Why We Read: Empathy, Wisdom, Information: BookMarks Update, February, 2023

Read My Review

Friends: The frigid weather and long nights of February were perfect for reading this month's books, a wonderful collection of fiction, non-fiction, essays, a play, and poetry.

Here are the books I read in February:

Every book was worth the time, and I remain enthusiastic about all of them. That said, I'm recommending three books because of their fine writing and the extra dimension of empathy, wisdom, and information that I hope I garnered from them.

Claire Keegan's finely sculpted jewel of a novella, 'Foster', is my top choice. It's sad yet uplifting, depressing yet exhilarating, and ultimately it's about the vulnerability and resilience of our children. Parenting remains the hardest and most fulfilling job in the world, and Keegan's tender story makes that clear.

Colum McCann's novel, 'Apeirogon' is a moving and powerful book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. McCann, one of my favorite novelists, based his novel on the stories of two men whose daughters were killed in the violence but who chose to work for peace not revenge. The term apeirogon is defined as a polygon with a countably infinite number of sides, and if that seems paradoxical or impossible, it's an accurate reflection of the situation in Israel. This is a superb and unsettling read.

There were outstanding non-fiction offerings this month, as well. The essays by the late Barry Lopez about the environment and by Hardwick, Kazin, and Prose about books, writing, and reading are fine examples of the writer's craft. The brilliant reporting of a murder trial in Queens by the late Janet Malcolm demonstrates her skills as a reporter and a writer. Dorthe Nors' book about exploring the west coast of Denmark is a good place to lose onself for anyone who dreams of getting away from it all and living close to nature.

But the outstanding non-fiction book this month was Gal Beckerman's book about how radical new ideas become realities and change the world. His thesis is that while the internet and social media can create the acute, energetic flare ups of revolutionary movements (e.g. the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street), those initial explosions don't lead to lasting change in the political realities on the ground. These new technologies circumvent the slow give and take, the thoughtful percolation and debates about ideas that actually build political movements that take hold. His examples from the 17th C to the current period include the nation-wide petitions of the Chartist movement in England that led to universal suffrage and the underground press in Stalinist Russia that eventually led to perestroika. Not light reading, but well done and well worth thinking about.

Having seen Tom Stoppard's 'Leopoldstadt' on Broadway recently, I read another of his plays and loved 'Arcadia'. It's a time-warped examination of determinism and free will set against quantum mechanics in an English country manor in 1809 and the present. Sounds weird? You'll love it.

Finally, I read Linda Pastan's two volumes of poetry as an homage to her long life of poem making. She died last month at 90 after publishing 15 volumes of poetry that are both accessible and thought-provoking and are full of 'aha' and 'OMG' moments. The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month features seven poems by her. The first four come from her book 'Carnival Evening: Selected Poems from 1968-1998' while the last three are from her recently published new and selected poems, 'Almost An Elegy'. She wrote about family, nature, love, marriage, memory, and like all poets, death. Reading these two volumes which contain poems written over a period of 54 years was especially illuminating. As her own death loomed, her writing reflected her increasing acceptance and even welcoming of it. There were dozens of poems of hers that I wished I could share with you, but here's a small sample. 'An Early Afterlife' ranks among my very favorite works.

I finish these monthly updates with an epigram or two. Here's a wonderful one from Somerset Maugham: "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." And here's one from Norman Rush, winner of the Pulitzer and National Book Awards for his fiction: "The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.”

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 dancing!