Reading: Autumn 2017

I started the year with a good pace, hoping to read at least thirty books, not an amazing number, but it would represent an slight improvement; however, I ran into some long ones that slowed me down considerably. Now it looks more like I'll probably end with about twenty-five. Since finishing Olive Kitteridge and Stegner's Crossing to Safety, I've completed Robert Gerwarth's massive The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (2016), a very scholarly and sometimes depressing analysis of World War I's aftermath of violence and conflict. Then, after that, I read a free ebook download from the University of Chicago Press: The Secret Lives of Teachers (2009) by Anonymous, an honest and frequently penetrating look at the frustrations of teaching high school in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. When I finished that one I moved on to Michael Chabon's latest novel, Moonglow (2016), our book club assignment for October. We had a good discussion of Chabon's fantasy memoir of his grandparents, both of whom experienced various traumas of World War II, then visited the aftermath on their offspring.

After Moonglow, I picked up Tamara Saviano's Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark (2016). Clark is (was) one of those Texas singer-songwriters I've long been interested in, probably since hearing Jerry Jeff Walker's recording of Clark's "L.A. Freeway," a line from which became the book's title. This biography is a fairly amusing and also slightly exasperating trip down memory lane, with many portraits of other Texas musicians, including, of course, Townes Van Zandt, who sometimes seems to haunt the narrative in the same way he haunted the lives of Guy Clark and Clark's wife Susanna.

Then, about the middle of last month I received my copy of Meredith Hindley's Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II (2017). I was eager to read this one, having watched from the sidelines as Meredith, a friend and former colleague, went from pitching the idea to agents and publishers and thence to years of research, travel, and writing. The result, I must say, is astonishing. And her timing could not have been better, with the book coming out almost to the day on the 75th anniversary of one of nearly everyone's favorite movies. The reason I say "astonishing" is that the book is in many respects as good as, if not actually better than, the film. Certainly, all of those fascinating fictional characters from the movie come to life in the very true stories Hindley tells of adventure and intrigue surrounding wartime existence in real life Casablanca. This may be the most entertaining history book I've ever read. Hindley is a formidable researcher and historian, but she is also a masterful storyteller. Way to go, Meredith.

When I'd finished with tales of Morocco, I turned to Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad (2016), which won the National Book Award and is the last of this year's book club assignments. It was an interesting book, but also perhaps necessarily unrelenting. Recent events in American history have confirmed, I fear, that there is no good outcome or happy ending possible for stories such as this. Every time the heroine, Cora, thinks she's made it out to freedom, she discovers she has been deluded or is once again deluding herself. By the end of the novel we must accept that there really is no escape from slavery; it lingers in the dread that the runaway slave experiences nearly every waking moment. And when that dread seems to slacken, something horrible will inevitably bring it back, usually with violence. I suppose the point of the book is that African slavery and its attendant race prejudice, something we would all like to put behind us and assign to the dustbins of history, lingers in America as a stain that cannot be expunged with any amount of good will. A few years ago some of us may have been deluded enough to dispute this thesis, but that would be difficult if not impossible to do today.

And so moving on to something more in keeping with my preferred delusions, I decided I would read perhaps the best known of the current Nobel laureate's novels: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989). I confess that I started this one not long after it was first published, but I got bogged down, and then the movie came out and I caved to temptation. My recollection is that Anthony Hopkins was (as he usually is) superb in the role of the main character, James Stevens, the most English of English butlers; so much so that now as I'm re-reading the novel I hear Hopkins' voice narrating it to me. Nevertheless, this time around I'm determined to read the book in its entirety. And it is, after all, set in that period I've made my specialty in recent years, just prior to and after World War II. I also see that this is my 26th book for 2017, so perhaps if I press on I'll get close to my original goal. I'll look for more short works. I think there may even be another Barbara Pym or two that I haven't re-read. (Yes, I count re-reading; after all, this is my list.)