Devon Trevarrow Flaherty's Blog, page 43

Foot on the Gas

Well, I will have my first writing group Zoom on Wednesday. (Perhaps we were all enjoying being cut off from civilization for a while, but now we know we must connect in order to keep the group alive.) I have so much to report, though there are things I wish I could be saying.

Here’s the deal: my life has stayed somewhat the same under the Stay-at-Home Order. I was a home school mom and I still am (without co-op and with an additional, though self-sufficient, kid at home). I was a homemaker and I still am. (I have discovered that I clean for me as much as for any possible guests. I like a clean and tidy and aesthetic space.) I was a home cook and I still am (with the added responsibility of foraging, which is a precarious and enormous project that I center around every-other Friday). I was a laundress and I still am (though doing small loads most days has been lifesaving for me, a person who normally puts it all off for giant loads that then overwhelm and sink me). My husband is a nurse and works nights and weekends, which he still does (with the added stress of being on the Covid unit and all the precautions we have to take getting him home and decontaminated and being around him). I was a vocalist on the worship team and I still am. (We record with no one in the congregation under social distancing restrictions every Tuesday night with the same team over and over, so you could say my effort there has increased). What did I lose in “quarantine”? Driving. (That’s a real big one.) I had also just quit my part-time job as a personal shopper, right before this began. (What timing, huh?) And any sort of non-essential meetings, though actually a few of those have continued over Zoom, like my “book club,” yoga, and small group. Coffee dates with my girlfriends replaced with texting. Neighborhood walks have replaced going to the gym. Portal conversations have replaced dinner at Mom’s.

What I’m saying is, I’m not really over here laying around and binge-watching TV, bored and lazy. I have barely had the time to do two-thirds of a painting, and I managed two home projects by stopping school around spring break time. That said, I have seized many of the wandering minutes and made them count toward writing. I have managed to write three op-eds, one short story, and work on several more. And then I had a friend who announced one week, early on, that she had a piece coming out in the Washington Post and I thought, well maybe I should try that. Several submissions later, it’s true, I have nothing published by any major publications and one of the articles has died because it was timely and the time had passed. But I still feel good about starting to amass those rejection letters (and silences), because it means I am moving forward in a way that I haven’t for quite some time.

That is a lesson that I learned here: op-eds are timely. Articles, for the most part, too. My husband is right, I do have a lot of opinions, but writing editorials has that added dimension that I somehow didn’t anticipate. If the article doesn’t land somewhere one of the first several tries, it has to be put to sleep. Especially for some op-eds, they belong to a time and have had their say often before they have met an audience. For me, I have to change my mind-set if I’m going to keep writing, editing, and submitting my many opinions, because I really hate killing writing projects. Hate it! I’d rather drag out old stuff and completely re-work it rather than wave good-bye. In a book I read recently, it listed types of “deaths” we encounter in life, and one of them was “death of a long-term project.” It is a death, of the hope and the time spent working on it, of the dreams and intentions and the mental energy, and maybe even the emotions that are wrapped up in it.

Then again, as I mentioned earlier, submitting—even to rejection letters—is a way of moving forward. I have wished, for years, that I got in the habit of submitting as early as high school and definitely by the time I graduated college. Do I think I would have been rejected about a million times by now? You bet your bippy. Would that have stung? No doubt. But here is what I think a writer gains in submitting, even without an acceptance:

practice with the actual submission. Practice makes better, and the submission process is often daunting and sometimes subtle. There are a lot of particulars to navigate, plenty of tools to master, from how to format to how to hook and flatter.calluses. Writers have to have thick skin. I recommend paying little to no attention to reviews and the like, but if you’re submitting, you have to know if you have been green-lighted or—duh duh duh!—rejected. And since extremely rare is the story of an author getting published on the first try (in fact, it may not ever happen), thick skin is required to keep moving forward. We have all heard the stories of famous manuscripts that were rejected hundreds of times, sometimes saved from the slush pile by a pesky intern in the eleventh hour. Well folks, you are not the exception.time to step back and work on other projects. A well-edited story is the product of work and of stepping back. You need to have distance from a project to see it more clearly and do your best work, to kill your darlings and to edit properly. The submitting process slows everything down and creates pockets of time to return to or begin other things, lending space to everything in your current universe.humility. I don’t know if we really need humility as writers, but we definitely need it as human beings. Learning to work with others and to accept criticism and spin it into gold are both prime life skills. Also, if you want to be the kind of writer who has something honest to say, humility is a beautiful fruit that will shine through an empathy and naturalness of observation of humanity, right there in your writing. (And editors don’t prefer to work with prima donnas.)a system. Because if you’re going to be submitting, you will quickly discover you need to keep track of it all. And maybe you need a book to help, and a spreadsheet. Maybe you need envelopes and stamps, or just a more professional signature and photo on your email. Whatever. When I start pushing out my novel, later this year, it’ll be nice to have everything already organized.

I’m not saying that I enjoy the submissions process or that I find it fair. I am a writer, not a salesperson, and I remain pretty miserable at selling myself and my work. I also hate to take the time out of my already packed schedule to format and generate cover letters for even a short story. (This can take all afternoon!) And then, to know that without a name or a friend in the right position I’m likely to be rejected before anyone even reads one word of my actual manuscript! Yes, it’s frustrating. But if I want something, from an op-ed to a novel, published traditionally, I have to jump through the hoops, network, pay attention to detail, schmooze, edit, perfect, and—sigh—sell myself. (Even if I am going to self-publish, I have to do these things, but the rejection phase moves from the editors’ shoulders to the readers’.)

It feels good to have moved from the writing-in-secret stage I have been in, to the submissions stage. I continue writing and editing and expect my submissions spreadsheet to grow and grow: grow with rejections, sure, but also with new projects that I am pushing out there into the world with increasing care and experience, on a wing and a prayer (because all publication requires luck as well as hard work and talent), finding out which ones will sink and which ones will soar.

Book Review: Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

[image error]Since the next paragraph sounds derogatory, I’m going to give it to you straight here: I loved reading this book. Now…

I did not LOL. (I might have smirked.) This book was not a mystery. It was only half-satire. And it cheated with the epistolary form (as many epistolary novels do). It might have been elevated chick lit. Maybe not, though. In other words, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? has been accused of many things that I didn’t find it guilty of, or at least not fully.

This book popped up on my radar when the movie trailer did, some time in the past year. With Cate Blanchett at the helm, the idea and tone of the movie immediately appealed: sassy, artistic mother disappears after a career loss. Where did she go? It looked main-stream artsy/quirky and topically interesting—myself a 40-year old artist and mother who could find herself in a mid-life crisis at any moment. (For the review of the movie, see below.) I watched the movie, and within days my aunt was saying to me, “You know, the book is so much better. You bored during Covid? I’ll send you a copy.”

Now, I don’t like to disappoint people, so as soon as I was done reading The Martian Chronicles (which was an asked-for gift from my daughter), I picked up Bernadette, expecting it to take, what?, a week? It was sorta hefty at 326 pages and epistolary at that (which can take more work for the reader), but it also seemed like it would be “easy” or “light” reading, which it basically is. I couldn’t put it down for two days! And lest you imagine me during this stay-at-home order lolling about on the sofa binge-watching Netflix under a blanket of chip crumbs, I will tell you that I am still schooling one child, working from home, and managing a household while my husband still works full-time as a nurse. In the betweens and betwixes (which there admittedly are more of during this time), I glued this book to my forehead and read.

I wish I hadn’t seen the movie first, because then there would have been a whole lot more surprises. And this book is a page-turner, so you want to be surprised. But it’s not like an epic adventure, or anything. I kept turning the pages because I was involved with the characters and I could also smell tragedy around every corner. It was all so precarious. It was also done in a voice that was fun to be around: snarky, honest, smart, observant, discerning even, and a little funny. I felt like I was there, especially when I was hearing from Bernadette. She sounds like a curmudgeonly genius, which just happens to be someone I would want to hear from, especially since Bernadette is also so feminine and fiery and, well, super warm under her cold, wacky exterior.

There were a few flies in my ointment (besides feeling like I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying this book as much as I was). The “satire,” which in my mind as I read was “poking fun,” definitely hit some sore spots with me. I’m not from Seattle or the Northwest (or Canada), I didn’t go to boarding school, I’m not a tech-nerd, and while I am privileged enough, I just drooled over the lives of the elite at the Fox-Branch’s level. (My middle schooler wants to go to Antarctica, perhaps the most expensive place to go in the world? Book it for next week and let’s make sure we buy every item we take new and top-of-the-line!) But I am a Christian, I drive a Subaru, my children went to a small Montessori charter school, and I was involved in a 12-step program for years. While some of the satire about people like me was still funny, I thought she was off on the Christians and the 12-step groups. I mean, American, middle-class Christianity as well as 12-step groups bring a lot of joy, purpose, and meaning to people’s lives. Do they have dimensions worth criticizing and/or making fun of? Of course. But all the Christians in the book were phony as bologna, intense, and mean, while the 12-steppers were bizarre beyond belief. So, lost opportunity there and I was mildly offended.

As for the perspective of this novel, it’s certainly worth talking about. As I said, the book is epistolary, and it’s difficult to make epistolary work. In this case, it was done well, and at times you forget that it’s just a packet of documents that you are reading. However, you forget because many of the documents don’t read at all like documents, but like a novel. Hmm. No one in the world flings back emails with that much detail and dialogue in them. And sometimes the information in these “documents” verges on the absurd. Then again, if you just let go and remember that you are, in fact, reading a novel and that the author was not giving you actual documents but telling a story in an interesting way, it was much more enjoyable. But it was sometimes distracting. It was also occasionally distracting to me that they story was being told through a teen. At first, I thought maybe this novel would be good YA reading because of it, but no way: this is a very adult novel. And not because of the content (though there are some adult themes), but because this book really speaks to people just like Bernadette and Elgie and maybe Audrey and Soo-Lin: middle-aged and with children. Their problems, their victories, their experiences… and it was just a little awkward to expect a teen (even a precarious, genius teen) to be the one to present it to the audience.

In the end, I found Where’d You Go, Bernadette? to be less funny, and more insightful, engaging, and even sad in a human-experience way. It was honest, even though sometimes almost slap-stick, and I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and Bernadette. I loved this book. The characters were simultaneously larger-than-life and super-real. Some of the language is beautiful and almost all of it is witty. I really found the currents of it relatable, even subtle and compassionate, and the story fun to read. I can imagine myself reading it again.

QUOTES

“Do you get seasick? People who don’t get seasick have no idea what it’s like. It’s not just nausea. It’s nausea plus losing the will to live” (p35-36).

“So I have no choice but to cowboy up and not make this all about me” (p38).

“Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to  make life interesting, the better off you’ll be” (44).

“This guy was proving resistant to my many charms, or else I am without charms, which is probably the case” (p61).

“This is why I didn’t want her to come to the first grade elephant dance. Because the most random things get her way too full of love” (p81).

“’I love you, Bee,’ Mom said. ‘I’m trying. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t’” (p82).

“There was a terrifying chasm between the woman I fell in love with and the ungovernable one sitting across from me” (p97).

“The only thing you can blame Elgie for is he makes life look so damn simple: do what you love. In his case, that means working, spending time with his family, and reading presidential biographies” (p130).

“Inside me roiled something so terrible that God knew he had to keep my baby alive, or this torrent within me would be unleashed on the universe” (p131).

“That’s what happened to me, in Seattle. Come at me, even in love, and I’ll scratch the hell out of you” (p136).

“I’d rather ruin her with the truth than ruin her with lies” (p243).

“Dad pointed to himself. ‘What you are looking at is me ignoring you. That’s what the experts told me to do, so that’s what I’m doing’” (p263).

“It was just me and time” (p268).

“’There’s a saying,’ Dad said. ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’” (p272).

“By definition, nobody lets an accident happen” (p273).

“…if Antarctica could talk, it would be saying only one thing: you don’t belong here” (p277).

“They were so haunting and majestic you could feel your heart break, but really they’re just chunks of ice and they mean nothing” (p280).

“She was an artist who had stopped creating. I should have done everything I could to get her back” (p288).

“When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins” (p293).

“(This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb)” (p314).

“Why I’m even mentioning this, I guess it’s to say that I let you down in a hundred different ways. Did I say a hundred? A thousand is more like it” (p316).

“Really, who wants to admit to her daughter that she was once considered the most promising architect in the country but now devotes her celebrated genius to maligning the driver in front of her for having Idaho plates?” (p316).

“But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I’m about to kick the shit out of life” (p317).

“My body gave a little jolt. Here was a woman who took can-do to an whole new exciting level” (p322).

“I’m an Antarctic 10, a boat ride away from being a 5” (p324).

“I’m not your best friend. I’m your mother. As your mother, I have two proclamations” (p325).

[image error]BONUS: SHORT STORY REVIEW: DEAR MOUNTAIN ROOM PARENTS

In the Reading Group Guide at the end of the book, Semple (or her publishers) slid in a short story. The story first appeared in The New Yorker in 2011, before the book was published. It has a very similar tone and even subject matter to Bernadette. (Definitely could have happened at Galer Street School). I imagine it’s a forerunner to Bernadette. At any rate, I read it, and I’m glad I did. It’s short. It’s funny. It speaks to experiences that I have been through. And I recommend it. That’s all.

[image error]MOVIE

As mentioned above, I watched Where’d You Go, Bernadette? before reading it, because I initially had no intention of reading it. Let’s just put it out there: it gets mixed reviews and generally they’re very much in the middle. I do agree with my aunt that they book is much better. If you think the book isn’t very mysterious, the movie is even less-so. They did skirt right around the most heart-breaking part of the book, which is all nice for general audiences, and I can see the issues of going from epistolary to big screen, and I think they handled that pretty well (except you know from the first scene exactly where Bernadette is). I think the acting is exemplary and the overall mood of the movie is right up my alley. But overall, I’m with everyone else. Ehn. Fine.

Best Books: Short Stories and Short Story Collections

I really believe, this time, that this is the last reading list I am going to give you. It’s just that I recently read a short story collection (The Martian Chronicles, which snuck in there as a “novel,” just like Olive Kitteridge), and it got me thinking that I didn’t have any short stories on my TBR and only one short story recommend on the Recommended Reading page. There are some short story collections on the general reading list, but not for quite some time. I don’t come across them, naturally, too often. However, my writing group is full of short story writers (and I, in fact, write shorts now and again, interspersing my novel-writing time). At our writing meetings, we open up by sharing what we are writing and what we are reading. Most of the other writers are forever reading short story collections, which makes sense because they are short story writers. However, I think that I must have had some bad experiences with short stories. Okay, so I know I have. It’s those darned literary journals! (Not all of them, but some of them strike me as trying too hard, trying to be weird and unconventional and shocking.) And then coupled with the short stories that they make you read in high school. I dunno’. There’s something about short stories that often strikes me as unnecessarily falutin’. And there is also something I love about the pacing of a novel and how deep you can go in the story and the characters.

At any rate, I do appreciate a great short story and so, I’m sure, do many of you. So, for the last time, I will warn you that I am not recommending these stories or books. I have not read the vast majority of them. I found lists of recommendations on the internet and squished several of those together to make one big list of short story TBRs and short story collections TBRs. It will be interesting, over time, to see if I can find the stories individually, or if I will need to buy (or check out from the library) collections in order to read the one story. It will also be interesting to see how many short stories are IN the recommended collections. Certainly, there are many authors who are repeated on the two lists.

SHORT STORIES

“The Tribute,” Jane Gardham
“The Stone Boy,” Gina Barriault
“The Love of a Good Woman,” Alice Munro
“The Siren,” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
“A Simple Heart,” Gustave Flaubert
“Friends,” Grace Paley
“My Life,” Anton Chekov
“In the Night,” Jamaica Kincaid
“Music at Annahullion,” Eugene McCabe
“Werner,” Jo Ann Beard
“The Signal Man,” Charles Dickens
“The Magic Shop,” H.G. Wells
“The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry
“Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving
“The Body Snatcher,” Robert Louis Stephenson
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gillman
“B24,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“Lamb to the Slaughter,” Roald Dahl
“The Window Theater,” Ilse Aichinger
“The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Ambrose Bierce
“After Rain,” William Trevor
“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” William H. Gass
“American Express,” James Salter
“Paradise,” Edna O’Brien
“Hands,” Sherwood Anderson
“Let It Snow,” David Sedaris
“The Distance of the Moon,” Italo Calvino
“Civil Peace,” Chinua Achebe
“In a Bamboo Grove,” Ryunosuke Akutagawa
“Happy Endings,” Margaret Atwood
“Going to Meet the Man,” James Baldwin
“Godspeed and Perpetua,” A. Igoni Barrett
“I Bought a Little City,” Donald Barthelme
“The Night Driver,” Italo Calvino
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” Raymond Carver
“The Swimmer,” John Cheever
“Desiree’s Baby,” Kate Chopin
“The Landlady,” Roald Dahl
“The Outing,” Lydia Davis
“Private Tuition,” Brose and Desai
“Don’t Look Now,” Daphne du Maurier
“A View from the Observatory,” Helen Dunmore
“Glittering City,” Cyprian Ekwensi
“In Plain Sight,” Mavis Gallant
“The Nose,” Nikolai Gogol
“The Midnight Zone,” Lauren Groff
“How to Become a Writer,” Lorrie Moore
“Cat Person,” Kristen Roupenian
“Cathedral,” Raymond Carver
“Sticks,” George Saunders
“The Veldt,” Ray Bradbury
“Flowers for Algernon,” Daniel Keyes
“Funny Little Snakes,” Tessa Hadley
Alan Bean Plus Four,” Tom Hanks
“Big Two-Hearted River,” Ernest Hemingway
“The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson
“The Superstition of Albatross,” Daisy Johnson
“The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” Denis Johnson
“Araby,” James Joyce
“What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?,” Etgar Keret
“The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Katherine Mansfield
“A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.,” Carson McCullers
“Butterflies,” Ian McEwan
“Going to Meet the Man,” James Baldwin
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges
“This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Tadeusz Borowski
“The Company of Wolves,” Angela Carter
“Why Don’t You Dance?,” Raymond Carver
“The Country Husband,” John Cheever
“An Outpost of Progress,” Joseph Conrad
“Twilight of the Superheroes,” Deborah Eisenberg
“In the Tunnel,” Mavis Gallant
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gillman
“The Overcoat,” Nokolai Gogol
“Six Feet of the Country,” Nadine Gordimer
“Big Two-Hearted River,” Ernest Hemingway
“A Village After Dark,” Kazuo Ishiguro
“The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson
“Emergency,” Denis Johnson
“Bettering Myself,” Ottessa Moshfegh
“The Elephant,” Slawomir Mrozek
“Runaway,” Alice Munro
“The Elephant Vanishes,” Haruki Murakami
“Symbols and Signs,” Vladimir Nabokov
“A Horse and Two Goats,” R.K. Narayan
“Over the River and Through the Wood,” John O’Hara
“if a book is locked, there’s probably a good reason for that, don’t you think,” Helen Oyeyemi
“Trilobites,” Breece D’J Pancake
“A Telephone Call,” Dorothy Parker
“Vampire,” Intan Paramaditha
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins-Gilman
“The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe
“Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” Karen Russell
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” J.D. Salinger
“The Beholder,” Ali Smith
“Moonlit Landscape with Bridge,” Zadie Smith
“Remember This,” Graham Swift
“Minutes of Glory,” Ngugi was Thiong’o
“A Conversation About Bread,” Nafissa Thompson-Spires
“Elspeth’s Boyfriend,” Irvine Welsh
“The Happy Prince,” Oscar Wilde
“Bee Honey,” Banana Yoshimoto
“A Bright Green Field,” Anna Kavan
“Extra,” Yiyun Li
“The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado
“Madame Tellier’s House,” Guy de Maupassant
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
“We Didn’t Like Him,” Akhil Sharma
“Heads of the Colored People,” Nafissa Thompson-Spires
“Smote,” Eley Williams
“The Flints of Memory Lane,” Neil Gaiman
“The Pig,” Roald Dahl
“To Build a Fire,” Jack London
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Mark Twain
“The Lady with a Dog,” Anton Chekov
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe
“The Dead,” James Joyce
“In the Penal Colony,” Franz Kafka
“A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner
“Vanka,” Anton Chekov
“Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?,” Joyce Carol Oates
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” Rudyard Kipling
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway
Bartleby, The Scrivener, Herman Melville
“A Jury of Her Peers,” Susan Glaspell
“The Most Dangerous Game,” Richard Connell
“The Rocking-Horse Winner,” D.H. Lawrence
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” James Thurber
“A Christmas Tree and a Wedding,” Fyodor Dostoevsky
“A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty
“A Bottle of Perrier,” Edith Wharton

 

SHORT STORY COMPILATIONS AND ANTHOLOGIES

A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin[image error]
Blow-Up and Other Stories, Julio Cortazar
Drifting House, Krys Lee
Dubliners, James Joyce
Everything’s Eventual, Stephen King
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
Florida, Lauren Groff
Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
Kiss Kiss, Roald Dahl
Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction
Ghostly Writes Anthology 2018
The Scribner Anthology of Comparatively Short Fiction
The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction
Champions: An Anthology of Winning Fantasy Stories
The Norton Anthology of American Literature
Glimpses: An Anthology of 16 Short Fantasy Stories
Literature: A Portable Anthology[image error]
Apothecary: Fantasy Anthology
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Runaway, Alice Munro
Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Collected Stories of Grace Paley
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
The Essential Tales of Chekov
The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Youngest Doll, Rosario Ferre
The Safety of Objects, A.M. Homes
American Housewife, Helen Ellis
Awayland, Ramona Ausubel
Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang[image error]
The King is Always Above the People, Daniel Alarcon
After the Quake, Haruki Murakami
Arrival, Ted Chiang
The Boat, Nam Lee
Tenth of December, George Saunders
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, Etgar Keret
What Is Not Yours Is Yours, Helen Oyeyemi
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enriquez
The Bed Moved, Rebecca Schiff
This Is How You Lose Here, Junot Diaz
Dear Life, Alice Munro
Lovers on All Saints’ Day, Juan Gabriel Vasquez
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Mona Awad
Alligator and Other Stories, Dima Alzayat[image error]
A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, Daniel Mason
Exhalation, Ted Chiang
Salt Slow, Julia Armfield
Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine
Civilwarland in Bad Decline, George Saunders
Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Edgar Allan Poe
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs
The Not-Dead and the Saved, Kate Clanchy
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Grand Union, Zadie Smith
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian
There Are Little Kingdoms, Kevin Barry
The Garden Party and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield[image error]
The Love Object, Edna O’Brien
The Awakening and Other Stories, Kate Chopin
Attrib. and Other Stories, Eley Williams
The Avid House, Irvine Welsh
The Nick Adams Stories, Ernest Hemingway
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
Madame Zero, Sarah Hall
First Love Last Rights, Ian McEwan
The Moons of Jupiter, Alice Munro
Heathcliff Redux, Lily Tuck
Best American Short Stories 2018
Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Deborah Eisenberg
Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, Sylvia Plath
The Human Comedy, Honore de Balzac
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol 1[image error]
The Soho Press Book of 80s Short Fiction
Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Jincy Willett
Delicate Edible Birds, Lauren Groff
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel
Drifting House, Krys Lee
Open Secrets, Alice Munro
Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff
Behind the Short Story, Van Cleave and Pierce
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
The Collected Tales, Nicolai Gogol
The Secret Self, Hermione Lee
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link

[image error]
Airships, Barry Hannah
Rennai Shosetsushu’s Collected Love Stories, Sachiko Kishimoto
Will You Be Quiet, Please?, Raymond Carver
Runaway, Alice Munro
The Garden Party and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield
Pulse, Julian Barnes
The Collected Stories, Lorrie Moore
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
That Glimpse of Truth, David Miller

Book Review: The Martian Chronicles

[image error]It is interesting, beginning any book. You don’t quite feel like you belong, you’re not sure if you’re speaking the right language. And where are you, anyways? What’s going on? Some books invite you in pretty quickly. Other books take a long time to acclimate to, sometimes so long that you give up on them before you’ve acclimatized. Some books take more work to figure out, to get your bearings, and some of those end up being worth the work.

This book took a little while to figure out, and there’s a reason for that. It wasn’t the language. It started with the setting. As with most speculative fiction, you’ve got to figure out where you are in time, get a picture in your head of a place you’ve never seen, and understand the rules of the world. With The Martian Chronicles, there is a further issue with getting oriented. You read the beginning of the first chapter, and you think you’ve got it. Then you realize, nope, you’re starting over again for the second chapter. And then you think you have it again… and that keeps happening, until you figure out how to read this book. Then you get it, but you also realize you’re going to have to keep figuring things out all through the book. It’s okay, though, because the experience is rewarding.

It might help to know the origin of this book before you begin. (Then again, I think feeling my way through it without the information I’m about to give you was kinda’ better. Whatever.)  It is a novel in short stories. It didn’t even begin as a novel at all, but there were chapters added to make the short stories fit together as a sort of experimental novel. There is not an antagonist or protagonist, either, unless you consider the noble and the depraved sides of humanity to be those things. Humanity is our main character, Martians are the other character, and maybe the planets are two other characters. At any rate, don’t expect to stay with whom you meet in the first chapter. (There are a couple people who do return in later stories, but for the most part, they represent characters against a much bigger backdrop of what is happening in human history.)

What is happening? It is around the year 2000 (as seen from a publication of 1950) and Earthlings are exploring Mars in preparation for colonizing it, and doing so quickly. Expeditions fail, but then there’s a twist (I won’t tell you what), and later expeditions succeed. However, an event on Earth recalls most of the Earthling colonists back and destroys most of the population, leaving the end with a tragic and yet hopeful ending true to much science fiction. Only two chapters (or stories) take place on Earth. The rest are on a Mars which we know is completely fictional (as it has a very established civilization and is livable as-is for humans. But that’s not the point.) It’s replete with the classics: telepathy, robots, rocket travel, alien civilizations, mind tricks, and some unique things too, like a story-book brought to life or the emancipation of the Jim Crow South. The real deal about this book is its exploration of humanity and its qualities, its foibles. Greed, revenge, hope, hate, resilience, preservation, high morality… there are a lot of facets of humanity laid bare here. And it really poses the question: what will destroy us? Hint: it’s not the elements or the Martians.

I really enjoyed reading this book. The language was surprisingly beautiful for a book of sci-fi and the insight, fascinating. The stories kept me guessing and had me whipping around like a roller coaster ride. There were some amazing little stories in this book. Ray Bradbury is a master, and I do think that the stories fit together into a really interesting novel, as an unconventional novel. Don’t expect any chapter to be like the one before it. There was only one thing that happened that made me lose my concentration because it was too unbelievable. (I know that nothing, on the surface, is believable in this book, but his observation of people is astute, and I think he missed the mark with one major event, perhaps to make the stories fit.) There was also a little bit the laughable way that Bradbury saw the twenty-first century and how he couldn’t see past some of the details: we’re all still wearing suits and dresses and talking on land lines in a cadence that we left behind decades ago. But that’s not a problem really, as it makes more to think about as you read.

You could read this book as short stories: my daughter was assigned one in her high school English class a few months ago. But I enjoyed it as a novel, and if you are open to someone playing with the novel form, then I recommend that you pick this one up and enjoy it for what it is: a sci-fi classic written by a master.

THE AUTHOR

Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous authors (written and screen) of our time. He wrote science fiction, fantasy and horror from the turn of the last century into the beginning of this one, and his works include Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine.

MOVIES

There do not seem to be any screen versions of the book worth tracking down and watching. There could be, but there isn’t.

QUOTES

“I hate this feeling of thinking of doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer?” (p91).

“Can one man be right, while all the world thinks they are right?” (p91).

“And this disease was called the Loneliness, because when you saw your hometown dwindle the size of your fist and then lemon-size and then then pin-size and vanish in the fire-wake, you felt you had never been born…” (p96).

“But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound” (p97).

“…he imagined the seeds he had placed today sprouting up with green and taking hold on the sky, pushing out branch after branch, until Mars was an afternoon forest, Mars was a shining orchard” (p97).

“Don’t ask it to be nothing else but what it is” (p105).

“There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands” (p110).

“Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett” (p156).

“The words on the radio and that green star were one and the same” (p175).

“Space was an anesthetic; seventy million miles of space numbed you, put memory to sleep, depopulated Earth, erased the past, and allowed these people here to go on with their work” (p192).

“The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs” (p226).

“Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!” (p227).

Best Books: Philosophy and Classics

I wasn’t going to make a best books list for philosophy or for classics, but then I received a comment on my last best books list (religion and Christianity) that got me thinking. Philosophy books and classics—genres that I have read a lot of—were included in the very first best books list that I did, the comprehensive one that goes for thousands of titles down the main page. But, since they’re basically the only sub-categories that I didn’t then parse out, I thought it would be easiest for browsers to have them as separate lists.

(I’ve also decided, thanks in part to my writers’ group—full of short story writers who are always chatting about short fiction—that I am going to make a list for short stories and short story collections. I’ll post that in the next few days, and I can’t imagine there will be any more, with the exception of movies, but that’s not a best books list.)

There’s not too much to say about these two lists. Just remember, I am not recommending these books: they are lists compiled from other online lists of books in the genre. I would like to read them, and as I do, you can find links to the reviews by clicking on those titles.

This philosophy list got really long, really quick. It’s so long that I can’t imagine I’ll even get through them all. (I will have some fun times trying, however.) Some of the books are about philosophy, like histories of philosophy, and a handful are anthologies. There are even some novels that popped up on here, and there are several titles that, should you know the genre, you might think, “That’s not even philosophy.” Well, when I get there, hopefully it’ll at least be an interesting read. I was looking for the traditional philosophy books, yes, but I was also looking for more. And I included books from many branches of philosophy, like ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, logic, etc, including practical and modern philosophy. I fear some titles from religion and psychology might have slipped in there. There are most definitely misspellings, repeats, and no end of non-italicizing.

PHILOSOPHY

A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder[image error]
Philosophy As a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot
Aristotle’s Way, Edith Hall
What Does It All Mean?, Thomas Nagel
The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Julian Baggini
Think, Simon Blackburn
The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer
Justice, Michael Sandel
Causing Death and Saving Lives, Jonathan Glover
The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits
The Last Days of Socrates, Plato
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, Epictetus
Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
Three Philosophical Dialogues, Anselm of Canterbury
Selected Writings, Thomas Aquinas
Meditation on First Philosophy, Renee Descartes[image error]
Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Republic, Plato
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
World As Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Being and Nothing, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne
The Dialogues of Plato
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume[image error]
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
The Four Agreements, Ruiz and Mills
The Book of Joy, Dalai Lama and Tutu
The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
The Path, Puett and Gross-Loh
How to Live, Sarah Bakewell
The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan W. Watts
The Art of Strategy, Dixit and Nalebuff
Flow, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi
Five Dialogues, Plato
Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi
An Eternal Golden Braid, Godel, Escher and Bach
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus[image error]
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
The Big Picture, Sean Carroll
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
The Moral Sayings, Publius Syrus
Fragments, Heraclitus
Nature and Selected Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer
The Essential Epicurus, Epicurus
On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
Ethics, Benedict de Spinoza
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
Everything Is F*cked, Mark Manson
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
Reasons and Persons, David Parfit
The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell[image error]
On Liberty, John Mill
The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant
Logic Primer, Allan and Hand
Logic, Wilfrid Hodges
Paradoxes, R.M. Sainsbury
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius
Analects, Confucius
Early Greek Philosophy, Heraclitus
Pensees, Blaise Pascal
The Gay Science, Friedrich Neitzsche
300 Arguments, Sarah Manguso
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Factfulness, Hans Rosling
The Veil of Isis, Pierre Hadot[image error]
The Way and the Word, Lloyd and Sivin
The Lost Age of Reason, Jonardon Ganeri
Atoms and Alchemy, William Newman
Native Pragmatism, Scott L. Pratt
Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett
Principles of Psychology, William James
Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith
Socrates in Love, Armand D’Angor
The Complete Philosophy Files, Stephen Law
Basic Writings, Chuang Tzu
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
Diaspora, Greg Egan
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Early Writings, Karl Marx
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls[image error]
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, G.A. Cohen
Violence and the Word, Robert Cover
The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin
A Guide to the Good Life, Robert B. Irvine
Existentialism, David Cooper
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Existentialist Reader, Paul S. MacDonald
Phenemology of Spirit, Hegel
The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
Understanding Philosophy of Science, James Ladyman
Candide, Voltaire
A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D.M. Armstrong
Varieties of Meaning, Ruth Garrett Millikan
A Survey of Metaphysics, E.J. Lowe[image error]
Art, Clive Bell
Aesthetics, Monroe Beardsley
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Mengzi
Zhuangzi
The Bodhicaryavatara, Santideva
Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy Bauermeister
Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith
Evil Men, James Dawes
Down Girl, Kate Manne
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Making Sense of Human Rights, James Nickel[image error]
The Idea of Natural Rights, Brian Tierney
The Law of Peoples, John Rawls
On Human Rights, James Griffin
The Crisis of the European Mind, Paul Hazard
The Enlightenment in America, Henry May
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Dimitri Gutas
Practical Ethics, Peter Singer
80,000 Hours, Benjamin Todd
Destined for War, Graham Allison
Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
Descartes’ Error, Antonio Demasio
The Really Hard Problem, Owen Flannagan
The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubormirsky
The Complete Text, Xunzi
The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, Solomon and Higgins
All About Love, Bell Hooks[image error]
The Symposium, Plato
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot
Heartificial Intelligence, John Havens
The Technological Singularity, Murray Shanahan
Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neill
Moral Machines, Wallach and Allen
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Elbow Room, Daniel C. Dennett
Four Views of Free Will, Fischer, Kane, Pereboom and Vargas
In Our Prime, Patricia Cohen
Moral Questions, Thomas Nagel
Utilitarianism, For and Against, Smart and Williams
The Skeptical Feminist, Janet Radcliffe Richards[image error]
The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege
Naming and Necessity, Saul A. Kripke
The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt
The Forest People, Colin M. Turnbull
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Animal Machines, Ruth Harrison
Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
In the Name of Eugenics, Daniel Kevles
The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kuhl
Eugenic Nation, Alexandra Minna Stern
Heredity and Hope, Ruth Schwartz Cohen
Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Killing in War, Jeff McMahan[image error]
A Theory of the Drone, Gregoire Chamayou
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
The Language of Genes, Steve Jones
The Ordeal of Integration, Orlando Patterson
The Ethics of Identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Annotated Alice, Carroll and Gardner
The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides
Winnetou, Karl May
Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace
Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle
Tiny Life, Julian Dibbel
Lying, Paul J. Griffiths
How to Think About Weird Things, Schick and Vaughn
Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
The Women’s Room, Marilyn French[image error]
The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi
Wetland, Charlotte Roche
Pragmatism, William James
Down and Out in London and Paris, George Orwell
Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy
An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
Tweets from Tahrir, Nunns and Idle
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David S. Landes
On Art and Life, John Rushkin
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett
Fault Lines, Raghuram G. Rajan
Chavs, Owen Jones
Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle
Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel[image error]
How to Use Your Eyes, James Elkins
An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
Flim-Flam!, James Randi
The Psychology of Superstition, Gustav Jahoda
Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer
Spook, Mary Roach
The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menard
The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
The Warrior Within, Bruce Lee
Philosophy in Seven Sentences, Douglas Groothuis
Seeking Wisdom, Peter Bevelin
The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
The Principia , Isaac Newton
The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley
Exact Thinking in Demented Times, Karl Sigmund
Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, Simon Critchley[image error]
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
As If, Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Meaning of Life, Klemke and Cahn
The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (anthology)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, George Muntau
The Nature of Consciousness, Rupert Spira
The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir
How Philosophy Works, DK
The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottleib
I Am Not a Brain, Markus Gabriel
The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan W. Watts
To Fight Against the Age, Rob Rieman
After the Natural Law, John Lawrence Hill
Aesthetics II, Dietrich von Hildebrand
Big Ideas for Curious Minds, Anonymous
The Coherence of Theism, Richard Swinburne[image error]
Philosophy Here and Now, Lewis Vaughn
Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sam Chase
An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, Roy W. Perrett
A Critical History of Western Philosophy, Stace W.T.
Wisdom from Ancient Greek Philosophy, George Tanner
The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant
The Stone Reader, Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments
The Critical Thinking Toolkit, Wiley Blackwell
Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Brownstein and Saul
Stolen Legacy, George G.M. James
Phenemology, Dan Zahavi
Seeing Through the World, Jeremy D. Johnson
Socrates’ Children, Peter Kreeft

Making the following list, I realized that classics are the genre that I read the most. By far, really. I also realized that it can be a little difficult to define a classic (especially the when about it), and that there are so very many of them. Some of the books below, I was surprised by because I hadn’t heard of them, which begs the question, can they be a classic then? And then there was also the issue of I’m sure I missed some. There were a dozen that crossed my mind as I made the list, and I just popped those on there for you. You could always go to my Recommended Reading page and see what classics I have included there. It is a much shorter list. Also, there are plenty of children’s classics included on the children’s list.

CLASSICS

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain[image error]
Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Odyssey, Homer
To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee
1984 , George Orwell
The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
I Capture the Castle , Dodie Smith[image error]
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Animal Farm , George Orwell
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Duman
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Lorna Doone, R.D. Blackmoore
Jamaica Inn, Daphne du Maurier
Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Moonfleet, J. Meade Falkner
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickenson
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy[image error]
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Lewis Carroll
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carre
Anne of Green Gables , L.M. Montgomery
The Children of the New Forest, Frederick Marryat
Heidi, Johanna Spyri
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Fahrenheit 451 , Ray Bradbury
The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
Bitter Lemons, Laurence Durrell
Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowatt[image error]
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
Travels with a Donkey, Robert Louis Stevenson
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
19 Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , Anne Bronte
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
Scarlet and Black, Stendhal
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad[image error]
Tristam Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Emma, Jane Austen
Eugenie Grandet, Honore de Balzac
The Old Wive’s Tale, Arnold Bennett
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
The Outsider, Albert Camus
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Stories, Anton Chekov
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe[image error]
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Sybil , Benjamin Disraeli
Berlin Alexander-Platz, Alfred Doblin
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Adam Bede, George Eliot
The Sound and the Fury , William Faulkner
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskill
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
New Grub Street, George Gissing
The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck[image error]
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
The Old Man and the Sea , Ernest Hemingway
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Going Solo, Roald Dahl
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Brave New World , Aldous Huxley
The Book of Khalid, Ameen Rihani[image error]
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkein
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
Lolita, Vladimir Nobokov
A Wrinkle in Time , in Madeleine L’Engle
The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grimm
Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine l’Engle
Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh[image error]
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
West with the Night, Beryl Markham
The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Stoner, John Willaims
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Mambo King Plays Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez[image error]
Wide Sargasso Sea , Jean Rhys
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann
The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe[image error]
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Iliad, Homer
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope
Another Country, James Baldwin
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Roald Dahl
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
Diary of a Nobody, The Grossmiths
Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy
The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni
Orland, Virginia Woolf
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
The Art of War, Sun-Tzu[image error]
The Forsythe Saga, John Galsworthy
Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
Staying On, Paul Scott
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
A Christmas Carol , Charles Dickens
Silas Marner, George Eliot
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The Castle, Franz Kafka
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie[image error]
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Heart of Darkness, John Conrad
Suite Francaise, Irene Nemerovsky
What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
White Nights, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Hard Times, Charles Dickens

Book Review: A Christmas Carol

[image error]I am aware that it is not the time of year to be reviewing a Christmas book. It’s not even Christmas in July! But I was looking over something on The Starving Artist and it reminded me of how I took my own recommendation and read A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, this past holiday season. And then it occurred to me that I never reviewed it and that I didn’t even slot it on the list of to-be-reviewed. And I was like, hey! That’s not fair! I read it, I should get credit.

It was one of those things that I did off-handedly, probably in the middle of reading another book, which might be why it got dropped inadvertently from the reviews. A Christmas Carol is short, a quick read. It really is meant to be snuggled up with as Christmas approaches, or read aloud to your children or grandchildren. It has translated well to theater and the screen, as well, so not so many people read the (original) book anymore. It has also become a part of our culture, a part of many of our Christmas traditions and even the language and observation of Christmas.

Do I need to tell you what it is about? Just in case: Ebenezer Scrooge is a tight-fisted, tight-hearted older man in Victorian England. He has an employee, a light-hearted, kind man named Bob Cratchit, who Scrooge treats with both economic and emotional miserliness. Bob has a lovely family and a son who walks with a crutch and is small and weak. There is also Ebenezer’s nephew, who plays a part in the unfolding of the story. At any rate, Ebenezer goes home on Christmas Eve—bah-humbugging all the way—to his dark, dank existence, and goes to bed, only to be visited by a succession of ghostly apparitions. (An old business partner, and of course the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.) The things Ebenezer sees and learns, from his own childhood and lost love to deaths that wait right around the corner, become successively more disturbing, leaving him with an opportunity to change or to accept the fates of those around him, as well as his own. A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843. Charles Dickens is one of the most well-known writers in the English language and his books include Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist.

It is a good book. Dickens is a great writer, and this is the shortest of his popular works. A classic. In fact, now that I think about it, I believe I grabbed this book from the shelf after Eamon and I went to a youth, community theater production of it. (Is that what happened? Life before Covid-19 seems so far away, now, like a dream. I can’t remember.) And I can’t think of much else to say. Not my favorite book of all time, but just completely solid. You’re going to know what’s coming, because we’ve all heard the story about a million times, so the novelty of the moral is lost on us. (And it most definitely is a morality tale.) But it’s well-crafted literature, from the story to the characters, from the language to the setting. Good stuff. Well, maybe I’ll say this: one of the brilliant things about this story was to combine Christmastime with a ghost story. It’s so seamless, you hardly notice it, but people who like to be creeped out get a holiday bonus with this one.

MOVIES

There are lots and lots of adaptations, from Mr. Magoo to The Flintstones. I’ll stick to some highlights.

[image error]Scrooged. My favorite of the movies. Sends the story forward into more recent times, but keeps the spirit (ha ha) of the thing alive. Bill Murray makes a great Scrooge and the production is well done, if it is getting outdated, by now. This one isn’t meant for kids, either, as so many of the renditions are.

[image error]The Muppet Christmas Carol. The Muppets are, in a lot of ways, their own thing, their own genre. I happen to enjoy a good Muppet movie, and this is a fine one. Fairly accurate to the original, even though told by puppets of frogs, bears, etc.

[image error]Mickey’s A Christmas Carol. A classic version, this one can be viewed in 25 minutes between Rudolph and Frosty. A decent re-telling for children, and will work especially if they like Mickey Mouse.

I would still like to check out (or re-watch, as it were) these movies: The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017), A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemekis, 2009), A Christmas Carol (FX, 2019), A Christmas Carol (Patrick Stewart, 1999), A Christmas Carol (George  C. Scott, 1984), A Christmas Carol (animated, 1971), and A Christmas Carol (Alastair Sim, 1951). Maybe this December I’ll have an A Christmas Carol marathon. I do love a good Christmas movie, at the right time of year.

 

Best Books: Christianity and Religion

There are some books below that are on the wrong list, but I think I got most of them in the right spot. As always, I haven’t read these books and am not recommending them, per se (though if it has a link attached to it, I have read it and you can follow that link to my review). The books I recommend can be found HERE. These are just lists of “best of”s that I have found on the internet and compiled into giant lists of books that I would like to read. You are welcome to peruse them and use them, but I can’t vouch for any of the titles until I, too, have read them. There is some history, theology, self-help, even fiction.

I am a Christian, so the first list of books below is unabashedly inside that world view. If you are not a Christian and you would like to read books about Christianity as a religion, you might want to start elsewhere (though there are bound to be several books here that would be interesting reads, I’m sure). Many of these books presuppose Christianity. (And most of them seem to be in a certain vein of Christianity. I would have liked more breadth, but I couldn’t find that list anywhere. If you have suggestions of more reading from more orthodox and/or more Eastern branches of Christianity, please comment below.) Following this list is a list of books on religion, which does include some books on Christianity, but many of those books are written from outside the particular worldview. And there are books from inside other worldviews, too. Lots of them.

CHRISTIANITY

The Broken Way, Ann Voskamp,[image error]
Uninvited, Lysa TerKeurst
Jesus Calling, Sarah Young
Wild at Heart, John Eldridge
The Five Love Languages, Dr. Gary Chapman
The Love Dare, Stephen and Alex Kendrick
Her Mother’s Hope, Francine Rivers
Choosing to See, Mary Beth Chapman
Outlive Your Life, Max Lucado
90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas
Heaven, Randy Alcorn
Here I Stand, Roland H. Sainton
William Tyndale, David Daniell
Jonathan Edwards, Iaian H. Murray
The Forgotten Spurgoen, Iaian H. Murray[image error]
Jonathan Edwards, George M. Marsden
Confessions, Saint Augustine
To the Golden Shore, Courtney Anderson
John G. Paton, John Paton
Spiritual Secret, Hudson Taylor
A Chance to Die, Elizabeth Elliot
Knowing God, J.I. Packer
A Quest for Godliness, J.I. Packer
The Death of Death, John Owen
Glory Road, Anthony Carter
Religious Affections, Johnathan Edwards
Basic Christianity, John Stott
The Cross of Christ, John R.W. Stott
Redemption Accomplished and Applied, John Murray
Overcoming Sin and Temptation, John Owen
The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, Jeremiah Burroughs[image error]
Lecture to My Students, Spurgeon
The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
How to Read the Bible, James L. Kugel
A History of Christianity, Diarmaid McCulloch
Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown
War and Remembrance, Herman Woulk
The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter
On Genesis, Augustine
Paradise Lost, John Milton
The Bible According to Mark Twain, Mark Twain
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich
Waiting on God, Simone Weil[image error]
The Anathema, David Jones
Confessions of St. Augustine
An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, Margo Todd
The Church in Africa, 1450-1950, Adrian Hastings
The Church of the East, Christoph Baumer
The Cult of the Saints, Peter Brown
Mother of God, Miri Rubin
Mohawk Saint, Allan Greer
Between Heaven and Earth, Robert Orsi
The New Oxford Annotated Bible
The Jewish Study Bible
The Green Bible, NRSV
Bible Illuminated, Forlaget
The Woman’s Bible, Elizabeth Cady Stanton[image error]
The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Neibur
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
On Christian Theology, Rowan Williams
Summa Theologiae, Davies and Leftow
The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Brian Davies
Aquinas’s Way to God, Gaven Kerr
The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, Brian Davies
Atheism and Theism, Smart and Haldane
A History of the Bible, John Barton
An Introduction to the New Testament, Raymond E. Brown
Jesus the Jew, Geza Vermes
The Misunderstood Jew, Amy-Jill Levine
Seeing the Word, Marcus Bockmuehl
Shorter Summa, St. Thomas Aquinas
The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer[image error]
Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
The Life and Diary of David Brainerd
The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel
The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren
More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell
The Reason for God, Thomas Keller
A Praying Life, Paul Miller
Valley of Vision, Arthur Bennett
The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges
Trusting God, Jerry Bridges
Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, Jeremiah Burroughs
Spurgeon, Arnold Dallimore
The Message of the Old Testament, Mark Dever
The Message of the New Testament, Mark Dever
The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, Mark Dever
Just Do Something, Kevin DeYoung
What Is the Gospel?, Greg Gilbert[image error]
According to Plan, Graham Goldsworthy
Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem
God, Marriage, and Family, Andreas Kostenberger
Humility, C.J. Mahaney
Desiring God, John Piper
What’s the Difference, John Piper
Finally Alive, John Piper
Love That Lasts, The Ricuccis
The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul
Chosen by God, R.C. Sproul
The Cross of Christ, John Stott
Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Tedd Tripp
A Gospel Primer for Christians, Milton Vincent
When People Are Big and God is Small, Ed Welch
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, Donald Whitney[image error]
The Reason for God, Tim Keller
The Meaning of Marriage, The Kellers
Jesus the King, Tim Keller
What Did You Expect?, Paul Tripp
One Way Love, Tullian Tchividjian
The Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones
Finally Free, Heath Lambert
The Complete Collection of E.M. Bounds on Prayer
Christian Classics, Spurgeon
The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer
The Greener Grass Conspiracy, Stephen Altrogge
Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands, Paul Tripp
What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey
The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brenden Manning
The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, Tim Keller
Here I Stand, Martin Luther[image error]
God’s Annointed Servant, George Whitefield
Through the Gates of Splendour, Elizabeth Elliot
Church History in Plain Language, Bruce Shelley
What Is the Gospel?, Greg Gilbert
According to Plan, Graeme Goldsworthy
The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul
Chosen by God, R.C. Sproul
Jesus Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias
When Sinners Say ‘I Do,’ Dave Harvey
The Biggest Story, Kevin DeYoung
What’s Best Next, Matt Perman
Do More Better, Tim Challies
Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesteron
The Practice of the Presences of God, Brother Lawrence
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards
A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis[image error]
The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
The Valley of Vision
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, John Foxe
The Normal Christian Life, Watchman Nee
Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
Don’t Waste Your Life, John Piper
The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis
God’s Smuggler, Brother Andrew
Radical, David Platt
Crazy Love, Frances Chan
Not a Fan, Kyle Idleman
Jesus + Nothing = Everything, Tullian Tchividjian
Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, The Taylors
The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey
Following Christ, Joseph Stowell
Born Again, Charles W. Colson[image error]
The Explicit Gospel, Matt Chandler
The Resolution, Jonathan Edwards
A Tale of Three Kings, Gene Edwards
Absolute Surrender, Andrew Murray
Tramp for the Lord, Corrie ten Boom
Forgotten God, Frances Chan
An Arrow Pointing to Heaven, Rich Mullins
Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller
The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer

There are definitely some books on the list below that would challenge your world view, whatever that is, since it includes texts that span various world religions and even anti-religions, so-to-speak. I don’t necessarily recommend that everyone read this widely, when it comes to their world view. I think it’s okay for some people—maybe all people—to bolster their own faith, instead. Questioning isn’t bad, but it’s not healthy for all people at all times to sink themselves into hundreds of books that counter their belief system. So proceed with caution—and curiosity—especially since I have vetted very few of these books. In other words, I have read almost none of them. Some of them, I’m sure, are offensive to huge swaths of modern humanity. (Many of them, though, are just historical.) Some, I bet, are even offensive to me. But I love learning. Love it! So I am curious about the religions of people and of historical people, though I am firmly grounded in my own. (Note: there are even books on here that I will be passing up as I get to them, should I determine at the time that they would be an unhealthy read, just like when I come across an especially challenging fiction book in the wrong season. I don’t have anything to prove.)

RELIGION

History of the Church in England, J.R.H. Moorman[image error]
The Indestructible Jews, Max Dimont
Ye Shall Be As Gods, Erich Fromm
The Dance of Time, Michael Judge
Gautama Buddha, Betty Kelen
The Great Transformation, Helen Armstrong
The Roots of Hinduism, Asko Parpola
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
God Has a Dream, Desmond Tutu
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
The Powers That Be, Walter Wink
Don’t Be Sad
Love Wins, Rob Bell[image error]
The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, Dalai Lama
You Can If You Think You Can, Normal Vincent Peale
The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield
Present Over Perfect, Shauna Niequist
Red Shift, Alan Garner
The Viking Way, Neil Price
Soul Hunters, Rane Willerslev
The Annotated Collected Poems, Edward Thomas
Yoga for the Three Stages of Life, Srivatsa Ramaswami
Light on Life, B.K. Iyengar
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
The Life of Milarepa, Lobsang P. Lhalungpa
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa
The Bodhicaryvatara, Santideva
One Robe, One Bowl, Ryokan[image error]
Entangled Minds, Dean Radin
Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Rupert Sheldrake
The Aeneid, Virgil
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pulman
Our Church, Roger Scruton
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
The Children Act, Ian Mcewan
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Baruch Spinoza
Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, David Hume
Society without God, Phil Zuckerman
Sacred and Secular, Norris and Inglehart
God is Back. Micklethwait and Wooldridge
Jesus and the Word, Rudolf Bultmann
The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer
The Shadow of the Galiliean, Gerd Theissen
The Birth of the Messiah, Raymond Brown[image error]
Born of a Virgin?, Andrew Lincoln
Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
The Miracle of Theism, John Mackie
Testament, Jean Meslier
Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, David Hume
In Gods We Trust, Scott Atran
Existentialism and Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre
Western Atheism, James A. Thrower
Breaking the Spell, Daniel C. Dennett
Atheists, Nick Spencer
Five Dialogues, Plato
The Epistle of Forgiveness, Abul Ala al-Ma’arri
Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus[image error]
Two Cheers for Democracy, E.M. Forster
Adam Bede, George Eliot
On Humanism, Richard Norman
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries
The Varieties of Scientific Experience, Carl Sagan
The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg
God in the Age of Science?, Herman Philipse
A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology with Christendom, Andrew Dickson White
The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean B. Carroll
Evolution, Carl Zimmer
Creationism’s Trojan Horse, Forrest and Gross
The Devil in Dover, Lauri Lebo[image error]
The Lotus Sutra, Kubo and Yuyama
Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, Eugene Burnouf
Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, Gregory Schopen
Words of My Perfect Teacher, Patrul Rinpoche
Journey to the West, Anthony C. Wu
Buddhism, the Basics, Cathy Cantrell
The First Buddhist Women, Susan Murcott
Call Me by My True Names, Thich Nhat Hanh
The Art of Living, The Dalai Lama
The Book of Stangers, Ian Dallas
The Way of Muhammad, Shaykh Abdalqadir As-Sulfi
The Noble Qur’an, Abdallhaq
Al-Muwatta of Imam Malik, Bewley and Johnson
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
The Islamist, Ed Husain
The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad[image error]
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Girls of Riyahd, Rajaa Alsanea
The Future of Islam, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Science and Islam, Ehsan Masood
Islam and Democracy, Fatima Mernissi
Inside the Gender Jihad, Amina Wadud
Muslims in the West, Yvonne Yazbeck
Islam and the Blackamerican, Sherman A. Jackson
Young, British and Muslim, Philip Lewis
The Religious Question in Modern China, Goossaert and Palmer
Qigong Fever, David Palmer
The Missionary’s Curse, Henrietta Harris
Zen Baggage, Bill Porter
Democracy’s Dharma, Richard Madsen
Border Lines, Danila Boyarin[image error]
Between Muslim and Jew, Steven Wasserstrom
The Compunctious Poet, Ross Brann
Two Nations in Your Womb, Israel Jacob Yuval
Founder of Hasidism, Murray Jay Rossman
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Dimitri Gutas
Avicenna’s ‘De Anima’ in the Latin West, Dag Nikolaus Hasse
Maimonides in His World, Sarah Strousma
Constantine’s Sword, James Carroll
The War Against the Jews, Lucy S. Dawidowitcz
Trials of the Diaspora, Anthony Julius
A Lethal Obsession, Robert S. Wistrich
The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown
God: A Biography, Jack Miles
The Travels of Ibn Battutah
The Sinbad Voyage, Tim Severin
4000 Years of Christmas, Count and Count[image error]
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Battle for Christmas, Stephen Nissenbaum
Inside Kasrilevke, Sholem Aleichem
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
The Pagan Rabbi, Cynthia Ozick
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
In Darwin’s Shadow, Michael Shermer
The Coming of the Fairies, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
In Joy Still Felt, Isaac Asimov
Jihad, Gilles Kepel
What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, Brian Whitaker
The Arabian Nights, Haddawy and Mahdi
The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz[image error]
A Secular Age, Charles Taylor
Out of Revolution, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Sacred Texts of the World, Smart and Hecht
A History of Wester Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
A Journey Into Gravity and Spacetime, J.A. Wheeler
The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
The Door Marked Summer, Michael Bentine
The Way of Wyrd, Brian Bates
Fire Child, Maxine Saunders
He Journey of the Magi, Richard Trexler
Christmas: A Candid History, Bruce Forbes
Lugbara Religion, John Middleton

Best Books: Plays, Musicals, and Screenplays

Not everyone reads plays, or at least after the required reading in high school and college. I do. (And more than Shakespeare, though I do love Shakespeare.) I enjoy them the same way I enjoy novels. Not that I read them like crazy, because I just don’t encounter them as much. Well, with this list I will at least be reading another of the greats every once in a while. And with Rowling coming out with her latest series as screenplays…

As always, this is not a list of plays that I am recommending. It is an amalgamation of some of the top best-of lists that I could find online. Mostly just limited to something like fifty and smashed together. I also try not to use lists like “Bob’s List.” Reputable sources, you know.

Hamlet, William Shakespeare[image error]
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
Angels in America, Tony Kushner
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne
A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
Woyzeck, Georg Buchner
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Bald Soprano, Eugene Ionesco
Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
The Homecoming, Harold Pinter
Machinal, Sophie Treadwell
Fences, August Wilson
Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekov
Tartuffe, Moliere
What the Butler Saw, Joe Orton[image error]
Uncommon Women (and others), Wendy Wasserstein
This Is Our Youth, Kenneth Lonergan
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
The Normal Heart, Harry Kramer
TopDog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks
Candida, George Bernard Shaw
Playboy of the Western World, J.M. Synge
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
Awake and Sing!, Clifford Odets
The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Stuff Happens, David Hare
Far Away, Caryl Churchill
Blasted, Sara Kane
Antigone, Sophacles
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August Wilson
Bent, Martin Sherman
The Government Inspector, Nikolai Gogol
Old Times, Harold Pinter[image error]
Purgatory in Ingolstadt and Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Marieluise Fleiber
The Changeling, Thomas Middleton
Our Country’s Good, Timberlake Wertenbaker
Independent 40 Best Plays of All Time
Henry !V, Luigi Pirandello
Intimate Apparel, Lynn Nottage
An Oak Tree, Tim Crouch
Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, Athol Fugard
The Effect, Lucy Prebble
The Seagull, Anton Chekhov
One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean
A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
Making Noise Quietly, Robert Holman
Private Lives, Noel Coward
Mother Courage and Her Children, Berthold Brecht[image error]
Faith Healer, Brian Friel
Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth
Medea, Euripides
Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
La Dispute, Pierre de Marivaux
Happy Days, Samuel Beckett
John, Annie Baker
The History Boys, Alan Bennett
Frozen, Bryony Lavery
Life is a Dream, Calderon de la Barca
Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Life with Father, Lindsay and Crouse
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare
Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill
Volpone, Ben Johnson
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Ruined, Lynn Nottage[image error]
The Vortex, Noel Coward
She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
John, Annie Baker
Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris
Master Harold… and the Boys, Athol Fugard
Fefu and Her Friends, Maria Irene Fornes
The Women, Claire Booth Luce
The Humans, Stephen Karam
M Butterfly, David Henry Hwang
Short Eyes, Miguel Pinero
Everyman
Dutchman, LeRoi Jones
The Persians, Aeschylus
Anything else Shakespeare
Betrayal, Harold Pinter
Richard III, William Shakespeare
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
The Clean House, Sarah Ruhl[image error]
In the Blood, Suzan Lori-Parks
Agamemnon, Aeschylus
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Bertolt Brecht
Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw
Miss Julie, August Strindberg
Oedipus the King, Sophocles
American Buffalo, David Mamet
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw
Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet
August: Osage County, Tracy Letts
True West, Sam Shepard[image error]
The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill
Look Back in Anger, John Osbourne
A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller
The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman
The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard

While it’s true that hardly anyone is going to curl up with the score of a musical and “read” it, it felt uneven presenting you with a best plays list and not a best musicals one. I also find it difficult to see many musicals, as many of them do not become blockbuster movies (in their original form, especially) or come to your town (and for a non-prohibitive price point, especially).

MUSICALS

Guys and Dolls[image error]
Gypsy
Sweeney Todd
Oklahoma!
West Side Story
Cabaret
A Chorus Line
Rent
The Book of Mormon
My Fair Lady
Fiddler on the Roof
The Music Man
Chicago
The Fantasticks
Carousel
Company
Show Boat
The King and I
Little Shop of Horrors
Sunday in the Park with George[image error]
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
A Little Night Music
Phantom of the Opera
Les Miserable
Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat
She Loves Me
Nine
Follies
Falsettos
Ragtime
Kiss Me, Kate
1776
Into the Woods
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Urinetown
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Wicked
Hair
Evita[image error]
Hello, Dolly!
La Cage au Folles
110 in the Shade
The Producers
Lady in the Dark
City of Angels
Dreamgirls
Avenue Q
42nd Street
Brigadoon
The Cradle Will Rock
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
Jesus Christ Superstar
Once on This Island
Adding Machine
South Pacific
The Sound of Music
Rent
Man of la Mancha
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown[image error]
Camelot
The Full Monty
Godspell
Annie Get Your Gun
Beauty and the Beast
Annie
Ain’t Misbehavin’
Bye Bye Birdie

BONUS: MUSICAL MOVIES

Annie[image error]
Newsies
Into the Woods
The Sound of Music
42nd Street
Tophat
Swingtime
Follow the Fleet
Shall We Dance
A Damsel in Distress
Carefree
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
Broadway Melody of 1940
Second Chorus
You’ll Never Get Rich
Easter Parade
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
On the Town
Summer Stock[image error]
An American in Paris
Showboat
Singin’ In the Rain
The Belle of New York
The Bandwagon
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Kiss Me, Kate
Brigadoon
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
White Christmas
Guys and Dolls
Oklahoma!
Carousel
The King and I
Funny Face
Gigi[image error]
Damn Yankees
Bells are Ringing
Flower Drum Song
West Side Story
Bye Bye Birdie
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
The Sound of Music
Camelot
Finian’s Rainbow
Funny Girl
Sweet Charity
Paint Your Wagon
Fiddler on the Rood
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Mame[image error]
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Fame
Pennies from Heaven
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
Yentl
Annie
A Chorus Line
Newsies
Chicago
The Phantom of the Opera
Rent
Dreamgirls
Hairspray
Sweeney Todd
Across the Universe
Moulin Rouge![image error]
Mamma Mia!
Nine
Burlesque
Les Miserables (2012)
Jersey Boys
Into the Woods
Lucky Stiff
La La Land
The Greatest Showman
Mama Mia! Here We Go Again
Mary Poppins Returns
Cats
Judy
The Wizard of Oz
Cabin in the Sky
An American in Paris
Cabaret
The Rocky Horror Picture Show[image error]
Bugsy Malone
Dancer in the Dark
The Umbrellas of Cherborg
Grease
The Lion King
Mary Poppins
New York, New York
Meet Me in St Louis
Lemonade
The Young Girls of Rochefort
I Could Have Danced All Night
Beauty and the Beast

And if you are intense, or you want to become a screenwriter:

BEST SCREENPLAYS TO READ

Some Like It Hot[image error]
Casablanca
Psycho
Chinatown
The Godfather
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Bringing Up Baby
American Beauty
Memento
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Annie Hall
The Sting
When Harry Met Sally
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Shawshank Redemption
Apocalypse Now
Pulp Fiction
The Usual Suspects
Shakespeare in Love[image error]
The Best Years of Our Lives
LA Confidential
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12 Angry Men
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The Manchurian Candidate
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La La Land
Dances with Wolves
Die Hard
Network
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You Can Count on Me
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Braveheart
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A Quiet Place
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Rocky

Book Review: The Borrowers

[image error]Here are a few of the books that I remember loving in late-elementary school: A Wrinkle in Time, Caddie Woodlawn, The Wheel on the School, The Indian in the Cupboard, and The Borrowers. (Also the Babysitters Club, but we don’t need to pretend that’s great literature; just good, clean fun.) It occurs to me that I have now read all of those books with my son except for The Indian in the Cupboard. I don’t know what happened there. I’ll have to get on that because he’s fast out-growing reading time, in middle school. And I can’t assign it to him because he’s got a stack of books that’ll keep him busy for a while.

So we just finished The Borrowers by Mary Norton. As with many lauded children’s books, I have learned too late that it is part of a series. The series is:

The Borrowers
The Borrowers Afield
The Borrowers Afloat
The Borrowers Aloft
The Borrowers Avenged

The first book of the series is the one that won the Carnegie Medal in the 50s, and it can stand alone, as it very frequently does. I am going to review the first book, here. (Note: knowing that there are later books sort of takes some of the tension out of the original book, so you might want to save that tidbit of information for later, for your children. If they, then, really enjoyed the book, you might want to get them the next book in the series and be like, “Surprise! There are four more!”)

There is, unfortunately, a bit of an old-fashioned English voice here, so there were things that went right over my son’s head. And I think he tired of asking what things were. Marmalade, crochet, bit-bucket, silabub, parquet, crumpets, decanter, Maderia for the matter… I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it, but I’m an Anglophile, and I have been since I was a little girl. Eamon, on the other hand, has limited exposure to the British literature that he has read (though I have hoisted nearly all Roald Dahl books on him at one point or another). And today’s kids also seem to, in general, stick to stories that take place in their own time. Not that this is acceptable or good, but it makes it harder for them to read older stories like this, full of allusions and language that is outdated. It might be better suited for a classroom, in this case. Or maybe, like I did, they’ll just learn as they go.

At the time, this probably came across as a wildly imaginative story. All of a sudden, fairy stories were about much more earthly creatures who lived right under your floorboards! And they weren’t fairies, they were borrowers, which explains where all the missing things go. (These days, for sure, they’re borrowing our socks, tape, and scissors.) It’s still a great concept: tiny people living among us, but staying out of sight, using our things. Also, that they believe they are the center of the universe and full-sized humans exist to supply them.

It’s told as a story-within-a-story, a literary device that was not as outdated in 1952 as it is now. The narrator is telling the story to a little girl, about when her brother stayed at a great-aunt’s house and accidentally discovered the borrowers who lived there. The story comes full circle, at the end, leaving the little girl and the reader in some doubt as to whether or not borrowers really do exist. (My son was not happy about that. He said, with disappointment, “I thought that story was true inside the book.”) The story in the story revolves around the teenage Arrietty and her parents, who are the last borrowers in the grand house. Arrietty has been sheltered within an inch of her life, but she’s not the kind of girl who can be kept inside all the time, and when she sneaks off, she lands the whole family in mortal peril. There are plenty of British themes: the naughty but normal boy, an invalid in bed addicted to the bottle, the maid, getting over illness by an airing out in the country, the brow-beaten husband, etc.

It is written nicely. There is a traditional plot and definitely some adventure and action. No romance to distract, just a great book for children. I appreciate the more traditional style of the book: medium-paced with honest-to-goodness normal sentence, paragraph, and chapter length. There’s humor. There’s even sadness. I recommend it particularly for kids who will enjoy the subject matter enough to stay focused on the story through the old-fashioned bits. Or for spunky gals. Or for bourgeoning Anglophiles.

[image error][image error]THE MOVIES

There are at least two adaptations of The Borrowers that come up when you do a little research. Neither one of them are reviewed very favorably, and you can tell just from their covers that they veer very much from the original story. Different time. More characters. Plot changes. On one hand, I don’t like that when a movie is that far off. On the other hand, I think we might need to watch a movie at “school” today. (Note: The Secret World of Arrietty looks the best of the bunch, but it’s $12 to buy online, so…)

Book Review: Because of Winn-Dixie

[image error]I hadn’t even noticed, until now, that I had two Kate DiCamillo reviews lined up one right after another. This is another book that I read with my son, but then gave a 24-hour re-read in order to review it fairly. I remembered it, but not well enough.

I think that one of the reasons this keeps happening with DiCamillo books is that they are so short. It’s hard to remember something well when you spend so little time with it. I hate to say that the books lack depth, because they are sweet and poignant and you do get some complication of plot and some shades to the characters, but how deep can you go in such a short space of time? The plots—though they be chock-full—positively zoom from scene to scene. One never pauses to observe the surroundings. There are no wasted moments here, either, spent doing nothing more than exploring the characters in a more benign, plot-irrelevant scene. I suppose this type of writing is appropriate for younger readers and for those who just don’t want any sort of frill. But I would really like something more toothsome. Plus, the brevity doesn’t allow for much suspense.

Other than that, what is there to complain about in Because of Winn-Dixie? It is well-written (for all its brevity). It is sweet and wise, though I admit that sometimes everyone in this story seems too imperfectly perfect. Or would it be perfectly imperfect? I mean, everyone is clearly bummed out and broken, but they’re all doing it so beautifully and consciously. Then again, we are addressing kids here, and just exploring the sadness and the brokenness in life all mixed up with the love and happiness, well that’s a pretty big feat. There is a whole cast of interesting characters. A super-lovable dog. A strong-voiced, ten-year-old narrator. And a number of quirky things that just border on magic realism. There is, in the end, only two things that do actually have to be unreal, but there are many things—from giant jars of pickles to desks full of candy—that still seem enrobed in this Southern, small town magic. I also really appreciated that the religious element was portrayed positively.

Because of Winn-Dixie is the story of India Opal, just as she has moved to a small town in Florida, where her father is a preacher. She takes in a mangy mutt and together they begin to make a very odd assortment of friends around town. Some friends are made easier than others, and Opal soon discovers that she’s not alone in her pain (having lost her mother several years before) and helps the preacher to discover the same thing.

It’s a good book. I’m pretty sure it gets plenty of recommendations from teachers. It should. It’s not afraid to be real, but it’s a sweet, magical, interesting story, even though it lacks length and drama.

[image error]MOVIE

There is a live action Disney movie from 2005. It’s not supposed to be particularly awesome, but I’m going to watch it soon, anyhow. I’ll review it in a few.