My summer break is finally here. I look forward to two events during the summer: writing more and reading more. I’ve already moved into the pages of three books although my break from teaching is hardly two weeks old.
For the past fifteen years or so, I’ve been making my way through Patrick O’Brien’s twenty-novel set of his Aubrey/Maturin seafaring works about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic era. I have only 100 pages left of the 19th novel, The Hundred Days, plus volume 20 (Blue at the Mizzen) to finish. A must read for summer 2011.
I also have been reading a recent biography, Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature, by Linda Lear. Potter was more than a writer of colorful and fascinating children’s books. She was a naturalist who was not accepted during her time (in part because she was a woman) and a conservationist well before such a thing existed. (I’ll have more to say about Potter as the summer progresses; she’s still a teen at the moment.)
As we drove to and from Arizona right after graduation (my excuse for no blog last week), Marianne read First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis aloud as we tooled along. Abigail and John were feisty, independent thinkers; we would do well to label them both as “Founding Fathers” of our democracy. Marianne and I were enthralled by the coalescing of so many currents in their lives: politics (obviously), but also home and often tragic family life, plus a passionate love for each other. They are a good model for contemporary committed couples given the carnage of marriage we see all too often in the American political landscape these days.
Lastly, I also opened a book I bought at Ypres last May while there with SMSU students, Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory by Julian Thompson. The author, a major general in the Royal Marines and a professor at King’s College, London, starts with the British Expeditionary Forces actions against the German Blitzkrieg while in Flanders in May 1940. He does so to stress the heroism and tenacity of the BEF before it was overwhelmed by the Panzer onslaught and left huddled on the Dunkirk beaches awaiting evacuation by the Royal Navy—the final part of the story we all know. Thompson shares an absorbing tale of French military blindness and Belgium wishful thinking, that their neutrality would save them this time, in 1940, although it hadn’t in 1914.
I guess it’s no secret that I am a book lover. Whenever I am in someone’s house which has a bookcase, I am not much of a conversationalist, I’m a library browser. I love seeing works I have heard about but not read, and also seeing my favorite works proudly on display. I especially love seeing works I teach on a shelf somewhere. It makes me feel that teaching novels isn’t so esoteric and irrelevant.
I recently spied dog-eared copies of Matilda and James and the Giant Peach which reveals that the adults of the house read to their children. Roald Dahl teaches kids about more than just chocolate. Houses with older kids (many now at college) usually have a tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s not surprising that this work has remained timeless. Its exposure of racism is as pertinent today as in the early Civil Rights Era.
I’m always excited to see Cry, The Beloved Country on a shelf, especially when its binding tells me it has been read. This novel has one of my favorite characters, Msimangu, a young, dedicated priest fighting racial injustice with Gandhi-like fortitude and determination. The work is an eye-opener for sheltered students who have no idea of what lurked under the oppressive stones of empire building. Move the Imperial stones aside, and they see that in the ooze underneath, the history of colonialism (European or not) is an ugly history.
It’s the same with All Quiet on the Western Front. Here is a story of youth and honor and gullibility. And then of disillusionment and horror. I am convinced that some wars need to be fought; World War One was not. Europe blundered into the slaughter and could never justify the carnage.
For a war that couldn’t be avoided, witness our Civil War, a war which should be viewed in its rawest contrasts and not glossed over with some fervor that celebrates “the honor-bound Confederacy” as actually having a real cause, now lost. It was a war over the ownership of humans. Black slaves as chattel, nothing more or less. I don’t often see it on a bookshelf, but pick up a copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara to witness the awful truth of that slaughter made worse by Southern “gentility.”
On the lighter side, when I see that children and adults have devoured Harry Potter, I am especially pleased. In Marshall when the intense frenzy of the final Potter books hit, I was among the first to get my hands on Book VI and Book VII. Locally, I got the 10th copy of The Half-Blood Prince in the summer of ’05; in ’07 I had slipped to 23rd when buying The Deathly Hallows. Either way, I was there at the stroke of midnight in our community bookstore, now unfortunately closed, to gather with witches, warlocks, nerds, geeks, book-freaks, and cyberpunks willing to try a different genre, plus all those enlightened parents who wanted to foster their youngsters’ passion for the right kind of magic, reading. I feel at home among these devotees of Rowling.
It’s a rare house that does not contain any of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works. The Lord of the Rings is almost as ubiquitous as the Bible. If Tolkien is there, I am almost certain of finding C. S. Lewis as well, Narnia and Screwtape and perhaps a personal work about his tragically lost wife, Joy.
While scouring my friends’ bookshelves, I am pleased to see a variety of cookbooks. Before Abigail and John Adams caught our attention, Marianne and I read aloud My Life in France, the well-crafted autobiography of Julia and Paul Child during their European sojourn that eventually lead to her writing The Art of French Cooking. (“And the rest is history,” as they say. . .) I enjoy seeing other cook books as well from vegetarian to Indian to “eat fresh and local” newbie works. It’s also encouraging to see a host of works about food production in America: Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.
Books do furnish rooms. Travel. History. Science for the non-scientific. Art. Photography. Fiction, including sci-fi. An occasional slim volume of poetry. I love a crowded bookcase with cock-eyed books stuffed in them. The montage shows that these volumes are for reading, not decorating. It’s a positive sign. As summer comes to warm us, don’t forget time for reading. Devour a novel or two (or a dozen) this summer. It’s good for your soul. Read to a bored kid. Buy them books. Ask them what they are reading and share how much you enjoyed reading about Tom Sawyer or Elizabeth Bennet. Live it up!
Two novels you can’t see on a bookshelf yet are my first two Marsco Saga works, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant. They are speculative fiction which brings in many elements of today’s political chaos into a story set 90 years from now. I plan to have them available for Kindle download in June or July this summer. Meanwhile, I have loaded two chapters of the first novel on this website if you wish to take a look. (Follow the Marsco link on this webpage.)