Storytellers and Poets, BookMarks Update #91 February 2026

Friends: As I write this, a bomb cyclone with 50+mph winds and two feet of snow is raging outside my Cambridge window. As I think of Orin, Michael, and the other unhoused people I see every day in Harvard Square, it's a reminder of the frailty of our human existence on this small planet and the current inhumane treatment that our government has unleashed in our communities. Last week's Supreme Court decision, Democratic wins in state races in Texas and Louisiana, and a bit of spine shown by the Congress increasing the funding for the NIH give me some slight ray of hope. While I'm staying tuned, here's what I read in February:

Lego ergo sum. I READ THEREFORE I AM. Yes, while I treasure my world of family, friends, travel, art, music, postcards, and walking, it is my daily reading that in many ways provides me with the elements that make me feel alive and engaged with the world. I read for pleasure and distraction, for information, for wisdom and insight, for connection, and at its very core, for a richer understanding of who I am and what I am doing here.

This reading would not be possible without others doing the writing, and the novelists, essayists, and poets who create the works I savor are motivated by the same desire to make sense of their lives and find meaning in the world. Given that we as individuals live for at most a century in a universe that has been here for 14 billion years and on a planet which is a microscopic dot in that universe, it's not surprising that writers ask questions in search of meaning and order. While I engage in the largely passive role of reader, these writers are driven by a passion and and a need to explore and share their endeavors. This sharing takes place largely in their role of storytellers, a basic element of human nature. .

Man's role as storyteller has been a central topic for many philosophers. The Scottish-American author of "After Virtue", Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, "Man is a storytelling animal, but a teller of stories that aspire to the truth. I can only answer the question of 'what am I to do?' if I can answer the question of "what story or stories do I find myself a part of?" Jean-Paul Sartre weighed in with "...a man is always a teller of tales; he sees everything that happens to him through them, and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story." Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman turned philosopher offered this view: "Man is eminently a storyteller and his search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story." And my favorite quote by Soren Kierkegaard who expressed a similar view of our ultimately undoable goal to fully understand our lives when he wrote that "life is only understood backwards but must be lived forwards."

Four novels this month explored these existential questions and the role of the individual in the world in a variety of ways. Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" was published in 1953 just eight years after the end of WWII, the fall of fascism in Germany and Italy, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the midst of the McCarthy Red Scare. The title is based on the temperature at which a book's paper will catch fire and burn and introduces us to a world in which it is a crime to own a book. The main character, Guy Montag is a fireman charged with spraying kerosene and burning any home identified as sheltering books. During the course of the story, Montag gradually begins to question his role and the absence of happiness in his world. Joining an underground of rebels who are committed to preserving books by memorizing them, he escapes the city just before it is destroyed by a nuclear war, described in the book as the third atomic war in 2022. Yes, Bradbury was specific about that year, 72 years into the future when he wrote it. This brilliant book anticipating much of the societal alienation and illiteracy in today's America is well worth reading and contemplating where we might be heading.

E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" written 22 years later is another literary classic in which stories highlight critical social issues and how individuals deal with them.. Mixing real life characters including Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, and Admiral Perry and real life events like the Lawrence, Massachusetts mill workers strike of 1912 with memorable fictional characters and events, Doctorow created a gripping tale of a city torn apart by the tensions between the white upper class society of New York, the Black community in Harlem, and the poverty stricken immigrants of New York's Lower East Side. Adapated for the stage as a musical and winning four Tonys when it opened on Broadway in 1998, it is currently in revival at Lincoln Center. Like Bradbury, Doctorow showed remarkable prescience as he castigated the income inequality, racism, anti-immigrant violence, and the evils of unfettered capitalism in the America of 1906. More than a century later, it is depressing how little progress we've made in eliminating or even ameliorating these social fractures. See the play if you can. If not, read the book. Better yet, do both.

The next two books were published in 2025, and despite neither making any of the 'Best Books' lists, I was drawn to both. I read the Irving book because I had loved "Owen Meany" and "Garp", and I sought out the new book by Laing because I loved her three earlier works.

Irving's "Queen Esther" is a big, sprawling, novel which picks up where one of his most successful books "Cider House Rules" ends. The title refers to the historical Queen Esther of the Old Testament who saves her Jewish people by interceding with her husband the King who had been poisoned against the Jews by his evil advisor Haman (? an early version of Steven Miller, perhaps?). In Irving's retelling, Esther is an orphan whose mother had been murdered by anti-Semites in Portland, Maine and who was delivered to the St. Cloud orphanage at the age of three with only two pieces of information----that she was an orphan and she was Jewish. Twelve years later Esther is hired by the Winslow family of Pentacook, NH to be the au pair for their fourth daughter, Hope. Years go by and Esther becomes the surrogate mother of Hope's son, Jimmy, and as the book makes its 400+ page way from Jimmy's birth to his own fatherhood, we see only brief flashes of Esther as she wages a secret war for the survival of Israel. Confused? I was as well from time to time, but Irving is a skilled, though too long-winded, narrator, and it's a good read. It's not Garp or Owen Meany, but not many books are.

The other novel published in 2025 that I read was "The Silver Book", and it was a real stretch for me. Olivia Laing's three earlier non-fiction books, "The Lonely City", "The Garden Against Time", and "Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency" were brilliant, captivating, and terrific reads. This novel, not so much, at least in part due to the subject matter all of which was a challenge for my limited experience and interests: Italian cinema, Rome in the 1990's, and quite explicit homoerotic love. The saving feature was Laing's beautiful prose. I learned of the book in the "New York Times By the Book" feature in which the actress Tilda Swinton recommended it as her 'best recent book'. Seeing that it was by Laing, I avidly sought it out. Only after reading it did I discover the connection between Swinton and Laing. The latter's book, "The Garden Against Time" focused on the late British movie director and writer Derek Jarmon, and Swinton had starred in most of Jarmon's movies. There's almost always a connecting thread in literature, but it's not always evident.

Not all of the books this month probed deep existential questions. Three of them that tell tales of murder and intrigue probably have some distant connection to these issues but were primarily intended to entertain, distract, and provide some relief from the real violence and horrors of the daily news. Towards that end, William Boyd's "The Predicament", Chris Pavone's "The Doorman", and Georges Simenon's "The Methods of Maigret" were all successful.

When William Boyd's "The Predicament" was cited among the best thrillers of 2025 in the year end 'New York Times Book Review', I was eager to read it. I had loved Boyd's earlier novel "Any Human Heart" published in 2002, and I was looking for a repeat performance only to be disappointed. Not only did this book not come close to his previous outstanding novel, but it so closely followed the plot of Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of the Jackal" that one could make a case for plagiarism. Having just read "The Day of the Jackal" last month, the comparison of the two books was inevitable. Both involved a relatively non-descript individual preventing the assassination of a major political figure by figuring out the murder plot at the last minute and shooting the assassin in the nick of time in a top floor apartment overlooking a political gathering. Coincidence??? At any rate, if you're looking for a spellbinding book about the foiling of a political assassination, go with Forsyth not Boyd.

In contrast, Chris Pavone's "The Doorman" was clever and convincing. Filled with colorful, well-developed characters, it slowly builds towards a tense and violent but satisfyingly credible conclusion. Yes, when it ends, there are a bunch of dead people lying around the foyer of a multi-million dollar condo on the top floor of a famous Upper West Side apartment building, but at the end of the day the good guys win and the bad guys lose in this page turner. Try to figure out the ending before you get there in this very good read.

And then there's my old friend, Chief Inspector Maigret in "The Methods of Maigret", Simenon's 31st novel featuring our hulking, slow-moving, but brilliant policeman. While my favorite Maigret novels are situated in Paris where I can follow the action on Google Maps, this book finds our intrepid inspector in Porquerrolos, a small island off the southern coast of France where a man had been murdered the day after drunkenly proclaiming that Maigret was his friend. Maigret does his usual hanging around, silently observing the scene and the characters before solving the murder and heading back to Paris. Not the best Simenon, but a good one.

The master non-fiction storyteller, John McPhee's 28th book, "Looking for a Ship" is ostensibly the story of how difficult it is for a sailor to find employment as the U.S. merchant marine fleet shrinks. What the book actually does is to provide McPhee with yet another vehicle for his signature deep dive into a topic via an in depth relationship with one or more fascinating characters who would otherwise pass completely below the radar. As in his books about Florida orange growers or the Maine maker of birch bark canoes or geologists in Wyoming or the residents of the isolated town of Eagle, Alaska on the Yukon River, McPhee focuses on two interesting individuals. Paul McHenry Washburn is the captain of the S.S.Stella Lykes, a container ship transporting everything from thoroughbred horses to tons of coffee to and from the west coast of South America. Washburn is the descendent of generations of sea-faring New Englanders and has a rich knowledge of the sea, ships, and life. Andy Chase is the second mate on the Stella Sykes and is the sailor who was looking for a ship. Chase is the great-great-great grandson of Nathaniel Bowditch of Salem, MA whose book "The New American Practical Navigator" was published in 1802 and is still carried on every American ship. McPhee weaves McHenry's and Chase's stories together with his usual creativity. As an aside, I came across Nathaniel Bowditch's grave in nearby Mt. Auburn Cemetery this week during one of my daily walks. It's a fine bronze statue of him sitting astride the globe and holding a sextant.

And now for the poets, those storytellers whose medium does not allow for the hundreds of pages that a novel provides (unless of course, you're Homer) as they explore the meaning of life in this world. Rather, the poet takes on the heroic feat of portraying the glory and tragedy of our world in the limited confines of the twelve lines of the sonnet, the four line stanzas of the pantoum, the 17 syllables of the haiku, or some other limited form.

Daniel Handler, the creator of the best-seling Lemony Snickett series and the incomparable artist, Maira Kalman dove into the photography archives of MOMA to explore the hurried existence of real people moving through their world. Handler's brief aphoristic, prose poems accompany photographs by some of the great photo artists of the 20th Century----Dorothea Lange, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Helen Leavitt, among others----and are interspersed with Kalman's wonderfully bright and delightful paintings. "Hurry Up and Wait" is a delicious book for adults and children, urging us to slow down, take a deep breath, and chill.

I read Mary Oliver's "House of LIght" and Lisel Mueller's "Alive and Together" with the words of Tracy K. Smith's "Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times" in mind. Smith, a Professor of English and African American Studies at Harvard, challenges the reader to "be an active partner with the poet in bringing the words on the page to life, poetry’s capacity to call to a reader’s empathy and curiosity.” She goes on to describe poetry as "a voice offering to build the world, by means of some crucial fragments, anew. A voice overcoming all manner of distance in order to soothe or astonish, entreat or rebuke. To ponder what has not yet been seen, what had eluded capture….Eventually a poem intercepts another consciousness by which it commences again to travel. This encounter occurs each time a poem is read, received, dwelled with, and carried off into the arc of another life." I found Smith's book to be a challenging read. Much of the writing was too densely academic for me, but I enjoyed the poems she used to illustrate her ideas, especially Robert Hayden's poem about his father that is linked below.

I read Mary Oliver's "House of Light" in order to encounter her most famous poem, "Summer Day" in its original context. The poem ends with the lines, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life.?” Reading the whole book proved to enrich the experience of "Summer Day" since the other poems in this slim volume were beautiful descriptions of the natural world. Turtles, snakes, owls, herons and other denizens of Cape Cod are subjected to Oliver's extraordinarily detailed gaze and captured in clear and vivid stanzas. A lovely little book.

While I was quite familiar with Oliver, Lisel Mueller who like Oliver had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize was unknown to me before I read of her in a recent edition of 'The Writer's Almanac'. That encounter led to the discovery of this poet's work with whom I have a number of personal connections from Lake Forest, Illinois where she lived to Goddard College in Vermont where she taught. Three of her poems are highlighted below.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month features works from the two poets whose books I read this month as well as poems by Charles Simic and Robert Hayden that the recent snowstorm evoked. I love the contrast between Oliver's "Summer Day" and Simic's and Hayden's wintry settings.

February ends with quotes from two important creative artists from recent times.

Sonny Mehta was the longtime editor-in-chief of Albert A. Knopf publishers. In accepting the Maxwell Perkins Award given for Lifetime Achievement by the Center for Fiction, he said, "Reading has been a constant in my life. I have always found comfort in the confines of a book or manuscript. Reading is how I spend most of my time and is still the most joyful aspect of my day. I want to be remembered not as an editor or publisher, but as a reader." Me, too, Sonny.

The other meangful quote I read recently came from Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican hip hop star who stunned the world with his recent spectacular halftime show at the SuperBowl. Bad Bunny wrote, "The hate gets more powerful with hate. The only thing more powerful than hate is love." Muchas gracias, Bad Bunny.

In closing, I want to thank two people who continue to make major contributions to BookMarks' each month. My wife, Susan, reads, edits, and re-reads every monthly update before I send it out, improving the final product in substantial ways. My tech support, Eliza in Utah, performs magic with images and links that are far beyond my elderly capacity. A giant thanks to both of them.

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