Cultural Amnesia by Clive James – a review

Clive James is an Australian cum British critic who writes novels and poetry to acclaim, publishes his critical work in all the best rags and seems to have read just about everything. I’ve heard Mr. James interviewed many times and he ranks with Quentin Crisp, Malcolm Muggeridge and Stephen Frye in the pantheon of glib and brilliant 20th century English raconteurs. He’s amply qualified to reflect on recent cultural, artistic and literary history.

James’ Cultural Amnesia (2007) is about important ideas of the 20th century, ideas we should not lose as the 21st speeds away. The book focuses primarily on people and events from 1920 – 1960 in continental Europe and the political phenomena Nazism and communism, both of which James unequivocally characterizes as pure evil. He champions nearly forgotten intellectuals and artists who fought against, or collaborated with, this – to steal a phrase misused by G.W. Bush – axis of evil. He brooks no excuses for communism, excoriating leftest intellectuals who spoke lovingly of imagined communist ideals, tacitly supporting the outrages of Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Cultural Amnesia is organized around mostly forgotten writers’ words, upon which James builds a series of interconnected essays addressing his themes. His writing is critical enough to establish his arguments persuasively and personal enough to make them worth caring about. His few rough edges evidence his passion for ideas more than any lack of verbal grace. Each essay addresses an author, but usually diverts deeply into the thought behind the words, often leaving the words’ source in the background. His essay featuring Arthur Schnitzler, for example, is mostly about how Bertolt Brecht can be one of Germany’s two outstanding 20th century poets (the other is Rilke) and, at the same time, be a fool, a dreadful man, and an abettor of tyrants. He does this with most of those he features except for the few Americans he quotes. Dick Cavett and Michael Mann receive almost biographical treatment.

In addition to his thorough analysis of the intersection of culture and totalitarianism – conclusion: they don’t mix well – James explores the art of elegant writing, and, bravely, elaborates on the quality of writers’ working in many languages. He seems to have learned the major European languages by going to libraries and coffee shops to read beautiful books in German or French or Russian or Spanish accompanied by only the appropriate translation dictionary. He repeatedly recommends this practice to others who fancy learning a little Serbo-Croatian or whatever.

Cultural Amnesia comprises 850 demanding pages and qualifies as a monumental work of neglected importance, in danger of not receiving the attention it deserves much like the words and people that fill its pages. (I picked up my remaindered copy for $3.95.) Each essay is beautifully crafted and, taken together, provide a perspective on the 20th century that is rapidly fading. Let’s hope this perspective lives on, at least in this unique and engaging book. Buy it through Amazon alternative sources, many of which will sell it to you for the bargain basement price I paid. It’s worth each one of those 395 pennies.

Read more about Clive James in the words of Clive James. This self-penned biography is winning beyond any words I could use to describe it.

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – review of a half book

I tried to read William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and just could not. It’s subtitle, A Novel Without a Hero, may as well read A Novel Without a Human. I got through the Battle of Waterloo and the following round of let’s get Miss Crawley’s money and could take no more of Thackeray’s insufferable characters. The occasional noble gesture from the lovesick Capt. Dobbin aside, do any of the residents of Vanity Fair give farthing for anyone other than themselves? I suppose this is Thackeray’s point and that he, too, finds his people insufferable. Unfortunately he doesn’t make their insufferability interesting enough or his commentary trenchant enough to keep me engaged. I hate to stop half way home, but I must.

As for our heroine (anti-heroine?), Becky Sharp, I’ve yet to see any redeeming qualities in the little bitch whatsoever. I suppose the fact she asserts herself and looks out for her own interest in a world that rejects her for all the wrong reasons is, per se, a good thing, but means count, I think. How a character deals with her dreadful lot matters and I can’t really take heart when a resourceful poor person uses her skills to relentlessly exploit those around her, essentially imitating their behavior toward her. Maybe in life this works. In fiction, I think not. Ultimately, of course, I doesn’t work for Becky either, which may be the much-labored moral of our story.

The glorious nineteenth century novel has many more worthy candidates to offer for our reading pleasure. I may finish this one, but only after I’ve finished all of Hardy, Eliot and Dickens.

Beowulf, only a comment

Beowulf, slayer of monsters, vanquished Grendel, Grendel’s vengeful mother and, later, the “hot and savage” dragon guarding the golden hoard. He brought stability to the people and cultures he touched, but the unintended consequences of his actions increased mistrust between peoples, spawned disruption, and led to war. If one as strong, generous and wise as Beowulf cannot break the cycle of death, even when his major accomplishments led to peace and reconciliation, what hope is there for humankind to reverse its deathly course?

Perhaps this is the point of this epic poem, the hopelessness of noble deeds, the futility of the truly righteous act. Or perhaps that noble deeds, while still noble and necessary, all have an obverse effect, that they serve primarily to maintain a frustrating balance between good and evil, between light and dark. Perhaps, then, the only road to progress on this epic scale, is to make certain the noble deeds are slightly more noble than the evil deeds are evil.

My god…I think I just discovered liberalism.

Yeatsiana – Poem #57

It’s a hut mainly, a solitary, cluttered hut, not of clay and wattles made,
just a hut.
I will arise and go now, and go to my hut, no innisfree this; melancholy this
hut is, but I go there alone, free, but that’s not the point.

No lake water lapping with low sounds, I am alone here, in my free hut,
my cluttered hut,
I ought to have brought a lover here, they say,
but in my lonely hut I am alive, I live.
Not in the bee-loud glade, my hut, but I can breathe here in my melancholy hut.

Old Fence – Poem #23

Outside my window is a fence, a cedar fence,
old, with six-inch vertical boards
and two-by-four horizontal railings,
railings attached
to four-by-four posts.

The fence sags, each rail a long, gray grin,
with four-by-fours to slow its collapse.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – a review

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

At the intersection of science, society and identity, lives can only be seen as through a frosted window alternately revealing glimpses of light, shadow and, finally, a frightening opacity. Few of our favorite writers can see the dangers and the possibilities at this intersection. Kazuo Ishiguro can and shares his view with simplicity and grace.

In Never Let Me Go, Hailshum, a school for special children, reveals its nature and purpose slowly and always through the eyes of several of its…uh…students. Cathy, Ruth, and Tommy are friends of a sort who, like all friends, play and fight and spar and love with each other in their years at school and later.

Spoiler alert! Skip to paragraph after this blockquote to avoid it!

Hailshum is a special school for those whose lives are defined by their eventual donation of organs to save others. The idea of institutionalized organ harvesting seems less foreign than it once did, less foreign than in the innocent days before September 11, 2001. Government institutions’ imposing solutions to problems we may not have has become standard practice, hasn’t it? Even an old liberal like me can see the inexorable creep of big brother and his sister agencies charged with keeping us safe. Can a program to keep certain people alive and kicking be far behind?

One of a number of special schools to raise donors, Hailshum encourages healthy sex (regular sex contributes to a healthy body) and prohibits pregnancy and marriage, conditions which, apparently, do not contribute to a healthy body. Close relationships flourish, but the important talk with pre-teens is not about sex – it’s about donation and its implications. Society at Hailshum provides some comfort for its students, students for whom the larger society is clearly the enemy.

In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro exposes his characters with all their charms, their weaknesses and their ugly parts. In this, he shows us their deep, confused humanness; he shows us the humanness they share with us.

Cathy, Ruth and Tommy live at that intersection, the intersection of science, society and identity, living with bumpy stoicism the lives science prepared them for. Society has decided it needs them, it seems, and they need each other to find meaning and love in the imposed hollowness of their lives. They, like we in ours, find some, but never enough.

Ishiguro tells us their tragic and ordinary story with the gentleness that distinguishes his work. Let no one tell you otherwise; this book is masterful.

Coincidences are for sissies

Coincidences just happen. That’s what they are: Things that just happen together. Like, I’m reading a book called The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Began to read it a couple days ago. Then I began to read another book, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. In the first chapter of the latter book, the author, Rust Hills, refers to a Eudora Welty short story titled “Livvie.” I read “Livvie” last night to understand what Hills was telling me about writing short stories. Today, the bulb flickered on: The name Livvie is a diminutive form of the name Deliverance.

A coincidence…that’s all. But…The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is about witchcraft. I’m jus’ sayin’…

Less is more…

Concision counts, even when it involves those dreadful texter abbreviations and horrid LOLs in online posts. Maybe some of this new-found brevity can find its way into contemporary, everyday writing? Not a chance…

clipped from www.thesmartset.com A Brief History Ours is not the first society to value an economy of words. The Taming of the Tween Shakespeare and texters do have something in common. Concision has a long, proud history, but pundits are now blaming the brevity of tweets for attention-span erosion that will hasten our descent into duh, stupidness. Tom Tomorrow recently suggested in his This Modern World comic that blogs will soon be replaced with single-word tweets (“happy,” “bored,” “sad”). The Daily Show‘s Samantha Bee took the same joke one step further with talk of Grunter (“not all my followers have time to read my entire tweet”) and the equally sub-syllabic Voweller.

Sir Thomas Browne?

I’ve begun reading selections from the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, 17th century English writer of science and religion miscellany. Some excellent writers get lost in history because they never write a work distinctive enough to pass the test of time, but still are compelling to read for their style and ideas. I’m reading into Browne’s Christian Morals, which reads like the KJV Bible on steroids.

• On chastity – “…be chast in thy flaming Days, when Alexander dar’d not trust his eyes upon the sisters of Darius…”
• On avarice – “Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them, and think it more satisfaction to live richly than dye rich.”
• On integrity – “They who thus timely descend into themselves, and cultivate the good seeds which nature hath set in them, prove not shrubs, but Cedars in their generation.”
• On the honest self – “Stand magnetically upon that Axis, where prudent simplicity has fixed thee; and let no Attraction invert the Poles of thy Honesty.”

Only a little start on Sir Thomas, but who’d have thought such wonder from one so unseen by most of humankind.

Angelica: A Novel – a review

Books written from several points-of-view can be tiresome bores, repeating narrative elements, often needlessly, instead of getting on with the novel’s development. Few do it brilliantly, like, for example, Barbara Kingsolver did in The Poisonwood Bible.

Arthur Phillips comes close in his complex and compelling ghost story, Angelica: A Novel. Phillips tells his story from four points-of-view – the wife Constance, the spiritualist advisor Ann, the husband Joseph and the daughter Angelica – and skillfully weaves layers of events, images (real and ghostly), emotions and perceptions into an ultimately gorgeous tapestry of fright and discovery. In Angelica’s adult words, the four stories work like “…jagged wheels, their interlocking teeth each driving the others onward.”

In Victorian London, the wife, Constance, is certain some ghostly force is harming, or about to harm, her daughter, four-year-old Angelica, and the perceived harm occurs at the same moments her vivisectionist husband, Joseph, pursues his nineteenth century “spousal rights.” Or so it seems to Constance. She receives some confirmation of this disturbing correspondence from her consultation with Ann, the spirtitualist who is also a former actress. Angelica’s reactions to her father swing from inexplicable terror to inappropriate affection, and virtually convince Constance that the ghostly visitations are connected both to Joseph’s advances and to foggy memories of own abusive father, Douglas. More details would require the dreaded spoiler alert.

Phillips unwraps his story in four sections, unveiling one character at a time. His pace predictably slows after the first shift in point-of-view, when Ann retraces too much well-considered exposition. Presenting the novel’s four points-of-view this way is somewhat less satisfying than presenting them simultaneously could be, breaking portions of narrative into smaller POV chunks, alternating between characters within each section. This approach would involve less duplication, an effect that creates more reader frustration than narrative suspense. With this latter approach, Phillips’ careful plotting would feel less contrived, less like it was mapped out on the wall of his study.

Nonetheless, Angelica: A Novel is a dazzling psychological mystery, an enthralling ghost story, and a deeply moving study of four rich and alive characters. I may even read it again.

Why I Read – my anti-manifesto

If you are a reader, books are your burden. You may love to read, or say you do, but the obligation of the books you know you must read will not be denied or even delayed.

I admit it. I read more because I have to than because I want to. Watching television and films and leafing through magazines is easier and often more enjoyable. I can stand or slouch or sit with one leg over the arm of the chair, or lie on my back or hang upside down when I do these things, but reading forces me to sit awkwardly for long periods of time, which does not please a 61-year-old, semi-arthritic body.

So…why read? I get more joy from children, more beauty from nature, more affection from people and more ideas from inside my own head. Book clubs hound me, literary blogs intimidate me and Barnes and Noble overwhelms me. Lowe’s is more fun and has toys.

Books are frustrating because they won’t go away until you attend to them, which means reading them, which is work. If I knew why I read books – all the time – maybe I could stop. Then what would I do?

That’s it.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy – a brief review

Some say that Thomas Hardy’s best work is Tess of the D’Urbervilles and I can agree with them. A few claim that honor (for honor it is…to be the best of the 19th century’s most brilliant ouevre) for Jude the Obscure. I cannot agree with this assessment. For fear of acquiring the label of revisionist lout, I won’t rename this over-long work as I think it deserves – Jude the Obtuse.

My favorite Hardy novel is The Mayor of Casterbridge, an engrossing, detail-rich story featuring arguably the 19th century’s most intriguing hero. One night, in a drunken stupor, Michael Henchard auctions his wife, Susan, and child, Elizabeth-Jane, to a sailor for five guineas. As you can imagine, his life is forever haunted by this unthinking, horrible act.

Unable to retrieve his family and unwilling to reveal his guilty act, Henchard settles in Casterbridge, lives a sober life, and prospers becoming the mayor of Casterbridge. More feared than liked, Henchard is cunning in business, treats people poorly, and stifles any conjecture concerning his wifelessness. Eighteen years pass and, you guessed it, Henchard’s wife Susan arrives in Casterbridge with Elizabeth-Jane turning Henchard’s life into a series of downwardly spiraling attempts to salvage his self-esteem and find redemption.

For Henchard, redemption is elusive. The complex plot includes politics, commerce, romance, friendship and its loss, and Henchard’s unending quest to find value in his life. The book is aptly subtitled “The Life and Death of a Man of Character”. Henchard frequently lets impulse overcome compassion, selfishness overcome affection, ultimately dooming his life to repeated failure and regret. Until the end, however, Henchard, and the many accompanying him on his hapless journey, persevere with desperate, admirable courage.

Get it here. Or get the Amazon Kindle edition here. Or get the latest DVD version here.

The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal – a brief review

Writing guides and handbooks fall into roughly two categories: Some are long, comprehensive, and, except for the extremely punctilious writer, unfathomable; a few are direct, useful, and ideal for serious writers who would rather write than spend hours finding the rules for semicolons. In the latter category falls Brandon Royal’s brilliant The Little Red Writing Book.

The articulate exposition of his twenty principles of writing and thirty rules of grammar fit neatly into 159 short, accessible pages, pages undoubtedly well-thumbed by thousands of grateful writers for years. Built carefully and simply around the categories of structure, style, readability and grammar, Mr. Royal’s little book will satisfy both the sit-down-and-read-all-about-it reader and the frustrated-fly-by-and-check-something-quickly writer.

I recommend this wonder to all my writing students; one day the writing committee will wise up and make this a primary text for all writing courses at my school. I won’t hold my breath, but you could buy a copy now here anyway.

The English Major by Jim Harrison – a brief review

Cliff is 60 years old, a farmer with a BA in literature, and poor, recently cheated off his farm in his divorce. Cliff is traveling the country renaming the states and the birds of North America. No kidding. He picks up a former student with a divine ass (Cliff was a high school teacher once) and she screws his brains out from Minnesota to Montana. She moves quickly from the fantasy category to the emotional burden category.

He visits his successful gay son (who pulls 300K in the film industry) in San Francisco and ends up pursued by his ex-wife who breaks up with the man she left Cliff for. This harridan (who, naturally, has a late-in-life real estate career) suddenly wants Cliff back in her life when she develops diabetes. People with no boundaries surround Cliff and he lets them roam freely in his life at the very time he wants to carve out a private place. Eventually, he carves, but at a price that is just sad.

Cliff speaks with an honest voice, a voice that knows he must accept what he cannot change and can get on with his life, despite the insensitive whiners who repeatedly invade his life. If you are a 60-ish man, you are Cliff and he speaks truth to you. I don’t know if he speaks truth to 35-year-old program analysts or 52-year-old corporate CEOs. Cliff doesn’t speak FOR me, but he certainly speaks TO me and I am glad to be his friend and fellow sexagenarian.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – a brief review

I may be the last person on the planet to have read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. It’s sold a gazillion copies, I understand, in its 20 year run. I’m trying very hard to like it. The Alchemist is just not my kind of book.

It’s a fable, full of inspirational, follow-your-dream, pursue-your-Personal-Legend storytelling. It tells the pleasant story of Santiago, a poor Andalusian shepherd boy, who is told by an old man (Melchizedek, the King of Salem, believe it or not) to go to the pyramids to find his treasure. Santiago is perfectly happy being a poor Andalusian shepherd, but after several odd messengers encourage his quest, embarks to Egypt to find his treasure. He travels across north Africa, stopping in Tangiers, where he makes a bundle for himself and his employer selling crystal and turning the crystal shop into a smash success. He amasses enough gold to return to Spain a rich man, but is once again compelled to chase his Personal Legend.

Santiago and his caravan reach a popular oasis boasting “three hundred wells, fifty thousand date trees, and innumerable colored tents spread among them,” a welcome sight after long, dry weeks in the desert.
This oasis is also a safe haven for the many tribes warring in its environs. Santiago, since he is committed to his dream (still faithful, of course, to chasing his Personal Legend) becomes the oasis’ much needed spiritual guide and finally learns the secrets of the alchemist which I will not reveal here because I didn’t exactly understand them. In short, on his quest, Santiago finds material and spiritual wealth, overcomes daunting obstacles and impresses the hell out of everyone he meets. But…he must travel on, to the pyramids, to his treasure, to his Personal Legend.

Along the way, wise voices speak to Santiago, sharing truths, which he gradually understands, after considerable repetition. “No matter what one does, every person on earth places a central role in the history of the world.” “No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.” “When you are loved you can do anything in creation.” And my favorite, “When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person realize his dream.” Cue Oprah.

Doubtless, you can hear my enthusiasm for paper-thin sentiments like these. Eventually Santiago finds his treasure, and I won’t spoil the end for you. You already know it. Really.

I liked The Alchemist. The characters are flat, the dialogue is biblical, and the themes are hardly challenging, but it’s well written, unpretentious (a rarity in profound-spiritual-truth books), and the story is engaging. The book’s Hallmark moments take on welcome weight with the unfolding of its simple and seductive narrative. It also has a quality often lacking in thematically-challenged books – it’s short. Take a few hours and read it. It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye.

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James – a brief review

William James’ exploration of religious experience, primarily experience beyond the reach of reason, makes a great stab at defining fundamental (definitely not fundamentalist) nature. He almost makes one believe godless atheists can be religious too. Hell…he does make one believe godless atheists can be religious. In sum: humans experience life as imperfect and reach outside themselves looking for something like perfection or unity or transcendence. When they reach out, they find their higher self, likely hiding in their own subconscious. James was a psychologist after all. All else in religious practice, per James, is “over-belief,” the bells and whistles, some good, some devastatingly evil, added by countless institutional religions since way back. This review is a puny reduction of a expansive, hope-filled book. Read it in spite of my meager effort here.

Find the Kindle version of The Varieties of Religious Experience here

How Fiction Works by James Woods – a review

Completeness seems to bother James Wood. His readerly affection for the silent parts of fiction gives his How Fiction Works a welcome portion of loosy-goosy admiration for the unround and the unresolved. I don’t know much about the range of contemporary literary criticism, but some critics, it seems, need their characters round and their resolutions complete. Piffle, says Wood.

We readers will find How Fiction Works a rich guide to the peculiarities (and conventions) of modern fiction. And it’s a helluva read. Honest. Wood has made litcrit compelling, giving us a page turner, a thriller-for-book-nerds filled with, if not exactly surprises, dozens of Aha! moments with flashing lights and clanging bells for the more excitable among us.

The cornerstone of Wood’s analysis is his discussion of what he calls the free indirect style, the third-person narrative style that enables the author to inhabit the voices of characters, shifting from an omniscient, external voice to the voice of the character, sometimes to the voice of the context in which the character lives. Wood notes other writer’s references to this style (“close third person;” “going into character;” “close writing”) and provides plenty of examples from writers we know: Austen, Naipaul, Chekhov(of course), Updike. And others.

By using free indirect style, Woods observes, writers maintain their distance and inhabit their characters at the same time.

He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tirelessly unhappy, almost sick. What the hell should he say?

Only one part of this passage is strictly third person; the rest is the character speaking to us, or, rather, speaking to himself with the writer as intermediary. We can see an “objective” third-person view of the character, we can see what the character sees and we can hear the character address his problem. While not a exactly a new insight, Woods gives this style a thorough and useful treatment, at least one for us less academically endowed and encumbered.

Wood spends considerable energy and space discussing flat and round characters, frequently extolling the charms and virtues of the former. Traditionally, it seems, critics prefer round characters, at least for the big players in a work of fiction, over flat characters, who are OK and necessary to move the narrative or highlight the nature of the round characters. Round characters usually get considerable description, become rounder (I guess this is the term) as the story progresses, and sometimes change in significant ways, such change often being the core event of the novel.

Flat characters, on the other hand, get less authorial attention, rarely obtain more layers of human qualities as the novel progresses, and, since flat, have few human characteristics that could be transformed. On the other hand….

Flat characters are often reader favorites. Achilles. Polonius. Mr. Darcy (most Austen men, actually). Chauncey Gardiner. Flat characters often carry a key attribute or, even, a catchphrase, like Mrs. McCawber’s repeated avowal that she would never leave Mr. McCawber. An author’s repetition of this attribute or catchphrase turns flat characters into steady friends we often welcome as their rounder, more changeable, colleagues navigate a narrative’s twisty turns and slippery slopes.

Round characters are, of course, collections of many attributes and attitudes, skills and sensibilities. But these round characters are still not real since no novelist can represent all of what makes a person real.
The best round characters aren’t round at all and we all know it. They may be some sort of hard-to-measure geometrical shape, but they certainly aren’t, well, people.

Wood prefers the distinctions “transparent” and “opaque.” Some characters show more of themselves than others, and show more or less of themselves at different points in the story. Since fiction probably has something to do with truth or the nature of reality, these traits may be more helpful for writers and readers than the ubiquitous round/flat distinctions.

To frame the history of fictional character development, Wood traces the progression from religious, to theatrical, to fictive presentation; from prayer, to soliloquy, to free indirect style. He explores and explains much about detail, metaphor, voice, dialogue and, my favorite, language. He makes it clear that the best fiction, in falling short of answering all our questions, delivers the mysteries and the wobbly, uncertain world we need to be authentic characters ourselves.

Wood is a knowledgeable, thoughtful critic who has written a book that should help us handle, and love, the instability of the modern novel. Contemporary authors have found many ways to bring the uncertainty, ambiguity and richness of our lives into fiction. And we are better for it.

R3W

(Unfortunately, How Fiction Works is not available for our Kindles yet. I’m sure it’s just a simple oversight which will be corrected as soon as a few of us hit that button at Amazon that automatically harasses the fine folks at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

My Dogs Saved My Reading

Ever enter one of those periods when, for some uncomfortable reason, you stop reading? Or, at least, significantly reduce the time you spend reading? I did. For several years.

This period came after I had some big surgery, the kind when you have it, the family gathers. Hell, I wasn’t worried; all I had was a shadow in my lung and an aneurysm in my aorta. I guessed, through the miracles of modern medicine, I’d be fine and I was. After a few months. Well, six months…

And after that, back to work for a couple years, then retirement, then move to warmth, like an old person, which I am definitely not…he said…defensively. I took and take coumidin to keep my blood from clotting around my St. Judes valve and a slew of other meds for a slew of quarrelsome maladies that can’t decide who should be #1.

Long story short – I know, too late – my coumidin failed one day and a little clot slipped through to my brain and I had a stroke, a small one, a mini-stroke really, a strokette. The effect was minor, but led to my period of reduced reading (Remember? That’s what I’m really writing about here.) I lost 30% of my field of vision; my left peripheral vision – poof! Gone. If you want to kill me, approach from the left and I am a dead man.

Reading is a strain. After a lifetime of seeing from left to right, I now see from center to right. Oh, you make adjustments, of course, and I still drive. I recommend friends avoid my neighborhood.
But, I have dogs. Who walk. And my docs tell me to walk to keep my heart healthy. And I tell me to walk to avoid the imminant threat of weighing 350 pounds. And we walk two to three hours a day.

On our walks I read. Three hours of reading a day, seven days a week, 363…er…5 days a year and you can read a lot. Since I’m semiretired (Don’t tell my students, they’ll expect me to finish grading their papers), I’ve launched the project I’ve been waiting for…to read all those books I told myself for 40 years I would read when I retired. Middlemarch. Bleak House. Return of the Native. Heart of Darkness. Origin of the Species. You know the ones. You have a list.

I’ve had time to read others, too, you know, the ones from the 20th and 21st centuries. More on these later. Of course, on our walks, I’m reading audiobooks, which are not exactly the same as traditional books, but, hey, we’re all about non-trad books here, aren’t we?

I bought my Kinkle 2 for one reason. You guessed it, right? Big type. Big type for every book I choose to read, for every issue of the Times, for all the free crap you can get for your Kindle and you do because you can and some of it is great. And big type for rereading In Search of Lost Time, which is never going to work as an audiobook, but works fabulously on my Kindle and I’ve just finished the first book, Swann’s Way, and Proust’s world is still there and lush.

My dogs got me to read again. My Kindle multiplies my reads. Life is good, ain’t it?