rocketjk's 2024 reading rollercoaster - two!

I've been past due for a thread part two. So here we go. I promised myself I'd get a new thread up here when my wife and I got back to New York for good. It took me a week, but here's the new digs, finally.

To review: After a two-year project of investigation and exploration, my wife and I moved in mid-August from Mendocino County, northern California, USA, to Manhattan. More precisely, for those who know the city, to the Upper West Side. We're both New Jersey natives, with family (my wife) and old friends (both of us) in the NY/NJ area, so really this is like coming home. I'm retired, with a checkered past including, in no particular order, public radio producer, teacher, freelance writer and used bookstore owner, busman, waiter, dishwasher and publications coordinator at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on the resume. My reading is an eclectic mix of fiction, history, memoirs, bios and more. In addition to the books I read straight through, I like to read anthologies, collections and other books of short entries one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once. I have a couple of stacks of such books from which I read in this manner between the books I read from cover to cover (novels and histories, mostly). So I call these my "between books." When I finish a "between book," I add it to my yearly list. Cheers and happy reading one and all!

Keeping Track of Who/What/How/Where I Read

For the past several years I've been posting a personal thread in the Reading Globally group to keep track of where my reading takes me. However, whereas when I started that tradition it seemed like there were a few folks doing the same thing, I'm now the only one still posting in that way there, so I've decided to move my personal map pinning to my own CR thread. Here is my standard introduction to my Reading Globally thread:

I've had fun charting my travels the last fourteen years. 2023's reading brought me to 14 countries, including the U.S., and 8 states within the U.S. As always, there were also many "U.S. non-state specific" and "Non-country specific" books on the list.

I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" in any particular way. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me!

Who
Female: 9
Male: 30

What
Novels: 18
Short Stories: 4
Histories: 6
Contemporary (when published) Events: 4
Biographies: 2
Memoir: 5

How (Original Language)
Arabic: 2
Albanian: 1
English: 28.5 *
French: 3
German: 0.5
Yiddish: 2
Various: 1 **

* The captions for Death in the Making were written in German by Robert Capa and translated into English. The original (1938) forward and the afterward for the 2020 edition were written in English.
** The short story collection, The World's Greatest Romances, is comprised of stories from writers of several different countries.

Where
ASIA
China
Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang
Into China by Eileen Bigland

India
Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt

CARIBBEAN
Jamaica & Haiti
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Jamaica and Haiti by Zora Neale Hurston

EUROPE
Non-country specific
The World's Greatest Romances edited by Walter J. Black (in this case "the world" being, almost entirely, various European countries)

Albania
The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare

England
Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe
The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson
Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce
The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith

France
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust
The Fortune of the Rougons by Emile Zola
The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

Italy
A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown

Norway
The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch

Poland
The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Estate by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Russia
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege by Antony Beevor

Spain
Death in the Making by Robert Capa et. al.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

MIDDLE EAST
Iraq
Iraq + 100: Stories from Another Iraq edited by Hasan Blasim

Palestine
Omar Appears in Jerusalem by Najeeb Al-Kelani

NORTH AMERICA
The United States
Non-State Specific
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam
Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy
Lady in Armor by Octavus Roy Cohen
Shattered Tablets: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer
Timbuktu by Paul Auster
Official Baseball Guide - 1963 Edition edited by C. C. Johnson Spink

California
Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts

Massachusetts
This is Murder, Mr. Jones by Timothy Fuller

Minnesota
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Mississippi
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.

Montana
The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan

New York
The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto
The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan
Balls by Graig Nettles and Peter Golenbock

Washington, DC
Erasure by Percival Everett

Wyoming
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee

nice to see you in your new shiny digs both virually and in real life. looking forward to see the books youll fill it with

Ive thought about doing a global thread but the time it would take for me to sort through my reads since 2016 (when I started here) would be better spent reading more books!) but ymmv

Glad to hear you've made the move. Enjoy settling in and getting unpacked. I like that part of moving.

Welcome back to New York!

Happy new thread, Jerry! And congrats on completing the move.

As for tracking your global reading, have you looked at The Global Challenge? Several Club Readers are tracking their global reading there. Disclaimer: I am the admin for the group. :-)

>6 labfs39: "As for tracking your global reading, have you looked at The Global Challenge?"

LOL, see https://www.librarything.com/topic/356203#8328580 and https://www.librarything.com/topic/356203#8328625

Congrats on completing the move! (I mean, I know it's not actually completed until you're settled in, but you're there at least.)

>7 rocketjk: Ok, ok! I'm a little distracted these days, lol!

Congratulations on both this new place and the brick-and-mortar one, Jerry! I see it's been exactly a year since we last got together (I have one of those five-year journals, which is really good for folks like myself with lousy memories)—I'm glad we get more chances, now.

Thanks to all for the kind words about our move. Here are a couple of photos of last night's sunset from our living room window.





Cheers!

Beautiful!

Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston



Tell My Horse is Zora Neale Hurston's often fascinating account of her visits to Haiti and Jamaica in the mid- to late-1930s. Hurston was intrepid and fearless about going out into the countryside of both countries, experiencing the lives and learning about the folk customs and religious beliefs of the people she met. Because she met people on their own terms, rather than as a supercilious academic anthropologist, Hurston was able to gain trust and entry into lives and, particularly, into meaningful religious ceremonies, particularly in Haiti, where she attended and sometimes took part in a wide range of Voodoo ceremonies.

In a way, the opening section, the chapters about Jamaica, are the easiest and most compelling to read. Hurston describes her stay at a place called Accompong, inhabited by people known as the Maroons, the descendants of enslaved blacks who had escaped into the hills generations back and successfully fought off the British forces who came to reclaim them.

"The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freemen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. . . . They were here before the Pilgrims landed on the bleak shores of Massachusetts . . . There are other Maroon settlements besides Accompong, but England made treaty with Accompong only."

Hurston's wry observations about the Jamaican class structure between blacks, mulattos and whites is full of sly, Swiftian humor. But I think the most memorable passage in this opening section about Jamaica is Hurston's description of a funeral procession. A respected yet very poor man of the village has died in a relatively distant hospital. A group of villagers goes off to bring the body home. Hurston is in the group that has gone to a nearby bridge to meet the corpse bearers and accompany them back to the village. It is the dead of night:

"So we were a sort of sightless, soundless, shapeless, stillness there in the dark, wishing for life. At last a way-off whisper began to put on flesh. In the space of a dozen breaths the keening harmony was lapping at our ears. Somebody among us struck matches and our naked lights flared. The shapeless crowd-mass became individuals. A hum seemed to rise from the ground around us and became singing in answer to the coming singers and in welcome to the dead. The corpse might have been an African monarch on safari, the way he came borne in his hammock. The two crowds became one. Fresh shoulders eagerly took up the burden and all voices agreed on one song. Then there was a jumbled motion that finally straightened out into some sort of a marching order with singing. Harmony rained down on sea and shore. The mountains of St. Thomas heaved up in the moonlessness; the smoking flambeaux splashed the walking herd; bare feet trod the road in soundless rhythm and the dead man rode like a Pharaoh--his rags and his wretchedness gilded in glory."

Also very memorable is Hurston's vivid account of accompanying several of the villagers on a dangerous hunt for wild pigs.

The section about Jamaica takes up just over a fifth of my edition's 260 pages. The rest of the book is Hurston's account of her time in Haiti. It, too, is very interesting, especially when Hurston is describing the places she visits and people she stays with. There are some historical sections, particularly about different recent (circa 1938) presidential administrations, the ways in which they came to power (almost always via coup), and the ways and reasons they were deposed. These are interesting, with the proviso that Hurston doesn't seem to be attempting any sort of scholarly histories, but instead is presenting more or less oral histories, the events as they were told to her by a variety of Haitians.

Hurston traveled to several areas in the Haitian countryside to learn as much as she could about Voodoo beliefs, history and ceremonies. While this information is interesting, Hurston unfortunately went a bit overboard, detail-wise, in her narrative. Whole sections of the book become recitations of specific Voodoo spirits and ceremonies. The page fills up with details about one, then another, then other. And though this does present a comprehensive (or at least multi-faceted) picture of the culture, the details crammed onto the page like that made it difficult, at least for me, to keep track, and I began skimming in places. The chapter on zombies was particularly interesting, and Hurston did her best to run down possible scientific facts behind the beliefs.

Hurston is matter-of-fact about the conditions of poverty and illness, and the destructive nature of the class system, in Haiti at the end of the 1930s. Nevertheless, from what we read now about current conditions there, seem things to only have gotten worse in the intervening 90 years.

Recommended? Absolutely.

>13 rocketjk: Fabulous review, Jerry. I hadn't heard of this book by Hurston but it sounds fascinating, so onto the wish list it goes.

>14 kidzdoc: I think you'd appreciate it very much, Darryl. I hope you get to it.

>13 rocketjk: Thank you for the review. I've become more interested in Hurston's life and the culture of Jamaica.

My post-Tell My Horse between book reading was a ramble through the "abbreviated while I wait for my books to arrive from California" version of Stack 1:

* “Thomas Alva Edison,” excerpted from The Youth’s Companion by Earl Reeves in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Murder as One of the Fine Arts – First Paper” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Not a Thing Out of Place” by Tawfiq Al-Hakim from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* Day 6, Story 9 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
“The Effete East” by Roger Angel from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

I've now started The Fortune of the Rougons, the first book of Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my plan is to read at least the first nine books in the series, up through Nana, and then see if I'm still enjoying the series enough to continue.

>17 rocketjk: Are you joining the Emile Zola Group Read?

>17 rocketjk: If you get to Nana 17 in the suggested reading order, you might as well go on to 20!

>13 rocketjk: Definitely sounds like it's worth pursuing.

>18 labfs39: I didn't know of it, so thanks for the heads up, but probably not. I'm not that big on group reads, sad to say.

>19 SassyLassy: Nana is 9, though, on both the "story" and the "publication" list, as per LT:
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/531/Les-Rougon-Macquart

On which list is it #17?

>20 rocketjk: I used Wikipedia, which lists both the publication order and Zola's suggested reading order, where Nana is number 17.

The article says that Zola gave this suggested reading order in his introduction to Doctor Pascal. Not remembering seeing that, I went to my copy, and discovered that Zola's introduction is not part of it. I just spent some time going down various internet rabbit holes looking for it, but couldn't find it. I did find a 2009 review on amazon's US site, which also mentions this introduction. The reviewer says "NANA will contain much that will elude you if you read it in the ninth position instead of the seventeenth, where it belongs."

I do feel that given Nana's life and fate, as well as her position in the genealogy, this is a better place than 9. However, in terms of a stand alone read, nothing is lost, it's just improved with the background.

>21 SassyLassy: Thanks, I'll check it out. It's odd that both the LT "story" and "publication" listings have it at 9!

>21 SassyLassy: Looked at the wikipedia page for the series. The footnote next to the heading "A Recommended Reading Order" says "The reading order recommended by Zola can be found in Ernest Alfred Vizetelly's Emile Zola, novelist and reformer: an account of his life & work. It includes a link that brings us to that book via .pdf, and to the specific page, from which I quote thusly:

"In the chronicle of Zola's career given in our previous chapters, the Rougon-Macquart volumes hâve been mentioned in their chronological order ; but the example of the critics who, even since the completion of the séries, hâve followed that same order in judging Zola's work is not one to imitate. By adopting that System one may certainly trace the variations in Zola's gênerai style over a term of years ; but if the séries is to be judged as a whole one must take its sections in the order in which the author himself desired they should be read. This he indicated in "Le Docteur Pascal," and confirmed by word of mouth to the présent writer."

Et, voila: https://archive.org/details/emilezolanovelis00vizerich/emilezolanovelis00vizeric...

>23 rocketjk: Thanks for that. Good to see - I had just been looking in amazon Canada's French titles to see if any of them had the introduction in the "peek here", but without any luck.

Will you be reading it 17th now:)

Poor old Vizetelly had a hard time of it, but he didn't do Zola any favours either.

>11 rocketjk: Belated congrats on the move, and thanks for the gorgeous photos!

>24 SassyLassy: "Poor old Vizetelly had a hard time of it, but he didn't do Zola any favours either."

Well, I know nothing whatsoever about poor old Vizetelly's hard time, or the harm he did to Zola, but I will absolutely take your word for both. :)

>25 Jim53: Thanks, and you're welcome!

>11 rocketjk: Congratulations on the move, and what a glorious sunset. I hope you continue to enjoy the views, and the new home.

>13 rocketjk: A great review; you make a compelling case for the book.

>13 rocketjk: That is fascinating! It reminds me of another literary funeral that also feature singing and a body carried in a hammock, in the play Morte e vida Severina (The Death and Life of a Severino) by Brazilian author João Cabral de Melo Neto (link to my post about the play). Here's a link to the scene in the 80s film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAtbeDyH9P8 (you can see the hammock-carrying at the start, and the song starts at 3:15)

>28 Dilara86: Interesting info, and sincere thanks for those links. I will check them out. It's not surprising that such customs would be similar in Brazil and Jamaica.

The Fortune of the Rougons by Emile Zola



The Fortune of the Rougons is the first novel in Zola's 20-book cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, about life in France during the Second Empire, which began with a successful coup d'etate by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (a.k.a. Napoléon III, the original Napoleon's nephew) over the Second French Republic in 1851. We are in the fictional Provencal town of Passans, somewhat geographically isolated and a cultural backwater. This first novel presents the family backgrounds and then the lives of Pierre Rougon and his wife Felicité, along with Rougon's half-brother, Antoine Macquart. The Rougons marry and then struggle in the town's low middle-class, always plotting to make their fortunes and move up into the leisured gentry class and always failing. Antoine, one of two illegitimate half-siblings, returns from a long army hitch embittered against Pierre, a feeling that deepens as the story continues. We also read the story of the young lovers, Silvere, the son of the third sibling, Antoine's sister Ursule, and the lovely, young Miette. As the events of the coup unfold in far-off Paris, the Rougons plot how to use the developments to their advantage, Antoine plots revenge on the Rougons, and Silvere and Miette pledge their love to each other in some of the books most wonderful sections and to the insurgents who rise up in the countryside to resist the coup and defend the Republic.

There is a tragic-comic element to all of this. The Rougons and also Antoine Macquart are grotesques and, aside from the cunning skill for the main chance, essentially devoid of redeeming factors. The middle class group that solidifies around them are cowardly and grasping. As Zola describes the situation and their plotting:

The Rougons, those miserable, disreputable wretches, had thus succeeded in gathering around them the instruments of their fortune. Everyone, out of cowardice or stupidity, would be obliged to obey them and work blindly for their aggrandizement. All they had to fear was those other forces that might be working towards the same end as themselves, and might rob them of some of the glory of victory.

How this all plays out provides the drama of the book's last two-thirds. The "comedy" of the novel is interspersed with treachery and bloodshed. Zola was, of course, quite a fine writer, and the modern translation provided by Brian Nelson in this Oxford World's Classics edition helped the narrative flow really well for this English language reader. Because so many of the citizens of Passans are presented as craven fools, I was reminded of the Jewish folktales of the "Wise Men of Chelm" that I read as a child. But also, due to the Rougons' unscrupulousness and rapacity, Faulkner's Snopes Family trilogy came to mind. The Fortune of the Rougons lands somewhere in the middle for me, between the light-hearted foolishness of Chelm and the grim malevolence of the Snopes clan. Nevertheless, humankind's seemingly endless capacity for hypocrisy, self-aggrandizing and conscienceless greed are on full display.

At any rate, I found The Fortune of the Rougons to be extremely absorbing reading, and I'll eventually hope to work my way through the major part of the 20-novel cycle.

My post-The Fortune of the Rougons "between book" reading sent me happily traipsing through Stack 1:

* “Smoked Skipper,” by W.W. Jacobs in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Murder as One of the Fine Arts – Second Paper” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Revenge” by Vakhtang Ananyan from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* Day 6, Story 10 and Conclusion from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “A Day on a Cruise” by Ogden Nash from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

Now, staying in France, I'll move from one famous series to another, as I head back to In Search of Lost Time, courtesy of Marcel Proust, for the third installment, The Guermantes Way. My plan is to break this reading up into three parts, but if I find things flowing nicely when I get to the end of Part I, I might just roll along with it and keep going.

>30 rocketjk: I'm glad to hear that it is engrossing reading. I've been a bit intimidated by the cycle, but had purchased the Oxford edition of Fortune of the Rougons back when Sassy, I think, recommended it on ratonliseur's thread. I skipped the introduction as it said it was full of spoilers, and read the first few pages of chapter one last night.

>32 labfs39: That's the edition I have. I did read the introduction. I guess there were some spoilers, but Zola pretty much foreshadows everything to come in the first 20 pages or so, as I remember it, so I didn't feel particularly aggrieved. One thing that the introduction does well, at somewhere around its mid-point, is lay out the historical context for the story, beginning with the revolution in 1848 that caused the monarchy to once again fall, the establishment of the Second Republic, and the events of 1851 around which the narrative of the novel revolves. I found myself going back and referring to those passages a couple of times during my reading just to center myself in the history again.

As I understand it, just about all of the books work pretty well as stand-alones, so it's not like you need to keep reading in the cycle to find out what happens at the end. 20 books is a lot of books, though, boy howdy, but I'm not going to stress myself over whether I get through the whole cycle or not. I'll just concentrate on enjoying those books I do get to.

>33 rocketjk: That's good to know, Jerry. I think I'll read the intro then. I did go down a few holes on Wikipedia yesterday, trying to find my bearings. I read Germinal in college, and then again a few years later, and really liked it. I think I also read Nana, but remember less. I had bought this edition of Fortune of the Rougons after hearing raton-liseur and Sassy discuss it and thought now would be a good time to read it in support of the Zola group reading that is just getting started.

>30 rocketjk: Skipping your review for now as I'm just starting The Fortune of the Rougons now, but I'll be back to compare notes!

>35 AlisonY: I'm looking forward to your take. My guess is that you'll enjoy it. Cheers!

As I've mentioned elsewhere on Club Read, I've decided to read The Guermantes Way, the third book in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time novel cycle, in quarters. I'm mostly enjoying it, but it's slow going, and I'm thinking that breaking up its nearly 600 pages in this way will help me appreciate it more. I'll see if that works out or if I'll just end up watering it the novel's power.

After setting M. Proust aside temporarily upon reaching the 150-page mark, I was on, first, to a stack of "Between Books." The movers finally showed up last week, abeit a week late, and most of the books are out of their boxes and onto shelves, although just in random fashion at first, so there is a massive organization upcoming. At any rate, this means that all of the "Between Books," whether they'd been residing on the West Coast or here in New York, have finally been reassembled (I know you were all concerned). Stack 1 now comes together thusly.

* “The Well of St. Keyne” by Robert Southey in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Vancouver Skipper Sent Tips to Pitcher Via Radio” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* “Murder as One of the Fine Arts – Postscript: An Account of the Williams and M’Kean Murders” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Night” by Gurgen Mahari from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “Mir Zaynen Do! – We Are Here!” by Marcel Kshensky from Annual Gathering Commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 75th Anniversary, April 19, 2018 edited by Irena Klepfisz
* Day 7, Introduction and Story 1 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “The Worlds of Tangier” by Paul Bowles from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

Now I've started something lighter, Dear Mrs. Bird by A.J. Pearce, a novel about a somewhat naive young woman making her way and trying to sort out life in London during the blitz. She takes what she thinks is her first newspaper job, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, but the job isn't what she was expecting. Well, this is a comedy, and just the sort of breezy fare that works as a rest from Proust. Not the kind of book I'd normally read, but it's a quick, good-hearted affair and I'm enjoying it.

>37 rocketjk: Sorry that your movers were late. It seems to be a thing. When my daughter and I moved to Florida from Seattle, the movers were 18 days late and they lost my car. It took several days for them to locate it. Fun times. Is Rosie adjusting to her new digs?

>37 rocketjk: For what it's worth, I read In Search of Lost Time slowly but steadily over the course of 13 months, and I loved it. So much so that I'd like to reread all 4000 pages some day!
I read lots and lots of books in between/during the time I was reading this. I did find that certain sections needed a good chunk of reading time to get into the flow. It didn't usually work for me to read a few pages a day. It worked better for me to have a day every week or so where a read a good 30-50 pages. I also didn't like to go too long while I was in a section without reading or I'd forget "how" to read it. It's a different style than most books. But I did take time off between each "book".
I loved it so much.

>37 rocketjk: Sometimes those random shelvings of books make you see books you had forgotten about, or just not been in the right space to read. It makes reordering them all fun.

>38 labfs39: "Sorry that your movers were late. It seems to be a thing."

In this case, we actually believed their tale that they had a mechanical breakdown en route. They did keep us informed of their status while they were on the road, and when they finally, arrived they were efficient, professional and very friendly. Also we'd had a professional reference for them from one of their competitors who couldn't work with us on the date we needed and suggested these guys, instead, so we felt fairly calm. But this was the second company we "worked" with. The first company was, indeed, a scam operation, the cause of no small amount of agita and even some money before we finally got ourselves sorted. But that's a story for another day.

>39 japaul22: Yes, all of that. I read the first two books in the cycle more or less straight through and both of them took forever, the second book especially, as much due to external events going on than to the books themselves. But, yes, the writing and the insights provided are extraordinary and overall I'm enjoying the reading quite a lot.

>40 SassyLassy: "Sometimes those random shelvings of books make you see books you had forgotten about, or just not been in the right space to read. It makes reordering them all fun."

Yes! I'm actually looking forward to the process. A lot depends on how easily my wife and I can agree on where the various categories go, but I think that will be go smoothly enough. But pulling books down and moving them around I'm expecting to be fun, the kind of thing that will bring me back to my bookstore owning days.

>37 rocketjk: I’m glad your between books are now accessible—I love this idea and keep planning to set something like that up for myself. The more often I read your entries the closer I come. I’ve just realized how much needed shelf space could be freed up if I took the various books of short selections I own and organized them elsewhere. Most of mine are short story collections by writers I’m very fond of and essay collections. I’m reading James Baldwin’s essays in this between book fashion.

>42 dianelouise100: The process works very well for me. I'm a "systems" guy, and I enjoy this one. I hope it works for you, too, if you decide to implement it. Hey, it's worth a try!

Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce



A couple of years back, my wife and I were wandering around Bayonne, NJ, USA. Bayonne is right next to Jersey City, where we were staying at the time, but also it's of particular interest to me because it's the town my mother grew up in and where my maternal grandparents still lived when I was a child. We came upon a lovely bookstore called The Little Boho Bookshop, and there I bought this book.

I began this novel with a bit of trepidation. Being in the midst of my intermittent reading of Proust, I wanted something lighter and maybe a bit breezy, and Dear Mrs. Bird seemed to promise that. As it's a first novel, I worried about the writing a bit, and also that it would lean a little too much for my taste on the romance-novel end of things. Well, I will say that the novel does have flaws, but all in all I was pleasantly impressed and enjoyed the reading experience.

Emmeline Lake is a young woman making her way in London during the blitz. She dreams of being a Lady War Correspondent, but in the mean time has a boring if pleasant day job and works night shift answering phones at the fire department during German bombing raids. In the beginning chapters, things are breezy and cheerful, and so is Emmy, and she soon actually finds herself working at a newspaper. Sort of. Her job is simply typing up the letters that come in to the advice column of the paper's Women's Section. Worse, her boss, Mrs. Bird, only wants to see the most unoffensive letters. Anything to do with relationships or worry about the war or about loved ones off fighting is strictly off limits. If you think you can see where this is probably going, I think you are probably correct. Things take a serious turn, however, and quite suddenly, as we experience a night (which seemed to me at least to be admirably realistically handled by Pearce) at the fire department phone bank during a particularly hellacious bombing, and Emmy's personal life, and those of her closest friends, become rocky indeed.

That sudden shift in action and tone are, I think, the book's biggest flaw. At first it seems that the blitz is going to be kept more or less as an ominous background element. Then suddenly it is front and center. I take that as a "first novel" pacing issue. At any rate, by this time I was hooked on the story, so if there was a hurdle there, I was able to jump over it. If there is no lack of melodrama in the novel, there is, on the other hand, some rewarding depth after all in Emmy's character, her handling of her personal setbacks and of the constant worry, emotional fatigue and uncertainty of life under constant bombing. So I give the book 3 1/2 stars, if anyone's keeping score. This is at this point a 3-book series. I am likely at some time or other to be in the mood for the other two books, I think.

And now it's on to pages 151-300 of Proust's The Guermantes Way.

>41 rocketjk: Ah, so now I see the advantage of having married a guy who likes to read, but who isn't really a book person. I got to unpack and order all the books the way I wanted them. But I'm sure you and your wife enjoy the book arranging discussions.

>44 rocketjk: my library has an audio copy of it. I put it on my never ending list. 😅

Having finished the second quarter (roughly pages 151-300), I took a trip through Stack 2 of my "between books," finishing two and adding two more, like so:

* “Madame Balmont’s Defense” by Abbe Arnauld from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black - Finished!
* “Who is Sylvia” by Cynthia Asquith from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith - Finished!
* “’Non Patsiar!’ or, Don’t Goof with Your Life” by Joe Donnelly (Newsday) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* “Old Truths and New Cliches” from Old Truths and New Cliches: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited by David Stromberg
* Memoir of Daniel Webster: Introduction” by H. J. Raymond from The Public and Private Life of Daniel Webster by General S. P. Lyman - Newly added
*”Bobby Richardson” from Sweet Seasons: Recollections of the 1955-64 New York Yankees by Dom Forker - Newly added
* Day 7, Story 2 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
“How Texas Won Her Freedom – The Story of Sam Houston and His Incredible Rout of the Mexican Army in the Battle of San Jacinto” by Robert Penn Warren from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

Now it's on to my next book, a short World War 2 novel, published in 1945, called A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown. The book was made into a very highly regarded movie shortly thereafter.

The World's Greatest Romances edited by Walter J. Black



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). I only mildly enjoyed this jam-packed (68 stories!) collection of stories, most from the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of them were fairly formulaic, having to do with the amorous and/or romantic adventures of nobility and knights and so forth. The first section of 11 tales were mostly gothic in nature and those were entertaining, but after that the collection settled into long waits, matters of honor, unrequited love and tragic misadventures, few particularly compellingly written. My favorite story was one that broke the mold, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" by Maxim Gorky, about a group of men in a Russian prison who begin to idolize the young girl who works as a maid in the building. There are some other famous names among the authors, including R.L. Stevenson, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bret Harte and Henry James. Those are all writers I admire, but none of their stories stand out for me. This must be something to do with editor Walter Black's tastes, or what he deemed to be his audience's tastes. The rest of the authors were obscure, at least to me. It was fun looking each of those names up online after I'd read their stories here.

The volume is one of a series Black published called Black's Readers Service. There were (I believe) 32 volumes in all of different topics, published between the late 1920s and early 30s. Given all that, you might not be surprised to learn that there are no more than three or four female authors represented here.

Book note: This collection has been on my shelves since my LibraryThing "big bang" in 2008. It will be off to the thrift store now.

>48 rocketjk: I’ve been wondering about this collection as I saw it pop up in your “in between” reads. I guess I don’t have to look for it 😉

>49 FlorenceArt: You definitely don't have to look for it. Either you can decide never to read it or I can mail you my copy, which I'd be happy to do if you'd like a no-risk way to have a peek at it. :)

>50 rocketjk: Thank you, that's very kind! But I doubt this book would be worth the trouble and cost of transatlantic shipping. Not to me anyway. You can donate it to the next Little free library for me ;-)

The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith



Read as a "between book" (see first post). Cynthia Asquith was born into the English upper crust in 1887. Early on, she became friends folks like D.H. Lawrence, J.M. Barrie and L.P. Hartley. She became a fairly well-known writer, known for her short stories and WWI-era diaries. Quite a bit of her writing showcased the unfair social restrictions that English women were saddled with. She was also known for editing anthologies of ghost stories, such as the collection I've just finished. Because Asquith was a writer herself and otherwise strongly connected in the British literary world, she was able to get some quite famous authors to contribute to her collections. In The Third Ghost Book, originally published in 1955, we find writers such as Mary Treadgold, Elizabeth Bowen, Lord Dunsany, Elizabeth Taylor (the writer, not the actress) and Angus Wilson.

The stories are almost all quite good. Most are quite spooky and evocative, though a few are humorous. In “The Telephone,” by Mary Treadgold, a man and his new wife are haunted by his former wife via a telephone that they thought they’d had disconnected. In “The Claimant,” by Elizabeth Bowen, a man lays claim to his former property, even after death. Elizabeth Jenkins' “On No Account, My Love,” while offering a wonderfully disturbing sense of dread, is more of a character study than a true ghost story. A woman recounts her family history, beginning with what she’s been able to piece together from family lore about her beautiful, demanding great-grandmother, who ran a girl’s school very exactingly. The narrator finally visits the old family home. The twist at the end I found quite satisfying. That was one of my two favorite stories. The other was "The Tower," by Marghanita Laski, in which late one afternoon, a young women stops to investigate one last historical site in Italy, much to her regret. Very creepy, that one. Oh, and one more was “The Day of the Funeral,” by Margaret Lane in which a young girl and her dying grandmother hear footsteps and voices in the walls.

The one drawback to reading a collection of ghost stories is that you already know that every story is going to have a ghost. So if a solitary hiker, accosted by an sudden rainstorm, comes upon an lovely hillside inn offering shelter, we pretty much can be assured that either the inn is haunted or the innkeepers themselves are going to turn out to be ghosts. There are a couple of stories that follow this trope, but they are both charming enough tales that I didn't even mind.

So this was fun. My paperback copy was a 9th printing (1965) of the British publisher Pan Books' 1957 edition. It's been on my shelf since before my LibraryThing big bang in 2008.

A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown



It only took me a couple of days to rip through this short but very well-written book about a company of American soldiers taking part in the invasion of Italy during World War Two. Their officer is wounded even before the landing takes place, and their mission then becomes unclear to them. All they know is that they have to go six miles up a country road and find a farmhouse. Presumably they are to take it, assuming there are even enemy soldiers in it, and hold it. Then they look at a map and see a bridge near the farmhouse, and decide for themselves that the job must be to destroy the bridge so the German army can't bring reinforcements, tanks and supplies across it. The novel is about their trudge up that road. They are combat-experienced, having already fought in North Africa and Sicily. Some have become resigned and matter-of-fact about the dangers and horrors. Others are beginning to show the strains of a year straight in combat. As they walk, Brown visits with some of the individual soldiers, as we hear their thoughts and their conversations. They often use banter and jokes to ease the tension and handle the boredom and discomfort of walking the hardened, rocky road in the increasingly hot day. We also listen in on the strategy discussions among the company's leaders, two sergeants and a corporal. They are attacked from the sky more than once. The whole thing takes two endless hours, and then they reach the farmhouse.

Brown was a very good writer, and there are many excellent descriptions of the men, their states of mind, and the surrounding terrain as well. I knew I was in the hands of a very good writer when, as the soldiers are still on the troop transport awaiting their nighttime landing, we read:

"As the time of landing approached a growing tension was added to nervousness and discomfort. The men's mouths were dry. Sounds magnified themselves. The dark closed in like a smotherer's pillow."

Sometimes I wished that Brown had gone a little bit easier on the banter, but all in all, I thought this was an excellent book about men at war, with a few quite vivid characters.

A Walk in the Sun was first published in 1944, while the war was still ongoing. It was made into a movie just the following year. According to Wikipedia, "In 2016, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry."* My mass market paperback is a first printing of the Signet Book edition from 1957. It has been on my shelves since before my LT "big bang" in 2008.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(1945_film)

>53 rocketjk: That sounds like something I would like. Adding it to the wishlist.

Well, I finally made it through the third quarter (roughly, pages 300-450) of The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, which I had decided to break up into four sections. The last 20 pages in particular seemed to take forever. Somehow, though, I can still say that I am, for the most part, enjoying the reading. So then it was a read through Stack 2 of my "Between Books," which looked like this:

* “The King and the Turk” by Steve Gelman (The Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* “Storytelling and Literature” from Old Truths and New Cliches: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer edited by David Stromberg
* “Mr. Webster in Congress” by H. J. Raymond
from The Public and Private Life of Daniel Webster by General S. P. Lyman
* “Whitey Ford” from Sweet Seasons: Recollections of the 1955-64 New York Yankees by Dom Forker
* Day 7, Story 3 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
“Pirates’ Paradise” (Andros Island) – anonymous with photographs by Slim Aarons from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

The Holiday Magazine piece represented an interesting coincidence, as my wife and I just finished watching the TV series, Bad Monkey, based on the Carl Hiasson book of the same name, which takes place mainly on Andros.

Now I'm on to a recently published book that I've been very curious about since I read a couple of positive reviews, Shattered Tablets: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer. It was written just before the October 7 attack, though Leifer does say in his introduction that he updated some of the text of the book before publication. As an American Jew and close observer of the sorts of events Leifer is talking about, I'm not supposing I'm going to learn a lot that's new to me here (though of course you never know what you don't know). But I'm hoping that reading a cogent and insightful contextual framing of the ways and reasons that Jewish life has been changing, along with the many internal pressures and conflicts within the varied American Jewish communities, including the rise of antisemitism and the ever-growing and furious schism revolving around Israel, would help me get a clearer grasp of the overall picture. I mentioned the book to a newly made friend who is a professor of Middle Eastern affairs, and particularly the Israel/Palestine situation. His comment was that Leifer is a thoughtful and intelligent person and a clear-eyed commentator on Israeli politics and policies. It remains to be seen whether I agree with his take on the history and future of American Jewry.

While I slowly make my way through Shattered Tablets, I thought I would pop on here for a second to share this recent photo of Rosie, the German shepherd, watching us watch the World Series while surrounded by her support animal and her ball.

That is so funny! Here is an almost identical photo of Ace and his wingless, legless support chicken.

>56 rocketjk: & >57 labfs39: Rosie and Ace are both gorgeous and perfect. Thanks for sharing them.

>57 labfs39: Great dogs think alike!

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer



This is a very recent book about which my interest was peaked by two reviews, one in the New York Times and the other in the English-language version of Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli daily whose stories often show up in my News app feed.

Tablets Shattered is a survey, more of less, of the history of American Judaism. Leifer is a millennial, and he is very much, and avowedly, writing from the perspective of his generation. That was one of the attractions of the book for me, a Jewish late-baby boomer (born in 1955). I wanted to see how a thoughtful person of a younger generation was seeing the subject. Leifer has been a journalist and an activist against Israeli policies and abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. That puts me in strong sympathy with his views along those lines. The book was finished just before last year's Hamas attacks on October 7 and the deadly Israeli response, but Leifer was able to make changes and additions to the manuscript based on those events before the book went to press.

Leifer's thesis is that the 100 years or so from the early 20th century, when Jewish immigrants poured into the U.S. from Europe, to sometime within the 2010s has been a golden age (with a couple of important chapters) for American Jews. He sees this period now ending, not because of antisemitism, but because what he calls the American Jewish consensus is now deteriorating. At first, immigrant Jews were kept together by that immigrant experience and by the ties to the religion and by Yiddish culture. The Old World, as most immigrant groups have labeled their countries/cultures of origin. Leifer makes the point that many of those original immigrants were socialists, members of the European Jewish workers' movement known as the Bund. Many of those people became involved in workers' rights here in the U.S. as well. By the 40s and 50s, though, with significant upward mobility, old world Yiddishkeit and labor issues began to fade as rallying points. Immediately after World War 2, however, as the horrors of the Holocaust began to come clear in America, and then with the establishment of Israel, American Jews had a new rallying point: Israel itself, and the perceived necessity for its survival and vibrancy, its existence as a refuge for the world's Jewry and as a symbol of Jewish strength where before had only been victimhood. Details of Israeli injustices to the Palestinian population were buried, though stories of Palestinian terrorism were accepted as gospel. More recently, however, according to Leifer, several factors have combined to severely weaken this American Jewish consensus. First is the growing knowledge of Israeli oppression in Gaza and the West Bank that is eroding American Jewish unquestioning support for Israel. Next is the further weakening of organized religion among American Jews. Leifer provides statistics about the closing of Conservative and Reform congregations for lack of membership, as a new generation has grown to adulthood that is even further removed from the immigrant traditions and even from the traditions of the social tenants of Judaism, including compassion, charity and the performance of good acts. Jewish support for the Civil Rights movement, for example, is now seen distantly in the rear view mirror.

So if religiosity among Jews is ebbing, and Israel can no longer stand as a central rallying point, what is the future of the Jewish community in America? Leifer sees several possible roads forward, though he doesn't seem particularly enthused by any of them. He is strongly supportive of Jewish advocacy/peace groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Not in Our Name, but doesn't see those movements as likely to coalesce into a strong consensus that will carry American Judaism forward. Similarly he speaks of Jewish religious movements that are aiming to expand inclusiveness and broaden concepts of what it means to be Jewish. Leifer, however, comes from a religious background and fears that these movements will carry Judaism too far from the basic philosophical tenets of what he loves about the religion. And I guess because of his religious background, Leifer spends a good bit of time investigating and explaining the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox communities, the only segment of American Jewry that has actually been growing in membership and cohesion. Finally, despite the horrors of the current war and the ongoing cruelty and criminality of Israeli policies toward Palestinians, which, again, Leifer has a history of actively opposing, Leifer doesn't see American Jewish abandonment of Israel entirely as a viable way forward. While the Jewish community in the U.S. has been the world's largest since the Holocaust, it is widely agreed that within the next 20 or 30 years, the Jewish population of Israel will exceed that of the U.S. Therefore, Leifer believes it important that American Jews not wash their hands entirely of the country that will soon have a plurality of the world's Jews, but instead continue to try to work toward a more just Israel. This is another uphill battle, to put it mildly, particularly in the face of his reporting that Israeli Jews no longer give a fig what American Jews think of them or their actions.

Personally, I think American Judaism will do what it has always done, which is to evolve organically and find a natural way forward. That may seem too simplistic, but I think the philosophical elements and historical strains are too strong to simply wink out or fade away. I liken this, rightly or wrongly, to my strong love of jazz. People are always talking about "help{ing to} keep jazz alive." Jazz is never going to be America's favorite musical genre, but it's not going anywhere and it's certainly not dying. Well, anyway, that metaphor has its strengths and its weaknesses, I guess.

I mostly found the first half of this book--Leifer's summation of American Jewish history--to cover ground I already knew, and I have several reasons why I wouldn't want it to be anyone's first introduction to the topic. The later stages, wherein Leifer examines some of the more modern movements within American Judaism, were more enlightening for me. I hope that some of these movements gain larger traction, but, sadly, I don't see much evidence of that. Here are some of my additional reservations about Leifer's approach:

* Leifer injects himself and his own experiences and ruminations quite liberally into the text. This is a problem for me because, first, I don't see him as really having the gravitas or experience to make his personal observations particularly meaningful, as thoughtful a fellow as he might be.

* Leifer, as mentioned, grew up in a religious household. He went to a Jewish day school rather than a public school. He writes about his early perspectives and opinions as being representative of Judaism in general, but most American Jews are not so wholly enveloped by the religion. In fact, it's part of Leifer's central thesis that, with the collapse of organized Judaism in America, most Jews of his generation are not living a particularly Jewish life at all. I wouldn't care overly, but Leifer continually frames issues through the lens of his own perspective, as if it were broadly shared.

* When Leifer speaks of organized Jewish life, he speaks only of religious training and support for Israel. As he sees those factors ebbing, he sees synagogue life per se as doomed. But he seems to miss wholly the important factor that brings families to synagogue, just as it brings people to church or mosque, that of community, of group support and association. I liked going to Friday night services, even into my hippie teens, because I saw my friends there. For my parents it was the same. Leifer seems to have a blind spot to this ingredient.

* Given his own strongly religious upbringing, not quite orthodox, evidently, but with plenty of cousins within the orthodox community, Leifer has a lot of sympathy for that tradition and spends a lot of time in the book exploring it. He sees a lot to like, in terms of cohesion and spiritual strength. That's fine for him, but it isn't the way forward for American Jewry as a whole that he seems to think it is. Crucially, he mentions, but quickly shrugs off, orthodox Jewry's rampant, foundational misogyny. He concludes the book's section he calls "The Orthodox Alternative" by saying, "For now, Orthodoxy remains the only living Jewish alternative to liberal capitalist culture on offer." For most American Jews, however, that's a hard no. Not really an alternative at all, whatever one might think of the evils of "liberal capitalist culture." (Leifer sees it, essentially, as quicksand into which American Jewry will soon sink out of sight.)

* On many issues, Leifer is content to provide us with a top-down history. So, for example, he will concede that many if not most American Jews have over the years had much more sympathy for the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories than organized leadership organizations have expressed and/or acted on. He waves this away, however, by adding that since those organizations get the headlines and have outsized lobbying influence, they are the most important factors to consider. But if the book is about American Jewry as a whole, it seems off to me to exclude the opinions so many American Jews.

* There's just enough of Leifer's summary of the Jewish American experience that I, as a current oldster, personally lived through that Leifer, as a current relative youngster, did not that he gets, from my perspective, just a little bit wrong, that I frequently lost patience. In fact, I came close to putting the book aside a couple of times during its first 100 pages.

* Given that the book's subtitle concludes with "and the Future of Jewish Life," Leifer really spends very little time looking at that future, all in all.

So, I'm sorry to say, this is not a book I can recommend. I guess I am better for having read it, for having gained exposure to the perspectives of an activist Millennial journalist. Those are two contradictory statements, I guess. What else is new?

>60 rocketjk: Great book review, Jerry. I can follow your comments very well.
I believe that the same thing happens again and again in all religions. There are the strictly religious ones and the more open-minded ones. Depending on which camp someone reports, screams, tells, others go under. This has led to misunderstanding for centuries and, unfortunately, often to war. No matter which religion, the different views have unfortunately not brought mankind any further.

>61 Ameise1: Thanks! I always worry when my reviews get that long, so I appreciate your kind words. Also, I agree with everything you've said, here.

>60 rocketjk: very interesting review on that. Did Leifer consider some of the differen off shoots of reform judaism such as Humanitarian Judaism or Reconstructionist Judaism? I know there are more but Im blanking;Ive been involved with both of these and found them interesting but disliked some of the traditions they toss out

you know the joke I suppose. Two Jews are stuck on a desert Island When found one shows off the synague that he built. When other was pointed up to him "that one? you wouldnt catch me dead in there/

>60 rocketjk: Adding my voice to the chorus of appreciation for your review. I have not read a lot about modern Judaism, I'm stuck in the past. Sounds like this is not the place to start.

>63 cindydavid4: "Did Leifer consider some of the differen off shoots of reform judaism such as Humanitarian Judaism or Reconstructionist Judaism? "

He did, yes. I should have added that those sections were among the most valuable of the book for me, because I really didn't know much about the details of those movements. His conclusion as I understand it is that while those movements have very healthy politics and provide good alternatives for people who feel comfortable in them, the more wide-ranging and adaptive they become, the less like Judaism, the more diffuse, they will become, so they are not a way forward for the religion/people as a whole.

Oh, and yes, I know and like that joke, although in the version I've heard it's just one fellow.

>65 rocketjk: yes I can see that. I was liking HJ till they had a Shabbat dinner invited me to light the candles and were not happy when I used the traditional prayer Ive used since kinder. so I do get that.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust



This is the third book in Proust's famous In Search of Lost Time opus. It is even longer than the previous entry, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (a.k.a. Within a Budding Grove), 595 pages to 533, and wasn't, for me, as compelling a read, though it is more consistently funny. Of Young Girls I wrote, "It's all a long, slow wander, with plot, what there is of it, subordinate to reverie. There are long passages of natural descriptions, which we strongly suspect are not meant to accurately represent the narrators observations at the time, but instead are heavily invested with the longing and enhancements rendered by time as the narrator looks back at them. . . . In The Guermantes Way, there's much less revery, much less longing for an unretrievable state of innocence and discovery. Instead, we enter the maze of Paris' early 20th-Century upper classes along with our unnamed narrator, who himself, against all odds (he is the son of an upper-middle class aspiring statesman) gains an invitation into this world. As the novel opens, our young man is in love with the beautiful Duchess Guermantes. He of course knows their is no hope for him there, but tells us of his longing to simply be ushered into her presence, to be invited to her parties and dinners, to experience the impossible heights of elegance and, he imagines, insight embodied in the life she lives along with her husband, the Duke Guermantes. He is enamored of the romance of their nobility, of their lineage, and that of their social set, that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages, evoking feudal days. He of course eventually finds himself, through friends, especially the Duchess' nephew, our hero's friend, the young army officer Robert Saint-Loup, invited into the august halls of the Guermantes and their friends and relations. What he finds there, of course, is not the intelligent, other-worldly conversation he imagined, steeped in history and romance, but instead a viper's nest of gossip, roomfuls of people whose knowledge, and interest in, history and literature is only of the shallowest nature. What passes for wit among them is almost always of the most mean-spirited and vapid kind, and their intelligence is no greater, often much less, than anyone else our man might meet in his daily life. And so most of the narrative is a black-comedy navigation of these conversations, a droll accounting of the Duke's obsession with the lineage of everyone he knows, the authenticity, or lack thereof, of their titles, and the determination of whose titles are the most ancient, who should thereby have precedence at table over whom. And this, mind you, 100 years at least after the end of any sort of royal reign in France. And while these memories of our narrators are, as mentioned, often quite funny, these incidents go on for several hundred pages.

I read this book in 150-page chunks, in between which I would turn to other reading. Despite the less compelling nature of this book to it predecessor in the series, I can still say I enjoyed the reading experience. The quality of the writing in so many places is just that good. I'm happy to be done with it, though, and will probably take a long rest from the series before continuing onward with book four, Sodom and Gomorrah. A note that I read both books two and three of the series, in the modern, Penguin Classics translation, which was helpful. The first book, Swann's Way, I read in the original English translation by Moncrieff. I already have a copy of the Penguin Classics version of Sodom and Gomorrah on my shelves, but I may break out my Modern Library (original translation) copy of The Captive when (and if) I get to it.

My post-The Guermantes Way "Between Book" reading offered me a quick and happy ramble through Stack One:

* “Yussouf” by James Russell Lowell in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Dubuque was Two-Club City at End of Season” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “The White Lamb” by Sero Khanzadyan from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Its Legacy” by David Slucki from Annual Gathering Commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 75th Anniversary, April 19, 2018 edited by Irena Klepfisz
* Day 7, Story 4 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “Billy Graham” by Noel Houston from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

Now I'm on to Timbuktu by Paul Auster.

Timbuktu by Paul Auster



I normally stay very far away from novels that have dogs as their protagonists, but this is Paul Auster, and I've admired the few books of his I've read. Plus, after all the Proust, I definitely needed something shorter. So when I noticed this book in a lovely, small bookstore in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn called The Word is Change, I decided to give it a go. One particular I was happy to see was that the book isn't narrated in first person (first canine?), but instead via a close-in third person.

As the book opens, we immediately learn that Mr. Bones, a resourceful and empathetic mutt, is grieving in advance, for his owner, Willy, is clearly dying. Willy wakes up coughing and coughs his way through each day. Willy once seemed to be on his way to a career as an author, until mental illness knocked him off course. Decoupling from mainstream society, Willy, believing it's his calling to spread joy and hope wherever he goes, years ago assumed a new last name for himself, Willy G. Christmas. Willy and Mr. Bones have been essentially hoboing around the country for the last seven years, always somehow getting by and entirely attached to each other. Now they are in Baltimore, where Willy is searching for his high school English teacher, the first person to believe in his writing talent, so he can hand over the key to a locker full of manuscripts.

That's the starting point, and things move on from there. Because he was so skillful a writer, Auster makes us easily accept that Mr. Bones understands everything that Willy, and every other human, says to him, and almost, but not quite, everything that's going on around him. The book is about the relationship between the two characters, and about Mr. Bones attempts to work out the elements in his surroundings, and in the world in general, that are opaque to him. Without going into detail, then, I can say that I found this a very affecting book about love, acceptance in the face of eccentricity, perseverance and mortality. It's not really a very deep book, but I found it quite nice for what it was. I will say that there were times that I thought Auster was channeling his inner Tom Robbins somewhat to the detriment of the narrative. But that's an extremely minor reservation. All in all, Auster found his way here, via a deft touch, to, for me at least, some memorable storytelling. It will come as no surprise that I'd recommend this particularly (though not only) to dog lovers.

A day or two after I finished Timbuktu, it was time to get on a plane to go visit my sister, her kids, and their kids in Las Vegas for a 5-day weekend. I didn't have time to get through my "between book" reading, but just grabbed my next full-length tome, Antony Beevor's WW2 history, Stalingrad: the Fateful Siege. Upon returning from Las Vegas, I set Stalingrad aside and went back for the "between book" stack, which included one relatively long entry (in the Daniel Webster bio). OK, so that's done:

* “The Ivy League” by Sid Ziff (The Los Angeles Times) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* “Literature for Children and Adults” from Old Truths and New Cliches: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer edited by David Stromberg
* “Debate with Hayne” by H. J. Raymond from The Public and Private Life of Daniel Webster by General S. P. Lyman
* “Bill Skowron” from Sweet Seasons: Recollections of the 1955-64 New York Yankees by Dom Forker
* Day 7, Story 5 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “New Orleans Society” by Shirley Ann Grau from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

Now it's back to the final third (about 130 pages) of Stalingrad. Cheers, all!

>69 rocketjk: Great review, and I'm going to check out this book. I share your wariness about animal narrators, but this sounds good.

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege - 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor



Stalingrad is an extremely detailed and very well-written account of one of the most horrific battles of modern times, written by Antony Beevor, an excellent military historian. Beevor had access to recently opened files and had the cooperation of Russian authorities who let him see their archives (the book was first published in 1998). He got to see diaries, contemporary official accounts and even letters, some mailed and some unmailed and found on the bodies of soldiers killed during the battle. He also conducted interviews with survivors and historians alike. Beevor took all the material and information and crafted an extremely readable and detailed account of this seminal battle, including major troop movements and hour-by-hour accounts of individual engagements. He even, via those interviews, diaries and letters, takes us inside planning sessions, bunkers and trenches to describe individual moments of heroism, terror and misery.

Beevor begins at the beginning of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, even taking us inside the meeting between Russian and German diplomats as the Germans read off Hitler's list of phony provocations and rationalizations for his aggression. As the meeting breaks up and the Russians leave to pack and head home to Russia, the German representative Joachim von Ribbentrop followed his Russian counterpart, Valentin Berezhkov outside, and, with tears in his eyes, whispered, "Tell them in Moscow that I was against this attack."

We get a brief overview of the beginning of the campaign, as the Russian army retreated and then stood firm outside of Moscow. Things get more detailed, of course, when Beevor turns to the German's next effort, to storm their way to the Volga to destroy the Russian army's large war supply factories and depots. Originally, taking Stalingrad hadn't even been the plan, but along the way Hitler's pride became engaged, and he was soon insisting that the city be occupied, even if it has to be destroyed in the process. The German air force's constant bombing of the city did not break the inhabitants' will, nor did it dislodge the Russian soldiers defending it. Instead, the bombs created mounds of rubble and ruins that, in the long run, made the city easier to defend. The German laid siege for months, until they were finally surprised (they shouldn't have been, according to Beevor) when several Russian armies the Germans did not realize were waiting in reserve broke out and raced around on two sides to eventually meet up in the Germans' rear and completely encircle the attackers. With quick action the Germans could have broken out, but Hitler refused to allow what he saw as a retreat, and told the German 6th Army to hold on at all costs and await a relieving column from the west. And though the German army did try it, the Russians were waiting for the expedition and destroyed it miles from the encirclement. Beevor shows us how, from beginning to end, Hitler's meddling in military planning and execution led to the invasion's downfall. (For one thing, it turns out that the old cliche about Hitler's fatal error in insisting that the invading army be split so that they could also try to capture the oil fields in the Caucuses is correct.)

All of the military action is tough enough reading on its own, although related, as I've said, with compelling detail, right down to the human element. What comes across most strongly in the narrative, though, was the toll of human misery and death on both sides. Beevor describes the Germans' atrocities, including the massacre of Jews and anti-German partisans and their general bloodthirstiness and callousness towards civilians during their advance. He also shows us Stalin's disregard for the lives of his own soldiers, who were frequently sent in waves to certain death and were even shot down by their own comrades if trying to retreat from a losing battle, and for the lives of Russian citizens, who might be turned out of their homes into the cold of winter by either side. During the initial Russian retreat, their scorched earth policy meant the burning of villages and stealing or slaughter of livestock, all of which might easily lead to starvation for the villagers left behind. As the German siege of the city endured into late fall and then early winter, and then the encirclement of the German army in January of a particularly brutal winter, their was death on both sides by the tens of thousands from freezing, starvation, exposure, exhaustion, suicide and disease. The list of horrors goes on, even after the battle ends, for the lot of the thousands of German soldiers taken captive during the battle and at the surrender, was mostly more misery and death. Russian prisoners fared no better. Somehow, Beevor is able to paint this picture largely in human terms.

Sounds like a fun read, eh? If one is interested in military history, this book is probably the ultimate account of this pivotal battle of World War 2. Once the German army had lost this battle, it was clear to their generals that what would come thereafter would be a long retreat and ultimate defeat. The Nazi leadership, on the other hand, of course turned a blind eye to this obvious truth, and the war ground on for another two years. Also, though, the book is an account of the misery that humans are willing to endure for nationalism and/or to protect their homeland, and for pride and loyalty, misplaced or not. This isn't a book that one "enjoys," as clearly written and readable as it is. It is a in-depth account, though, on the horrors of war and the follies of fanaticism and loyalty to power-(both political and economic)-besotted leaders.

I've had Stalingrad on my shelves since before my LT "big bang" in 2008. I've previously read Beevor's even longer history, The Battle for Spain, about the Spanish Civil War. I also have his The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II on my history shelf awaiting my attention.

Great review of Stalingrad, Jerry. I won't read it, but I just looked at your review of The Battle for Spain, which will go onto my wish list.

ETA: Oddly enough neither of my local library systems has The Battle for Spain, so I used a coupon to purchase a paperback copy for just under $10 from Amazon.

>71 rv1988: Thanks! I hope you enjoy Timbuktu if and when you get to it. I'll be very interested to read your reactions.

>73 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. Yes, Stalingrad is a long march through misery and cruelty, for sure. Made curious by your comment, I, too, went back and looked at my review of The Battle for Spain, which I wrote--holy cow!--14 years ago! Oh, for the good old days when I could effectively sum up a 500-page book in a couple of short paragraphs. :)

My post-Stalingrad "between book" reading went, via Stack 1, thisaway:

* “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” by Robert Browning in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Panama Champs Won Latin Loop Tourney” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink - Finished!
* "The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “The Orange Mare” by Hrant Matevosian from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* Suicide Letter of Shmuel Mordkhe Zygielbojm—May 11, 1943, London from Annual Gathering Commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 75th Anniversary, April 19, 2018 edited by Irena Klepfisz
* Day 7, Story 6 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “The Basques” by V.S. Pritchett from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

Now I've started Into China by Eileen Bigland. Bigland was an English writer who published travel memoirs in the 1930s, including this one about her journey into China with an ammunition convoy via the Burma Road bringing military supplies to the Chinese army during the relatively early days of the Japanese invasion.

Official Baseball Guide - 1963 Edition edited by C.C. Spink



Read as a "between book" (see first post). The wonderful but now defunct weekly publication, The Sporting News, used to publish these digest-sized guides each year during spring training. So, because this is the 1963 edition, is provides a compendium of the events, accomplishments and statistics of the 1962 baseball season. Not only does the publication encapsulate the 1962 Major League season, but every minor league season as well. It contains relatively long rundowns of the American League and National League 1962 seasons and the World Series as well. There is also a fairly detailed account of the AAA (the highest level of the minor leagues) playoffs. Also, the publication is sprinkled with very short (1 to 3 paragraphs) little stories about interesting in-game accomplishments or statistics. For example, we learn that Jerry Wild, pitching for the Billings Mustangs of the Class C Pioneer League, set a Pioneer League record by striking out 21 Pocatello Chiefs on August 21, 1962, breaking the mark of 20 that had been set in 1953 by Vern Kilburgh of the Ogden Reds.

Other than that, the publication provides standings tables and long lists of statistics for every minor league then in existence. In those days, there were a lot of leagues. For a hardcore baseball fan such as myself, it's kind of fun to peruse the standings and stats of, say, the Class B Northwest League, with six teams in places like Yakima, Eugene and Wenatchee. Because I was seven in 1962, when I scan the lists of batting averages and pitchers' won-lost records for a league like this, I occasionally come upon names of players who actually made it to the majors and whom I remember from my adolescence. But also the list of names opens up for me an endless opportunity for conjecture. So, for example, we have Nelson Gardner, who hit .315 with 22 home runs for the Dothan Phillies of the Class D Alabama-Florida League. What happened to him? A quick look at the online Baseball-Reference.com minor league encyclopedia reveals that 1962 was Gardner's first year in organized baseball. He was 19. Between the '62 and '63 seasons, Gardner got traded to the Washington Senators organization, who bumped him all the way up from D ball to the Class A Peninsula Senators of the Carolina League. Another promotion brought his to the Senators' AA affiliate, the York White Roses of the Eastern League. And then, at age 23, he was through. Although he never quite approached his excellent offensive stats in that first minor league season, in his fourth and final year, he hit a very respectable .273 with an on-base percentage of .363. So not a slugger, but a very respectable leadoff hitter type. Were the Senators just looking for power bats in the outfield, and so simply released him? Did he suffer a career-ending injury loading trucks in the off-season? Did a job open up in his uncle's business? Maybe he and his wife had their first child and decided they couldn't raise a family on a minor leaguer's salary. Maybe he just got tired of the ballplayer's life and decided to move on with his life. I'm pretty sure I'll never know!

With its list after list of player names and stats, his book offers trailheads to thousands of mysteries like this one, many that would provide even less to go on than our friend Nelson's.

Obviously . . . for baseball fans only.

We had a fun, NYC arts splurge over the long weekend. On Wednesday night we went to see Alicia Keys' amazing musical, Hell's Kitchen. Thursday might was Thanksgiving dinner, of course, with my wife's family on Long Island. Friday night we went to a NY Philharmonic concert. There was a short piece by contemporary composer Dai Fujikura called Entwine. Then an astounding young South Korean pianist named Yunchan Lim was the soloist for Chopin's Piano Concerto in F Minor, Op. 21, and finally an exhilarating performance of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2. Wow! I hadn't experienced a NY Philharmonic concert since my parents took me to one when I was a kid. Finally, last night we went up to Tarrytown in Westchester County, to meet my brother- and sister-in-law and their daughter for a first visit (for Steph and me) to an intimate jazz venue, the Jazz Forum Arts Club, to see the extraordinary singer, Jazzmeia Horn. Really fun, but, obviously, we can't do that every weekend! Tonight we'll stay home and catch up on "Shrinking," currently our favorite TV series.

That sounds like a perfect weekend!

>78 kidzdoc: It was. There was a lot of time on subways and commuter trains, but it was definitely worth it.

Into China by Eileen Bigland



I have a habit of, when reading short story anthologies, looking up each author as I read his/her story entry. So it was that when I read "Remembering Lee" in the collection The Third Ghost Book, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, I looked up the author of that story, Eileen Bigland, and found that she had been a well-known writer in England from the 1930s through the 60s, author of several travel memoirs, biographies and children's books. Intrigued, I went to Biblio and ordered Into China, Bigland's memoir of her journey into that country in 1938. China at that point had already been invaded by Japan, and the horrors of Nanking had already taken place. So Bigland, with a contract to write a travel memoir about China and several letters of introduction from relatively high up British department officials in hand, hitched a ride on a munitions convoy bringing arms into the country for the Chinese Army from Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar) over the perilous, mountainous Burma Road. She is, in fact, not on a truck but on a bus crammed with rifles and TNT, and only three other passengers, including the driver (at first). At first Bigland is only on the bus because it is her only way into China, what with the war and all. She has grand, romantic ideas about China, and she is feeding her wanderlust (her word). The war is not "her war," as the German invasion of Poland that opened the conflict in Europe has not occurred yet. But it doesn't take long for Bigland to start to see and empathize with the wartime hardships exacerbating the difficult lives of the peasant classes in the the cities and countryside both: starvation, disease, exposure, as well as the brutal working conditions endured by the "coolies" and the complete indifference to their lives and deaths by government officials and upper class (and even middle class) merchants and politicians. At the same time, Bigland becomes friends with the bus' driver and other passengers and quickly begins to admire them and cherish their friendships. The day to day details about life on the Burma Road, with it's many hazards, including frequent delays due to landslides, bus breakdowns and almost constant rain, the observations about the people she comes in contact with and the astounding physical beauty of the countryside (they are frequently looking down at dazzling river valleys from high up on this precarious mountain road) are quite well told, as are her interactions with her bus mates. At the end there is a harrowing description of her time in the southwest city of Chongqing (Chungking to her) under frequent, deadly Japanese bombing raids.

So the narrative is very interesting and well-written but there are drawbacks. Bigland is definitely looking at China through a European eye. And for all of her described sympathy and love for the country, frequently looking down at China. Her descriptions of social conditions often spring from an attitude of superiority. Her desire is to "touch the hem" of what she deems "the Chinese philosophy," which in her view is the patience and serenity the people display (or at least display to her) in the face of hardship. To her credit, her phrase "touch the hem" comes from her realization that she has no chance of fully understanding a philosophy that's been thousands of years in the developing via a couple of months in the country. But she has a somewhat maddening (at least to me) insistence of trying to figure out "the Chinese puzzle," and is frequently perplexed when the Chinese people she meets display the same sorts of contradictions, the same changing moods and attitudes, of any other humans she has come across. How do these contradictions fit into the "Chinese puzzle?" More like the "human puzzle," if you ask me. On the other hand, there are times when Bigland displays compassion, humanity and courage (including ducking under a bridge during a bombing raid to discover a badly wounded woman all alone and about to give birth and steadfastly stays to help deliver the baby) that allow us to forgive her some of her cultural weak spots (including, particularly appallingly, the occasional, casual use of the N-word) to a certain extent. Reactions to these factors may vary. While this memoir is in most places a fascinating account, it is also, most definitely, a period piece.

As Bigland gets deeper into China, she begins to tell us of her admiration for the accomplishments of Chiang Kai-shek, particularly for his efforts to unify the country. Her information on this subject is not particularly in-depth, as we can see from our own perspective. However, on the book's very last page, Bigland expresses her opinion that no matter how much Chiang might accomplish, in the end the Chinese people will have to rise up and free themselves. When she wrote Into China, Bigland has already published a memoir of her time traveling in Soviet Russia. The blurb on the back of my copy of Into China of this book, titled Laughing Odyssey,* tells us, in a quote attributed to the New York Times Book Review, "Eileen Bigland set out from troubled Europe to find in the Soviet Union the happiness of which her Russian grandmother had told her, from the old days. And astoundingly, as it may seem, she found it." Toward the end of Into China, a longtime friend she's run into in China tells her, "Don't try to put your Red ideas over on me." So who knows how much of her real thoughts along these lines Bigland had to keep out of her accounts here in order to placate her publisher (my copy is a second American edition, published by Macmillan), or how much her publisher took out during the editing phase. I couldn't find a single piece of biography about Bigland online, so I can't say for with any degree of surety what her actual attitudes were along these lines.

So, a mixed bag, I'd say, but in the reading I was always engaged, even when particular passages had me wincing. An historical note that not too long after Bigland traveled the Burma Road, the Japanese invaded Burma, closing off the highway for the duration of the war. By that time, of course, the war was raging around the world, and China had gone from being an isolated victim of aggression to a valiant foe of the Axis. The allies, therefore, organized an airlift over the mountains from India.

* Listed in only one LT library!

>80 rocketjk: An interesting find, Jerry. I'm intrigued, although perhaps not enough to track it down. I'm trying to read more Chinese history and my list of recommendations from Club Readers will keep me busy for years!

>80 rocketjk: Definitely sounds interesting in a primary source way. I wonder how her perspective on the power struggle within China would compare with that of another observer, the American Edgar Snow.
Enjoyed your review.

My post-Into China "between book" reading was another swing down Stack 1 alley, like so:

* “The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* "Joan of Arc” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* Five poems by Gevorg Emin from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “Introduction to Readings by Moishe Rosenfeld from Annual Gathering Commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 75th Anniversary, April 19, 2018 edited by Irena Klepfisz - Newly added
* Day 7, Story 7 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “Britain’s West Point” by John Masters from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

I've now started Omar Appears in Jerusalem by Egyptian author Najeeb Al-Kelani. Over the first 20 pages, the novel is shaping up as a fascinating fable-like story about life in Jerusalem just after the 1967 War (that's an extremely simplified description). Translated from Arabic.

Omar Appears in Jerusalem by Najeeb Al-Kelani



I found this slim volume in a fun bookstore in Philadelphia called The Book Trader and couldn't resist, as it looked fascinating. Its author, Najeeb Al-Kelani (1931-1995) (Najib Kilani as per the Wikipedia page about him), was born in Egypt and began his medical career there. He joined the Moslem Brotherhood while still in his teens and remained active in the organization throughout his life. He was arrested "more than once"* by the Abdul Nasser regime. In 1955 he was sentenced to ten years in jail, but was given a medical pardon and released after 40 months. He began his literary career while in prison. According to the mini-bio on the book's back cover, Kelani was the author of many Islamic novels, a member of the International League on Islamic Literature and winner of the Prize of the Higher Council of Arts and Literature in Egypt. Omar Appears in Jerusalem was evidently first published in 1970 (Kelani's introductory statement is dated that year). The English translation I purchased was published in 1986 by Dar Ibn Hazm, a publishing house and bookstore in Beirut. Their website seems quite active and up to date, so it seems they're still going strong. With luck they have survived the recent Israeli bombing attacks.

The book takes place in Jerusalem immediately after the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem during the 1967 war. Our narrator, never named, is pacing a road through the city, trying to clear his head from the despair and frustration of the defeat and new, oppressive, paradigm of Israeli rule. A sleep comes over him and he is awakened by a voice and a hand on his shoulder. He looks up at a figure who reveals himself to be Omar Ben Al-Khattab,** returned to the world. ("I thought you're the God's Messenger's Caliph." "It is so.") Omar has returned to life to assess the state of Islam and the causes and repercussions of the recent defeat to the forces of darkness. He quickly discerns that the root causes of the Palestinians' (and the greater Arab world's) weakness is their turning away from God and the teachings of the Quran, their seduction by the secular world and the false promises of individual freedom and material comfort.

I was hoping for a contemporary, realistic, picture of life in Palestinian Jerusalem during the early years of the Israeli occupation, infused with the magical realism inherent in the reappearance of a prophet assassinated over 1,300 years ago. This was not that, but instead, really, a religious tract proselytizing the urgency of a return to strict Islamic practice and the many advantages of that life. The Israelis, evil in almost cartoon-like fashion (I have no doubt the reality was bad enough, to put it mildly, but the exaggeration, for me, anyway, takes power away from the message), of course harass Omar and eventually arrest him, but anyone but the hardest-hearted interrogators and torturers coming into contact with Omar is soon moved and persuaded by the quiet power of his words and his peaceful, assured demeanor, including the beautiful young Israeli woman sent to seduce and shame him. Omar delivers repeated religious and philosophical speeches, and conversions are frequent.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that Kelani selected Omar as his message bearer for this book. As is discussed several times in the novel, Omar was a strong opponent of Mohammed during the first years of his rise to prominence, but underwent a dramatic conversion and eventually became the Prophet's right-hand man. It is this theme of conversion and/or return to the path of righteousness that predominates throughout. There's a lot of anti-Semitism on display in Kelani's writing. Not only an entirely understandable hatred of Israelis, but a condemnation of Jews as a whole as more or less a devil people. Betrayals by Jewish tribes in the 600s are brought up as if of contemporary importance, and at one point Omar wonders how Christians can have sympathy for the people who killed Christ.

So while I found Omar Appears in Jerusalem disappointing in several ways, sometimes made tedious by the thinness of the characters and the frequent repetition of themes, I found it fascinating as an Islamic religious, political and philosophical statement in the form of a fable. Whether it is in any way a period piece from 50 years ago, or would in fact not differ much from a similar contemporary publication, I have no idea.

The book suffers from a very amateurish translation. We're told on the title page that the work was done by the publishing house's translation department, and indeed the quality of the translation seems to vary chapter by chapter. There are errors of tense and syntax throughout, which are easily glossed over, but also the English vocabulary seems extremely limited. My conjecture is that there may have been quite a lot of power of Kelani's writing drained out of the work during the translation process. I can easily imagine that a small local publishing house would lack the funds to contract a more skilled Arabic/English translator, but that, too, is mere conjecture on my part. At any rate, a quick look at the publisher's website shows Omar Appears in Jerusalem to be out of print.

** "Umar ibn al-Khattab was the second caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate, ruling from 634 to 644 CE. He is known for his significant contributions to the expansion of the Islamic state and for establishing many administrative practices that shaped the future of the Islamic empire." (Again, Wikipedia.)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najib_Kilani

I've also finished by post-Omar Appears in Jerusalem "between book" reading, slip-sliding through Stack 2:

* “Ara the Beautiful” by Charles Parmiter (Time) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* “The Kabbalah and Modern Times” from Old Truths and New Cliches: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer edited by David Stromberg
* “Mr. Webster and Nullification” by H. J. Raymond from The Public and Private Life of Daniel Webster by General S. P. Lyman
* “Bob Turley” from Sweet Seasons: Recollections of the 1955-64 New York Yankees by Dom Forker
* Day 7, Story 8 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “Lucien of the Palace” by Lucius Beebe from Holiday Magazine, March, 1958

Now, since this has inadvertently become "The Year of the Doorstop" for me (two Prousts, Antony Beevor's history of the Battle of Stalingrad, two 450-page Isaac Singer novels), I've decided to finish up 2024 by finally reading Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.

>84 rocketjk: I was hoping for a contemporary, realistic, picture of life in Palestinian Jerusalem

I'm not entirely sure this is what you're looking for, but I plan to read the Children of the Ghetto trilogy by the famed and recently deceased Palestinian author Elias Khoury next year, starting with My Name Is Adam, which begins in the immediate aftermath of the Naqba when a group of Palestinians who were forcibly displaced from their homes were confined into a ghetto where they "endured thirst, hunger and terror."

>86 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. That trilogy does look very good. To be clear, I wasn't going out of my way to find an account of post-67 Jerusalem, but when I stumbled onto Omar in Jerusalem and became intrigued, that what I was hoping it would be. Now, though, I would like to read such an account, and I'll look into the Khoury. Thanks again.

>86 kidzdoc: One small correction, Elias Khoury is Lebanese, not Palestinian. But I do second your recommendation. My Name is Adam is a remarkable book.

>87 rocketjk: You're welcome, Jerry.

>88 RidgewayGirl: Thanks, Kay. I had forgotten that Khoury was Lebanese, not Palestinian.

>84 rocketjk: i think i’ll pass

>86 kidzdoc: >88 RidgewayGirl: Khoury sounds a lot better

>90 dchaikin: "i think I'll pass"

Sure, but to be clear, we are not the intended audience, to put it mildly. I doubt Kelani would care one fig what you or I thought of this book. Its success or failure in his eyes would have been figured via an entirely different calculus. I guess that's me being Captain Obvious again. :)

>85 rocketjk: I'll be very curious to hear what you think of Look Homeward, Angel. It's been on my shelf since a trip I took to Asheville, NC about a decade ago. Every review I've read has been pretty lackluster, and I keep considering just donating it without reading it. Curious to see if your review tips me one way or the other.

>92 japaul22: I'm enjoying it so far, though I'm only about 15 pages in. For what it's worth, while I was out walking around our NYC neighborhood today, doing a bit of shopping and such, with book in hand because I was also stopping for lunch, I decided to drop into a local tavern, just for the fun of being in a bar and watching a couple of plays of football on a cloudy, chilly Sunday afternoon. After bringing me my shot of Jameson, the bartender looked at my book on the bar and said, "Is that 'Look Homeward, Angel?'" I said, "Yes, have you read it?" She said, "Oh, yes. It's a huge favorite of mine." So there's one good review, anyway! I think there was a long period of time when Wolfe's type of writing was out of fashion, so maybe that's what sparked the negative reviews for a while. That's pure conjecture. My more or less fuzzy impression is that it's a good novel but somewhat over-written and/or self-indulgent on Wolfe's part. So I'm not expecting perfection. As long as I enjoy the writing style, I'll be OK.

>91 rocketjk: i’m not the intended audience of any book encouraging a call back to religion

>92 japaul22: >93 rocketjk: I read Look Homeward, Angel in my teens, loved it, and have always wanted to reread it.
However, I had a professor in university who insisted it was a book most enjoyed by those in their teens and early twenties, before life had taken hold as it were. This has made me somewhat reluctant to try it again in case my good memories of it are destroyed! I really should do it though.

>93 rocketjk: the 1001 books group just read it as a small group read. I've followed the reading of the two who commented on it for a long time so I trust their reviews. They both seemed to find things to love in it but have issues with certain sections. I will probably try it sometime next year.

>95 SassyLassy: Interesting! There is definitely a certain type of book that is best suited to the young. I will keep that point of view in mind whenever I get to it.

>96 japaul22: "They both seemed to find things to love in it but have issues with certain sections."

This is exactly what I'm expecting and in fact already finding, around 75 pages in.

I wish you and your loved ones a happy and blessed festive season.

Thanks! And you, too! I didn't post on your thread, but I very much enjoyed the news and photos of your recent vacation. All the best to you, and to all my CR pals, for a Happy Holiday season and a great New Year with lots of wonderful adventures, reading and otherwise.

Hi Jerry—finally catching up on your thread, and wishing you all good holidays and an auspicious new year (whatever that might look like). As always, lots of good reading and reviewing here.

>69 rocketjk: I'm also a bit leery of dogs-as-protagonists, but have had Timbuktu recommended to me so many times, and now your positive review, so I'll give it a shot sometime.

Hope when the weather gets a little less jaw-clenching, we can get together for brunch or a drink (or both)!

>100 lisapeet: Yes! We will definitely make that meet-up happen soon. We've finally got the heavy lifting of the unpacking/apartment setup behind us, or most of it, anyway, so there will likely be many more free afternoons coming up.