Books read January through December 1989
| Author | Crisp, Quentin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 212 |
| Extras | Preface by Michael Holroyd. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | January 1989 |
An autobiography of an extraordinary man, related in the most precise and articulate prose, filled with effective use of what Holroyd calls "the inverted cliche"
Crisp was a flamboyant, exhibitionist homosexual who braved ostracism, poverty, and outright physical attack to assert himself publicly as exactly what he was. He put red or blue in his hair, wore makeup, and walked in the stereotypical fairy way. Even when soliciting clients as a free lance commercial artist, although unfailingly considerate and polite, he made no concessions to conventional appearance.
I started the book with considerable distaste, growing to revulsion, as he described his self-indulgent childhood of bedwetting, fouling himself, and demanding momma. But as I read further I began to respect him, first for his insight, then for his honesty, and finally for his courage to face himself and the world without flinching and without retreat.
Crisp was a limited and even, as he put it, disfigured man. But he had an unusual ability to see into himself and to formulate what he saw in precise, accurate words.
See the diary for December and January.
I wrote quite a bit about this book in the diary, on December 24, 1988 and January 2 and 13, 1989 and don't think I need to add more here.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 1989 |
A 12 year old neighborhood boy knocks on Nero Wolfe's door and asks to hire him, for four dollars, to investigate a suspicious event he saw in a passing car. The next day the boy is murdered and Nero and Archie launch an investigation which eventually uncovers an unsavory gang preying upon illegal immigrants, as well as a murderer.
I am beginning to forget the plot lines of these books. Incidents and favorite scenes run together into a general ambiance of the three story brownstone, the fine meals by Fritz, the orchids, Archie at his typewriter, and Nero, with his current book and his glass of beer. One slips into a timeless, ageless world of old friends and comfortable surroundings - with a spice of adventure and a final helping of truth and justice.
How wonderful that there are over 40 of these books. What a nice contribution Stout has made. At four hours per book, it's 160 pleasant hours for each of his thousands of readers.
The "Golden Spiders" of the title were earrings worn by the woman in the car observed by the little boy. They were a slender lead which eventually helped track down the killer.
I don't think I can improve on the comment field that I wrote in 1989. As of this writing, 27 years later, I have read another 14 Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe books. I'm not reading them as often as I was around the time I wrote that comment, but I still recollect the feelings that motivated me to write it.
I may not be the same kind of person or the same kind of reader that I was in 1989. I'm more conscious of the shortness of time left to me and that detracts, I think, from the timeless feelings that came over me when reading books like this one. It detracts, but it doesn't completely overthrow it. As the Israeli writer wrote, "that which once was can never cease to have been." I'll come across his name in one of the book cards as I keep converting them.
| Author | Thackeray, William Makepeace |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dent, London: Everyman's Library, 1970 |
| Copyright Date | 1858 |
| Number of Pages | 427 |
| Extras | Introduction by M.R. Ridley |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | October 1989 |
A historical novel of the period of the English restoration, Queen Anne, and the accession of King George. It is written, quite beautifully in the language of the time, as the first person narrative of Henry Esmond, a presumed bastard son of the Lord Castlewood.
The story begins with Henry as a little boy, raised by a Catholic in the Castlewood estate. Later he becomes a Protestant but retains his loyalty to King James throughout the time of William and later Anne, risking his life for the young pretender, only to find that his 30 years of faithful devotion was stupid and unrequited and against the interests of his country. So too his long love for his beautiful cousin Beatrice was stupid and unrequited. In the end he realizes his foolishness, marries Beatrice's mother whom he has always loved, and plans to leave for Virginia.
Of course this tiny summary says hardly anything about the politics, the history, the piercing analysis of society, and of human emotions, which is always present in Thackeray's books. Nor does it say anything of the clear, natural, masterful use of language, even when rendered in seventeenth century style, which Thackeray produces. It is a deep book, a beautiful book, a book which teaches us history, a book which teaches us about the humbug of our sacred cows, a book which teaches us about the fine humanity and the foolishness in our own hearts.
I will someday read the rest of Thackeray's work.
This book made a deep impression on me. It's the only book I have recorded as having read in October, 1989, though I probably started one or more of the books I recorded for November before the end of the month.
I had read Vanity Fair the year before and between that and this book I came to regard Thackeray as one of the very few, very best novelists ever to have lived, in the same class as Tolstoy, Mann, Melville, Faulkner and not a great many others - though I had already long before come to the view that different authors have qualities that are not really comparable. There are many ways that an author can be great.
| Author | Thomas, Ross |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Company, 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 383 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | November 1989 |
A suspense thriller about an ex-spy of some kind who is hired by a consultant to help him further corrupt a city government in order to get it thrown out of office and bring in a slate of reformers.
The story traces several periods in Lucifer Dye's life in interleaved chapters. There's a childhood in a Chinese whorehouse, spying for the Americans in Hong Kong, a prison in Singapore, college life with a beautiful wife - murdered by people who are after her spy father, and the main plot in the Southern city of "Swankerton".
To say that the story is improbable doesn't get at the essence of it. Thomas is a good writer. He's full of cracks about American life and the sleaze in government and society. H keeps up interest by using the right tricks of the suspense writer. He mixes an absurd story with some believable (and some unbelievable) action scenes.
I suppose that, on balance, this is a good example of a bad genre. It has all of the genre's faults - a hard bitten hero with a heart of gold, a whole bunch of whores with hearts of gold, an intellectual unwise in the ways of the world, an old cop who can beat anybody, a story that's absurd, villains with no redeeming features, simple, simple, simple.
I did like reading it even though I found the juvenilia to be obtrusive and irritating.
What I remember best about this book is the clever title, which turns out to be a paraphrase of a line in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. "Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?"
| Author | Tracy, Diane |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 157 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Management |
| When Read | November 1989 |
A very simple book of commonplace observations, primarily about how to relate to people. There is no technical information and, in specific areas like "Interviewing Techniques", the information given consists more of superficial platitudes than knowledgeable advice.
Nevertheless, the basic principles of human relations that she emphasizes struck me as sound, important, and frequently ignored by managers I have known - with serious consequences.
Key principles are: Be a teacher. Always increase the skills of your employees in order to raise productivity. Don't work around unproductive people, teach them, make them productive, don't unfairly burden the good, productive people, work on their weaknesses. Build a team. People work for a team. They stay for a team. Sandwich every criticism between two compliments. Only criticize an action, never criticize a person. Always share credit - spread it around, never take it yourself. Say "we", not "I". Take the blame yourself.
A perfect example of what not to do is Bill's telling Jackie and Mike, "Alright, you wanted this job now you better perform or else." If he made the decision to give them the job, he has to make it his responsibility that they succeed and psychologically support them. This is unfair to Bill - I'm going on hearsay.
It's a typical book for managers - commonsense advice made very, very easy to read. Nobody writes computer books that way. Suspicious isn't it?
I'm blathering.
I must have been in an odd mood when I wrote that book card.
"Bill" is, of course, Bill Ford, then the President of Online Computer Systems, where I worked first as an employee and then as a consultant from 1979 to 1990. "Jackie" was Jackie Elpers, a highly capable and intelligent woman with whom I worked closely at one point but who came to resent me (did I violate the rules of management above?) Mike may have been Mike Dorsey or Mike Lay, I don't remember which and I don't remember what the project was that Bill approved as recounted in the first paragraph of my comment.
I also don't remember why I read a management book. Was I already preparing to open an office for Online in London?
These things are all behind me now. I won't be surprised if my ideas about all of them change and fade in the next few years. I also won't be surprised if they don't. My work life was intense in those days, though not as bad as it had been when I was an employee working 60 hours a week.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Walker and Co., 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 1989 |
The first (I presume) of the George Smiley books. Smiley, a student of German literature, is recruited as a spy in 1928. He spends the 30's and 40's war years as a spy in Germany. After the war he is put on the staff, doing routine security interviews, until a man he interviews in the foreign Office turns up dead the next day. He visits the man's home the next day and interviews his wife, who accuses Smiley of driving her husband, Samuel Fenman, a Jewish scholar/diplomat, to suicide. While he is there, the phone rings. It is a wake up call for the dead man.
Eventually Smiley and a policeman track down the killer, who turns out to be connected to a man who worked as a spy in Germany with Smiley during the war
All of the elements of the master, Le Carre, are here. The characters are sophisticated, intellectual, alienated, deeply concerned about ideology and yet cynical and skeptical about themselves and their causes. The enemy, though only dimly seen, and that from afar, is also intellectual and ideological.
The action scenes are always a bit muddled. Events never happen exactly as planned, no matter who does the planning. The dialog is remarkably rich, remarkably intelligent, remarkably authentic sounding.
| Author | Chekhov, Anton |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | Ecco Press, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1919 |
| Number of Pages | 198 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | November 1989 |
"The Bishop" 1902, "The Letter" 1887, "Easter Eve" 1887, "The Nightmare" 1886, "The Murder" 1887, "Uprooted" 1887, "The Steppe" 1888.
Each of these stories has a religious character in it and, except for "The Steppe", they are all involved with religion. "The Bishop" is about a bishop dying of typhoid fever. He goes about his life, trying to pray and lead services, wishing his mother and other people would treat him as a person, not as a bishop. "The Letter" is about a stern letter of correction written by a learned priest on behalf of an indulgent but inadequate father who loves the letter but does not send it. "Easter Eve" is about a ferryman with more religion in him than any priest, and more poetry too. He lives on the fringe of a monastery where he was the only man to truly appreciate the deep spirituality of a recently deceased monk. "A Nightmare" is about a squire and a parish priest. The squire imagines the priest to be stupid, womanish, and irresponsible. In fact, the man is almost starving to death in extreme poverty. "The Murder" is about a man who kills his irritating brother. The brother had disparaged the man's religious views until he couldn't stand it. But murder and imprisonment took a much deeper toll on his spiritual life. "Uprooted" is about a Jew converted to Christianity. In fact he is a man with no roots anywhere who drifts constantly. Finally, "The Steppe", C's longest story (141 pages) is about a young boy carried across the steppe to live in a foster family and go to school.
All of these stories have to do with disparity between real life and idealized life - a disparity which has its roots in our real situations but makes its effects felt in our inner souls. They are existentialist stories. They tell of lives which proceed along their paths but never reach their ends. The people in these stories do what they have to do. They know no alternatives. Given whatever choices they had, they chose the lives they led. Yet they are all empty or failed or forgotten. All are ultimately completely alone.
Very powerful writing.
I didn't record the number of pages in this volume. Looking on Amazon I see many editions with this title, one of which, published by "IndyPublish", says it is Tales of Chekhov Volume 7 and is listed as 198 pages. I chose that length to record here. The others range from 140 pages in a Kindle electronic version up to 644 pages.
It has been too many years since I read Chekhov. He was once among my favorite writers and I should say that he still is even though I haven't returned to him to re-read his work.
I have some memory of "The Steppe", but the memory that came back strongest when I read these book notes 26-1/2 years later was of "The Nightmare". Extreme poverty to the point of starvation was not an experience familiar to the squire. He couldn't recognize it. The reader, meeting the priest through the squire's eyes, doesn't recognize it either until Chekhov pulls away the curtain of ignorance and shows us that there's nothing wrong with this man that a few unattainable rubles worth of food and clothing couldn't cure. It's a revelation to us and a lesson.
I'm currently in the midst of Hemingway's Men Without Women. Where Chekhov is penetrating and psychological, Hemingway is spare and keeps to the surface - though I have also described Chekhov as "so tight, so spare, so deep, and always so inevitable" (diary entry for 10-19-1989.) The depth of his characters is always and only revealed by their behavior and their essentially superficial speech, never by the author's explanation.
Both were great writers, demonstrating that there are different ways that great writing can be great, even when writing about similar problems.
I only see four book cards for Chekhov. My first was for The Cherry Orchard read in 1980. My last was for this book of stories. I have generally only written up book notes for book length reading, so it's possible that I have read more of Chekhov in individual stories, possibly in collections by multiple writers, than this slim group of four would indicate. I would have thought that I did, but I don't know and have no documentary evidence. I did read Troyat's biography of Chekhov and I can say that I have always revered Chekhov as a great writer.
There are some notes in my diary about this collection of Chekhov stories.
| Author | Priestley, J.B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 276 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1989 |
Tom Adamson, 36 year old professor of colonial economic history, leaves Australia to return to England and find his father, who abandoned him, his mother, and sister when Tom was only three years old. He arrives in England and first meets his two cousins. "Chas" is a rip-off artist who rips off Tom, but does get him started in his search. Leonora is the wife of a Tory MP living in a dull world of Conservative women's garden clubs and unable to cope with her beatnik son.
During the search he meets several more odd characters. He falls in love with the beautiful countess Helga, who turns out to be devoid of interest, and then meets old Dr. Firmius and young Judy Marston, whom he will eventually marry. Finally, he finds his father working as a writer in a resort hotel. The old man had been an actor, painter, army captain, writer of bad checks, convict, salesman, waiter on a cruise ship, and other things, including alcoholic.
In the end it all comes out well. Tom finds his Dad and sets him up with an annuity so he doesn't have to work anymore. Then Tom gets the girl and resolves to get a job with UNESCO, doing good for the world.
I liked the book quite a lot up until the last 40-50 pages. Then, as he did in Bright Day, Priestley began to force everything to his happy and socially justifiable ending. The dialog, which seemed okay to me before then, began to look stilted. It probably was all along.
Nevertheless, P is an observant and intelligent writer. He seems at his best when he's writing about society or work, and at his worst when working on the story itself.
Oh well.
I think I remember how I found books like this. I would walk into the library, I'm thinking particularly of the Montgomery County Wheaton Library at the moment but it was similar at the Randallstown Library, and go to the new book shelves. I would look over all of the books on the non-fiction shelves and then on the fiction shelves, picking a few of each and putting them in my bag. Then I'd go to the main fiction shelves, starting at one end, and browse through to the other end, more or less scanning every book on the shelf and stopping to look at one here and one there. For particular authors I'd look more carefully. For others I'd skip over them quickly. After that my next stop was the paperback area, or the separate science fiction or mystery areas. I had to move fast because there was a lot to look at with, in Wheaton anyway, only one hour to look. The marvelous book sale rooms closed at 8 pm and I would stay until the last minute before going upstairs to the library, which closed at 9.
This particular book would have been 22 years old when I read it in 1989. It was probably not in the new book section. I have no idea what drew me to it. There was always then, and now, a certain randomness to my book selections.
I really don't remember anything about this book. If I try hard I can convince myself that I do, but I have to try hard.
| Author | Simon, Roger |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Villard Books, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 228 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 1989 |
A Moses Wine mystery in which Simon works out some of his feelings about Jewishness and Zionism.
Wine is hired by an Arab to find the killer of another Arab. The chief suspect is an acrobatic, half-crazy, child-like young man from Los Angeles with a JDL (Jewish Defense League) type past who has gone into hiding in Israel on the West Bank.
Wine follows the trail to Israel and meets fundamentalist Jews, a Meir Kahane under a fictitious name, Israeli intelligence agents, Jewish Americans in Tel Aviv for a wedding, or in Jerusalem on various personal guests.
The plot was so strange and moved so quickly that it was difficult to take it seriously. But the view of Israel and Judaism were interesting to a person like me who wants to know what another person who is at least in some respects like me, thinks about it all.
After flirting with Jewish mysticism, Wine returns to his Shiksa in Los Angeles, cured of longing for whatever it is that we long for with respect to Israel.
One thing I'll say for Roger Simon is that he has been unafraid to use left-wing political themes and even to question Israel in what are clearly intended as popular books. That's what attracted me to him when I read Peking Duck. The writing didn't hold me after the next two books, this being the middle one.
I have a copy of his The Big Fix and, given enough time, who knows, I might be tempted to read it.
| Author | Wolfe, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 659 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1989 |
This must be the most talked about book of the 1980's.
Sherman McCoy, chief bond salesman for a Wall St. firm, takes a wrong turn in a car with his misress and winds up in the Bronx. There is an incident in which his girlfriend Maria backs up the car in what appears to be a robbery attempt and speeds off with them both. A boy from the Bronx is injured and later dies.
All of this becomes a cause celebre as a corrupt black minister, Reverend Reginald Bacon, and a degenerate English newspaper reporter, Peter Fallow, go after the story of the rich white man who kills a black boy. The D.A.'s office joins in and Larry Kramer, assistant DA obsessed with his neck muscles and impressing girls because he's bored with his wife, joins the hunt for the killer. McCoy is caught through his own ineptitude and put through the mill, losing everything.
There are no attractive characters in this book. Everyone is motivated by absurd egocentricity and vanity. We feel for them because their pain and suffering is made very real. But we also see nothing noble in their actions.
McCoy begins the story as a self-described "Master of the Universe." He imagines himself to be life's finest flower, a man who gave his wife a fine income and now, by virtue of his high achievement, he deserves a "frisky young animal", Maria.
W is an extraordinary observer and interpreter of life in New York. His cynical descriptions of high finance, black and white politics, police, justice, newspapers, law firms - are all literally astonishing and filled with a verisimilitude that makes them quite believable despite the high comedy and exaggeration that he presents. It is a sensational and compelling book.
All of Tom Wolfe's books have been sensational. He ridicules his characters, not because he is cruel, but because they are ridiculous. Their pretensions, their self-importance, their competitiveness, and their cowardice are convincing. So too is their pain and, just maybe, in some cases, their courage and their redemption.
The scene in which two detectives visit McCoy's millionaire apartment is fantastic. The two are going through a list of 50 car owners whose cars fit the description of the one that hit the boy. They are going through the motions. They think it more than just unlikely that McCoy is the killer. What, after all, would a man like him be doing in the Bronx at that time and place? But McCoy is nervous and unnatural. Asked if they can see his car he hems and haws and says that maybe he should consult his lawyer. Incredulous at his behavior, they start to see the man as an actual suspect and eventually nail him.
McCoy acts foolishly throughout the novel but, by the end he has come to a different view of himself. Brought before a judge, the judge notices that McCoy's fists are cut and bruised. He asks if McCoy has been abused in jail and if he needs help. McCoy, who has learned to fight to protect himself against bullies in the jail says, No your honor, it's nothing I can't handle.
It turns out that the boy who was killed really was trying to hold up and rob the occupants of the car. He played it wrong and get run over by accident, but it is questionable whether McCoy should have been treated as he was by the justice system. But Wolfe puts together a perfect storm of community outrage, politicians making hay, a black community leader and a white DA both attempting to advance their own careers on the back of McCoy. There are no heroes. Justice is a show and an illusion. The foundational institutions and people in our society are ordinary, limited, men.
It's going on 27 years since I read this. I've forgotten most of the details. But there are still passages that have stayed with me - the ununderstood but disturbing bump under the wheels as McCoy and Maria drive off, the interview by the cops, the DA flexing the muscles in his neck to impress the woman who just thinks there's something wrong with him, the shock when McCoy is confronted by would be bullies in the jail.
I remember something of all of the Tom Wolfe books that I read. He is one of America's great writers.