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Super good reads: 5 Stars

52. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, by Mark Twain

53. Socrates, by Paul Johnson (NF)

55. The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
56. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (NF)
58. The Ugly American, by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
61. 1776, by David McCullough (NF)
62. Leonardo, by Frank Zöllner (NF)
64. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver
65. The Rim of the Prairie, by Bess Streeter Aldrich
66. Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
67. The Sixteen Pleasures, by Robert Hellenga
68. Monet, by Christoph Heinrich
69. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
76. Lord Peter Views the Body, by Dorothy Sayers

Also very good: 4 stars
52. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, by Mark Twain
54. Echo Burning, by Lee Child
57. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain
70. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
73. Love Among the Ruins, by Robert Clark
79. Inferno, by Dan Brown

Selected Notes:

52. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, by Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories includes “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” (the story that launched Twain’s career) and several other short stories such as “The 1,000,000 Bank-Note,” “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” and “Was It Heaven? Or Hell?” This latter one explored the folly of asserting that a lie, any lie, is a sin. “The 1,000,000 Bank-Note” re-minded me of the film Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche and Jamie Lee Curtis. The film is thought by many to be based on Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, published 11 years prior to this short story. The Mysterious Stranger is a novella of about 100 pages and is the last of the stories in this volume. It’s of the same genre as C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. It’s set in 1590 in Germany. The mysterious stranger calls himself Satan, a nephew of the real Satan, the only angel uncorrupted by sin. This Satan is virtually immortal and has scant interest in hu-man beings, considering the enormous ontological divide that exists between mortals and angels — he compares the distance between an elephant and a tiny red spider no larger than a pinhead. He shows the boys (a young Theodore is the first person narrator) a vision of the history of the world: war after war after war … this is what humans do. He has a dim verse of humanity’s devotion to the “Moral Sense.” The Mysterious Stranger was not published in Twain’s lifetime. No doubt he thought it would have been damaging to his career.

He was a good doctor and a good man, and he had a good heart, but one had to know him a year to get over hating him, two years to learn to endure him, three to learn to like him, and four or five years to learn to love him. It was a slow and trying education, but it had to be paid.
—“Was It Heaven? Or Hell?”

53. Socrates, by Paul Johnson (NF)
Had some excellent material here and my appreciation for Socrates, the first public philosopher has increased. I like his resolute determination to live a pure and good life, that is, one that follows the ethical path he had embraced. He never wrote down a word, like Jesus, and his interest in philosophy was tied to his interest in people and their needs. And he was condemned to death when the people needed a scapegoat, also like Jesus.

55. The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
This was a page turner and is set in the 12th century, beginning only about 20 years after my own historical novel, The Reluctant Crusader, ends. The reluctant crusader of my novel was Stephan of Blois, the father of King Stephen in Follett’s story. I was surprised that Follett didn’t mention that his Stephen was the grandson of William the Conqueror. His mother was William’s daughter Adela. But he did not mention parentage. Follett has good characters, good story line, good twists and surprises, and good research, better than mine by far. He’s written a follow up called World Without End sent in the 14th century. I might give it a try. And I would like to watch the mini-series, although it varies from the book, I’ve read. I enjoyed his description of the building of cathedrals, something I have studied a bit myself. (Spoiler alert): I was glad that all the bad guys got their just deserts (yes, the spelling of deserts is correct).

56. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (NF)
Finished the Mayflower book—which is less about the voyage of the Mayflower and more about the first 50 years of the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. Much of the book is devoted to King Philips War of 1675-76. Enjoyed it.

57. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain
Twain goes after the romantic idealism of Sir Walter Scott, capitalism (advertising, marketing, etc.), the Roman Catholic Church, the royal family (homage to cats would serve just as well, and cats don’t require much upkeep, don’t kill anyone and can take care of themselves) and the stuffy ways of the Britons. Lots/ of quotable Twain stuff, and hilarious scenes, like Sir Lancelot and his knights coming to the rescue on bicycles. Here are some quotations:

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.”

“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”

“Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government, and earthly despotism would be the absolute perfect earthly government if the conditions were the same; namely the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual; but as a perishable, perfect man must die and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible.”

“Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified way. His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate. He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy. I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and “Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the grace of God King,” would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on.”

“Never regret anything that made you smile”

“Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church. More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat; more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatching his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give thanks, without even waiting to rob the body.”

58. The Ugly American, by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
It is set in SE Asia and everything these authors wrote rang true. It is a fiction, a novel, but as a story, it is an extended parable. It is the key to why we lost Vietnam, and indeed explains why we shouldn’t be there in the first place. It should help us understand that the unification of the PRC with Taiwan and Hong Kong are inevitable developments. But it is also an indictment of U.S. foreign policy exacerbated by the departmental infighting and jockeying for power. I imagine that many decisions are may by people who have never been on the ground. Their ridicule of the diplomatic class posted overseas who didn’t know the local language was well-deserved. They noted that in most cases the Russian ambassadors could speak the language of their host country. This book should be required reading in high school classrooms. I am surprised I have not read it until now.

61. 1776, by David McCullough (NF)
I finished David McCullough’s book 1776, which I enjoyed very much. I had not realized that when the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, it was so much whistling in the dark. Destinies were by no means decided by then. And indeed, the fighting would go on for another seven years — the Treaty of Paris was not signed until 1783. Additionally, the book provided a lot of illustrative material about valor, success against the odds, etc. As I read (it was a page turner), I was reminded of the battle sites in and around Princeton, New Jersey, which I visited when I was studying there. And I also remember visiting the site of GW’s crossing of the Delaware River. There still ruins of forts and outposts in the area.

65. The Rim of the Prairie, by Bess Streeter Aldrich
This started slowly for me, but I became interested about 50 pages in and thereafter I was hooked. Good story. You could call Aldrich an American Jane Austen. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, but there were twists along the way. The denouement is wrapped up too quickly, and she is given to pages of excessive description, but it is all apt for eastern Nebraska, having lived there myself. The volume I read is the book that was given to my Grandmother Marion in 1925, the year TROTP was published. It’s a first edition. In the book there are a few places where Marion underlined in pencil the name of a character and then made an annotation referring to a real person living in Cedar Falls. Marion was a classmate of Aldrich’s in high school and she undoubtedly recognized some of the charac-ters as drawn from BSA’s experience in Iowa. Five stars.

66. Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
enjoyed it very much. Each chapter is titled in terms of the character or characters who take the stage. This is unnecessary as the reader would have no trouble knowing who is the focal point of the chapter. Some reviewers talk about how the novel is about the interweaving of several stories into one tapestry, but I didn’t feel that way at all. Isn’t that what any novel is? Haruf had a story. He told it and the story has several interesting characters. The ending was good but not sentimental. I wished a couple of nasty characters could have had a better comeuppance. The title refers to the simple song or mono-phonic line used in Western rite churches, unadorned, almost a chant, and it’s a good metaphor for the unadorned, simple and sometimes harsh life of the western plains. (Haruf wrote two additional novels based in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, call-ed Eventide and Benediction.) I enjoyed this, also, because it is set in northeastern Colorado, and the real town of Brush is mentioned as is Denver. This novel made Haruf’s name, and he didn’t get it published until he was about 50. It enabled him to retire from teaching and he lived until he died a few years ago in Salida, Colorado. He writes with obvious knowledge of farming and animals, and his style reminds one of Hemmingway. He doesn’t lapse into rhapsodic descriptive paragraphs as did Bess Streeter Aldrich in The Rim of the Prairie. Interesting that I should read two books sequentially that are set in the western Midwest.

67. The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga
Enjoyed this novel very much, although the ending could have been more decisive than it was, but I was satisfied. Was not able to predict some of the turns and developments. Not formulaic in any way. The story involves a young woman signing on to help restore books in Florence after a devastating flood. She comes across a rare book of erotic poems and drawings, and it’s got to be worth a fortune. The volume, found in a convent, just might save the convent and its library from an overreaching bishop. Along the way, the author treats us to a lot of art history, and the heroine becomes a figure in the art of her own life including several romances. Those who enjoy art lit books such as Artemisia by Alexandra Lapierre, The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Falling Angels and The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier, will enjoy this. Sadly, Robert Hellenga died only last month (July 2020). I would like to read another of his novels.

68. Monet, by Christoph Heinrich (NF)
Loved this. Learned some things about him I did not know, por ejemplo:
• His first name is Oscar
• He spent time in military service in North Africa
• His father was opposed to his painting career
• His early success as a school boy was with caricatures
• That he often painted on very large canvases
• The en plein-air concept
• That his first wife, Camille, died at 32
• The Impressionism moniker came from the title of one of his paintings, and was ridiculed as an impression of a painting, rather than a painting itself
• That he painted into his 80s
• That he produced such a prodigious body of works
• That he often painted in series, like the haystacks, poplars and of course the water lilies
• That he was influenced by Japanese art
• That he lived the last 43 years of his life at Giverny, and that he created the gardens and ponds there that attract tourists there today.
The book is replete with color photos of his works.

69. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
The meta-message of Prodigal Summer is a call to reexamine our relationship with nature, and to adjust our assumptions about predators and the delicate balance that exists in the food chain. Along the way we’re introduced to moths, butterflies, snakes, and especially coy-otes. This is done by telling the story of three people, whose lives slowly begin to intersect half way through the novel. It’s very well done, and the reader definitely becomes interested in these characters—they are interesting and plausible. One is a Jane Goodall type of outdoorsy woman in her mid-40s, who works for the Forest Service as a game warden, and rarely comes down out of the mountains. Her supplies are brought up to her by messenger once a month. The second person is also a woman, but younger. She’s in her late 20s, married, the daughter of a Palestinian woman and a Polish man. In other words, she’s an outsider. Her husband is the youngest in a family of five children, the other siblings all girls. They seem to resent the woman their baby brother has married. She is recently from Lexington where, as a bug scientist, she was lecturing on bugs. The third character is a man almost 80, eight years a widower, who lives next to a granola hippie woman in her 70s who grows apples, tomatoes and more with an organic certification. Meanwhile, he’s trying to reintroduce the American Chestnut tree that used to grow in the area until decimated by blight. There are other characters of course, but it’s all quite nicely done. The stories of these people are told in chapter headings: Predators, Moth Love and Old Chestnuts. Very good read. Five stars.

70. Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
I found this to be slow going at first, but it picked up, and I enjoyed the whimsy, and the character of Mr. Toad, for we all know such conceited, narcissistic people—and of all the personality disorders, narcissism is the most difficult to modify.
Although a publishing sensation in 1908, this book could not be published today as children’s literature. I would like to talk to a children’s author about this, or an elementary school librarian. It’s a chapter book, the vocabulary is far beyond what any third grader or even sixth grader could handle today. There are words in it I have not seen—mostly related to plants and animals and English customs of 100 years ago. So I wonder who actually reads this book anymore. Not children, surely. Do parents read this book to their children?

73. Love Among the Ruins, by Robert Clark
The plot is not terribly engaging: two under-18 teens falling in love and deciding to run off. The guy is somewhat angry and rebelling against the establishment (it’s 1968), and she is a thoughtful, poetry-loving girl who’s acquiescent. Clark does a nice job opening up their minds to the reader. He also nicely dissects a middle-class marriage, and hits the right notes in his descriptions of the 1960s, especially 1968. RFK has just been assassinated. As I suspected, things don’t end well for the kids who ran away. It was not a happy book. But then, 1968 was not a happy year. Mahler, Bernstein, the Age of Anxiety. This is an anxious book, and Clark’s writing had a bit of a Victorian accent to it, Jamesian in a way, and he writes a little as do I, and I liked it.

76. Lord Peter Views the Body, by Dorothy Sayers
Excellent read. Lord Peter Wimsey recalls Sherlock Holmes and in fact Holmes is mentioned occasionally; Sayers herself makes the comparison: the same type of deductive reasoning, observational skills and he has a sidekick, Bunter the butler. Wimsey, like Holmes, comes from a family with connections, but Wimsey is wealthy. He has the same build as Holmes, but shorter at 5.8. I like Wimsey’s laconic personality better than Doyle’s Holmes who often seems cold, irascible and unappreciative. This book is very much like the Sherlock Holmes book I had as a child—and still have. Unlike Doyle, however, Sayers wrote eleven novels about Lord Peter Wimsey’s exploits and I want to read some of them.