reading and good travelling!