rocketjk's '26 50

Greetings, all! I'm back for a 2026 reading challenge. Sad to say, 2025 was the second in a row during which I read short of my 50-book goal, though I did read 46 books, which was an improvement over 2024's 41. In '24, I blamed the cross-country move my wife and I made during the year plus the four or five very long books that made it into my reading. In 2025 I only had a few of those chunksters to ascribe blame to. In 2023 read 58 books. That was a bit of a bump up from 2022's 53 books, which was a good effort but didn't come close to 2021's 67 or 2020's crazy 82-book rampage. We'll see where this year takes me. 2019 found me reading 63 books. My previous five totals, when I still owned my used bookstore, had been 41, 41, 46, 44, 46 and, in the first year of the store, only 40. I doubt I'll ever hit 82 again, but who knows?

In case you're interested:
2025 50-Book Challenge thread * 2024 50-Book Challenge thread
2023 50-Book Challenge thread * 2022 50-Book Challenge thread
2021 50-Book Challenge thread * 2020 50-Book Challenge thread
2019 50-Book Challenge thread * 2018 50-Book Challenge thread
2017 50-Book Challenge thread * 2016 50-Book Challenge thread
2015 50-Book Challenge thread * 2014 50-Book Challenge thread
2013 50-Book Challenge thread * 2012 50-Book Challenge thread
2011 50-Book Challenge thread * 2010 50-Book Challenge thread
2009 50-Book Challenge thread * 2008 50-Book Challenge thread

In addition to the books I read straight through, I like to read anthologies, collections and other books of short entries one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once. I have a couple of stacks of such books from which I read in this manner between the books I read from cover to cover (novels and histories, mostly). So I call these my "between books." When I finish a "between book," I add it to my yearly list.

Master List (Touchstones included with individual listings below):
1: The Doorman by Chris Pavone
2: The Penitent by Isaac B. Singer
3: Life Magazine November, 7, 1955 edited by Edward K. Thompson
4: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
5: Independent People by Halldor Laxness
6: How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South by Esau McCaulley
7: Chronicles of the Canongate by Sir Walter Scott
8: The Rare Coin Score by Richard Stark
9: The Heiké Story by Eiji Yoshikawa
10: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Moore
11: Spycatcher: the Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer by Peter Wright
12: Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx by Roy White with Paul Semendinger
13: Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
14: A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools (a.k.a. Albion W. Tourgee)
15: The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad
16: The Story Continued: The New York Times Magazine, January 13, 1974 by J. Anthony Lukas
17: What You Are Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
18: No-one Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi
19: Theodore Herzl: The Charismatic Leader by Derek Penslar

Book 1: The Doorman by Chris Pavone



My first book of 2026 was a selection of my monthly book group. Billed as a thriller, The Doorman doesn't really become particularly thrillerish until maybe the final fifth of the narrative. Before that we get Pavone's description of life inside a famed old high-tone co-op apartment building on Central Park West in New York City's Upper West Side. The only character of any appeal and, for me at least, interest is the book's title character, one of the building's doormen, known as Chicky Diaz, a working class fellow of 50 whose wife died a few years back and whose kids are grown and moved away. Otherwise, we get a roster of over-the-top stereotypes. The well-intentioned art consultant, Emily Longworth, who has traded a decade of just getting by for marriage to an ultra-rich, who has gradually revealed himself to be, you guessed it, emotionally manipulative and controlling, and a villain to boot, being in the arms business and all. And yet his fortune is so vast by now that the money is, basically, bottomless. Emily is, of course extremely beautiful. We are brought inside a meeting of the co-op board, and here, too, stereotypes abound. What plot there is through the book's first three quarters takes place within the context of police shootings that have the city on edge.

Pavone's writing is pretty good, on a paragraph and sentence level, and as I understand it from some LT members, Pavone has written better books.

Book 2: The Penitent by Isaac B. Singer



I read The Penitent as part of my ongoing project of reading all of Isaac B. Singer's novels in chronological order of their being published in English. I read two per year, the first book I start in January and the first book I start in July. The Penitent is the 9th in that order of Singer's 14 published novels, and I'm sorry to say that it is the first I've read that I found unsatisfying. In the book's opening section, a fictional Singer speaks of visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where he is approached by an obviously religious Jewish man, one Joseph Shapiro, who tells Singer how much he has admired his writing over the years. The rest of the relatively short book is Shapiro's monologue about his reasons for turning from secular Judaism to ultra-orthodox Judaism. It's a long refutation of the sins of modern secular society, the temptations of the flesh and of liberal society. We get very little of Singer's usual impressive and gratifying powers of description or delvings into human nature. Instead, we get a rather repetitive and unsubtle testimony. Some of the more approving reviews here on LT express the view that Singer here has presented an interesting portrait of the thinking and motivation of the dedicated religious mind, so your mileage may vary, but I didn't find anything that revealing in this novel. C'est la vie. I can only say that if anyone is thinking of exploring Singer's writing, I beg you not to start the The Penitent.

Book 3: Life Magazine November, 7, 1955 edited by Edward K. Thompson



Read as a "between book" (see first post). I have a large stack of old magazines sitting in my home closet which, over the past several years, I've been gradually reading one article at a time. Generally, when I finish them they go on the recycle stack, unless I find them of significant enough interest to hold on to them. This edition of Life will not make that cut. The issue is of historic interest to me because it came out four months and three days after my birthday. Americans of a certain age may recall Life as a weekly publication that was largely full of short snippets of human interest or historical note, accompanied by one or more photographs. And then each issue would have three or four longer articles. The two lengthy pieces in this edition included:

* The cover article, clearly the first of a series, called "The Epic of Man, Part 1: Man Inherits the Earth," by Lincoln Barnett. This piece provided a pretty interesting account of the appearance and development of modern humans, at least to the extent that research one the topic had developed in 1955. It was well written, but I don't know how much of it would be considered accurate 70 years later.

* The most interesting item in this edition of Life by far for me was "The 'Doomed Daredevils' of the I.R.A. Warm Up Their 40 Years' War" by Irish writer Sean O'Faolain, who we learn was "in his early twenties . . . the director of propaganda for the I.R.A. during the civil war in Ireland." O'Faolain provides a fairly in-depth history of the I.R.A. and an examination of the state of the organization and their activities at the time of the writing. By 1955, he basically finds them to be a tragic anachronism whose tactics have long since lost any possibility of securing their goals.

I'll go closet diving this afternoon to find out what the next magazine off the stack will be.

Book 4: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong



Just so no one is even momentarily mislead by what I'm going to write next, I found The Emperor of Gladness to be a marvelous novel.

You know that sort of novel full of quirky, misfit characters who band together somehow, in a music group, say, or at a workplace, or in a bar. They are poor, probably, and/or otherwise outsiders. Their lives are hard, and they probably have some stronger outside force arrayed against them: an evil landlord or building developer, or a relative with power of attorney who just doesn't understand, or maybe the medical industry, but none of that matters in the end, because they have each other and their quirky humor and positive outlooks on life. There might be some good writing, but overall the novel provides a feel good cartoon of a story, even if the ending's not all that happy. Over the years, my patience for such novels has been worn down to a stubble.

The Emperor of Gladness could have been that, because what I've just described is the basic framework. But Ocean Vuong is such a good writer, his ability to infuse this archetype with depth and breadth so acute, that this novel instead becomes a moving and memorable testimony of friendship and continued struggle against the headwinds of poverty, diminished expectations and disappointment with one's own choices. In the first few pages, 19-year-old Hai, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, addicted to pharmaceuticals, stands on a bridge over a freezing river and prepares to jump. He has already dropped out of college in New York City and returned in abject embarrassment to his mother in East Gladness, Connecticut, a gray, shrinking industrial town several miles outside of Hartford. Now his mother thinks he is in Boston studying in a medical program, though in truth he has never left East Gladness, so although he misses her, he can only speak with her on the phone, pretending to be in another city. But while he is looking down at the water, he is hailed from the window of a house on the far shore by an old woman who somehow convinces not to jump but instead to finish crossing the bridge so that she can warm him up with a blanket and give him a meal. She is Drazina, an immigrant from Lithuania who ran from Stalin's army at the end of World War 2 with her husband, now dead, and who now lives alone in the family house at the end of what is now mostly an abandoned and crumbling block of houses that dead ends at the riverbank. She offers him a room and he essentially becomes her caretaker. Soon, he prevails upon his cousin, Sony, to help him get a job at a nearby HomeMarket, a chain restaurant that specializes in rotisserie chicken and mac and cheese. The staff of this restaurant, a band of misfits in one way or another, will become his surrogate family. Again, this is all within the first several pages, so no real spoilers.

Well, you can see, perhaps, the potential for preciousness here. But Vuong's extreme talent in accurately depicting the claustrophobic humiliations of poverty and restrictions of class, and the strength of human aspiration and hope in the face of these factors, renders his character portrayals intensely human and their setting entirely recognizable. Also, since we feel we're in the real world rather than a feel good comedy, we are never sure of happy or longterm outcomes. Here's an overlong (sorry 'bout that!) quote to give you an idea of Vuong's writing:

There's a way an old Connecticut town feels when you pass through it at night. Hollowed out, blasted yet styled into a potent aftermath, all of it touched by an inexplicable beauty, like the outside has suddenly become one huge living room. And you feel you can sit down underneath the sincere light of a streetlamp and no one would bother you, no one would tell you to leave, because they know you're staying for a reason. That you're bound by your debts, by blood or sweat and the cars sprayed silver with hoarfrost along streets named after white millionaires no one remembers. How boring, he thought, to be yet another boy wanting to rid himself of the hometown dust clinging to his clothes, setting out like a spark flung from his mother's cigarette. He floated through the empty streets, eyes watering from the icy wind. He passed houses filled with warm light and imagined the people inside, his head growing blurry with the thought of them huddled in their tiny parlors full of furniture and voices breaking through the raiment light of TV commercials, the news, its endless reel of abjection, their bodies kept, for now, from the intolerance of daylight and its procession of work and misgivings. He imagined all the boys he wanted to know lying sleepless in their cramped and cluttered rooms, the curling posters and chipped trophies, the endless cords to defunct video game consoles, all of it once the feeble altar of teenage triumphs, now the detritus of adolescence.

This is a novel built much more strongly on character and setting than on plot. And yet, as we're pulled along by the writing, we relatively quickly come to care about these people, and to want to know what will become of them. And, to be clear, it is definitely not all as bleak as the excerpt I've provided above might suggest. There is, in fact, quite a bit of humor. This novel gets a rare five stars from me.

Book note: I read The Emperor of Gladness due to a tradition my wife and I share. At the beginning of each calendar year, we give each other to read whatever book from our previous year's reading that we enjoyed the most and which think the other would enjoy as well. My wife gave me this book to read. Not coincidentally, a couple of years back she also gave me Vuong's first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, which I similarly admired. (For the curious, the book I gave her this year was The Little World of Don Camillo by Italian author and journalist Giovannino Guareschi. Written in the 1950s, the book is a collection of stories about the village priest Don Camillo and his enemy/friend Peppone, the town's Communist mayor. Happily, she quite enjoyed it.)

Book 5: Independent People by Halldór Laxness



Independent People is, I think it's fair to say, considered a modern classic of Icelandic literature. It won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Originally published in 1946, the novel describes the life of rural farmers at the early part of the 20th century and takes its characters through the WW1 years and beyond. The title refers to the state of being that the book's protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, aspires to. To be "independent" means to be totally debt free, to survive only on one's own labor, with no sacrifice being too extreme to reach and retain this independence. The needs and desires of this wife and children are entirely beside the point when "independence" is at stake. The large landowners and merchants are, of course, eager to extend credit of one sort or another to such farmers, in order to put them and keep them in debt. Thoughout the book, Bjartur will go to extreme and sometimes wholly regrettable (to the reader) lengths to avoid this snare. No level of poverty is too oppressive to stand in service of his goal. He shrugs off and sometimes even causes personal losses that others, and most readers, would consider tragic. Bjartur, instead, is entirely focused on his sheep, as he sees increasing his flock as the road to remaining independent. This frequently enough makes Bjartur a rather unsympathetic figure to spend time with. And yet Bjartur is also a poet, enamored of the ancient Icelandic sagas, and acutely aware of the beauty of the natural world around him. Laxness simply presents him to us with relatively little editorializing. Sometimes we see the world through Bjartur's eyes, and sometimes through the eyes of one or the other of his several children or his elderly mother-in-law. Particularly effective is the perspective of Bjartur's youngest son, Nonni, who dreams of visiting other lands. There is a lot of spectacular natural description, and we get a visceral feeling of what life in the family's falling apart home is like. Here is a too-long to quote passage I really love, seen through Nonni's eyes, as his grandmother awakens and gets the fire going:

Mumbling away to herself, the old woman gathered her strength and, after one or two fruitless efforts to rise, managed finally to scramble out of bed with all the gasps and groans which always accompanied that task. She put on her sackcloth skirt and her short coat. Then the search for the matches began. It always ended with the matches being four. In the uncertain light of the wall-lamp he saw her bending bareheaded over the range, saw her mahogany rune-carved skin and her protruding cheek-bones, her sunken mouth and scraggy neck, her thin wisps of grey hear -- and was afraid of her, and felt that morning would not come until she had tied her woolen shawl round her head. Presently she tied her woolen shawl round her head. In these tottering movements and twitching eyes he greeted each new day, greeted afresh the return of concrete reality in this age-old, closed-up face which peeped mumbling and grumbling from its hood as, toiling, stringing, and wrestling, she once more set about here endless taks of lighting the fire. Then, without warning, his father started scratching himself, clearing his throat, spitting, and taking snuff. He put on his trousers. It was time to think of feeding the sheep.

That part of morning which belonged to reality had at last come round. It was comforting to reflect that one thing at least never varied from day to day: his grandmother's desperate wrestling with the fire. The brushwood was always equally damp; and although she broke the peat up into little pieces and laid the bits with the most wood in them nearest the kindling, the only result for long enough would be a dreary crackling and a damp, offensive reek that filled every cranny and stung one's nose and eyes with a smarting pain. And even if the boy put his head under the clothes, the smoke would have got there too. The flame in the wall-lamp would gutter low on the wick. But his grandmother's ritual grumbling was never so protracted that it did not carry with it the promise of coffee. Never was the smoke so thick or so blue, never did it penetrate the eyes, the nose, the throat, the lungs so deeply that it could be forgotten as the precursor of that fragrance which fills the soul with optimism and faith, the fragrance of the crushed beans beneath the jet of boiling water serving from the kettle, the smell of coffee.

While Bjartur in many crucial ways is an unsympathetic character, Laxness manages to allow us to feel a significant level of compassion for him, even in his extremities, and makes his world and his struggles interesting enough so that the reading experience one attains through Independent People is memorable and rewarding, or at least it was for me.

Book 6: How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South by Esau McCaulley



Neither of the two books I'd brought along to read on our just completed trip to New Orleans were enjoyable for me, and I DNFed both of them in short order. So when Steph and I passed by the Baldwin & Co. Books in New Orleans' Treme neighborhood, we went in, with me on the lookout for a book to replace those I'd jettisoned. I came out with How Far to the Promised Land, a memoir by Esau McCaulley about being raised, along with his brother and two sisters, in a tough neighborhood in Huntsville, Alabama, in the 1980s and 90s by a single mother, with his sometimes abusive, always troubled father gone most of the time. McCaulley is an author, columnist, theologian and pastor. His memoir begins, basically, with the news of his father's death and the realization that it will be up to him to deliver a eulogy. He begins interviewing family members and friends to learn as much about his father's life, and who he really was, as he can. In the memoir, goes back to provide his own life story and that of his family and community. The narrative also includes much about McCaulley's Christianity, and the ways in which his faith has shaped his life and sustained him.

I suppose one might think, well, how many versions of this familiar narrative--the lucky individual/family who survives early hardship and prejudice, raised successfully by a determined, religious single mother despite an absent/abusive father, etc., does on need to read? And yet, I am a Jew who, at 70 years old, still loves to sit down at a Passover seder each year and retell still again the story of the Exodus from Egypt, so I feel an empathy with the beauty of the powerfully, and regularly, retold tale. In this case, the beauty of the story shines through McCaulley clear and acute insights into the meanings of his experiences of growing up Black in the American South, and of having a mother who he knows to be a hero and yet in Regan's America would be scorned as a single mother of four, and therefore probably a "Welfare Queen," and thereby in the eyes of white racist America, a part of the problem.

An early example is McCaulley's relaying of the first incident in his life that exposed him to the corrosive power of racist hate. As a young boy in elementary school, he had come down with a stomach ache. Realizing something was amiss, his teacher had sent him to the nurse's office so that he could contact his mother to come get him. But when the nurse dials his mother's emergency contact number at the factory where she works on the assembly line, the man who answers merely curses at him and hangs up. Thinking the nurse might have dialed wrong, they try again. This time the man calls him the N-word and slams the phone down again. At that, he give up and goes back to class to wait out the school day. There follows this description:

That call would divide my Blackness in two. There was the Blackness of my community . . . Then came the other Black: the way the outside world saw us. Black as danger or trouble. Black as an odd intrusion in a world that would be better off without us. . . .

On television, a boy who experienced something that frightened him would come home and tell his dad. But I had no father to talk to about my newfound Blackness. I could not ask my father to tell me when he'd discovered that the world saw him that way. Nor did I confide in my mom. Children of single parents learn to dole out their traumas in small doses. When I saw her the evening and she asked how my day had been, I said, "It was fine." I knew she carried a heavy load, and I wanted her to believe that her sacrifice was working.

My father, then, hadn't just closed himself off from us; he had in part closed me off from my mother. My mom never knew that her seven-year-old son found out that he was Black as the world defines it while he was sick and calling for her help. That lie of omission was the first of many lies created out of love for her.

It is the insight in the first sentence of that third paragraph that I found so revealing, something I wouldn't have considered. I marked several passages for quoting as I read, but I will spare you most of the others. As a person who considers himself an agnostic at best, I very much appreciated McCaulley's method of describing the power of his faith: straightforward and never preachy. One description of different methods of prayer, and their effectiveness, struck me. As a young boy, he had prayed for the removal of his problems, but that hadn't occurred. His mother, as she told him later, had instead prayed for the strength to see her problems through, and felt that prayer had worked. At one point she tells him, "I prayed for strength and God spoke to me. I knew it was God because He pronounced my name correctly."

There is a lot like that in McCaulley's storytelling that I found powerful in its plain-spokeness and directness. In one of the blurbs on the book's back cover, author Tish Harrison Warren says, "This book is prophetic without being preachy, and heartwarming without being cloying." That's a decent summation of the book, I think.

A quick note that the copy editor in me wanted to know where the question mark was at the end of How Far to the Promised Land. But by the end of the book, and especially McCaulley's relating of his errant father's late attempts for atonement and renewal of his family ties, I began to think that maybe I'd misread the title after all. Instead of "How Far is it to the Promised Land?" maybe the intent is "How Far it is to the Promised Land." Or maybe it's both.

Also, I'd like to add that Baldwin & Co. Books turned out to be a wonderful bookstore and coffeeshop, too. They've got a lot going on there, including regular podcasts from their on-site studio. More info on all of it here: https://www.baldwinandcobooks.com/about

Book 7: Chronicles of the Canongate by Sir Walter Scott



Read as a "between book" (see first post). Chronicles of the Canongate is a collection of three long short stories, or perhaps two long stories and one novella, published by Scott in 1827 (200 years ago!). The volume also includes a long introductory narrative by Scott's fictional author Chrystal Croftangry, explaining a humorous "how and why" of the writing of the tales, plus shorter introductions before the second and third tales. The stories are all historic tales (taking place around 75 years before Scott wrote them) recounting legends of the Scottish Highlands. I found the three tales to be of varying enjoyment.

"The Highland Widow" relays the history of a reclusive old women, the widow of a notorious outlaw who, who resides alone in the Scottish Highlands and is by now the subject of much superstition and suspicion. Here, she tells her story to the woman who, years later, relayed it to Croftangry. She is mourning, not the death of her husband, but of her son, and the part she herself played in his downfall. The writing is certainly entertaining, but I couldn't work up a sympathy for this tragic heroine.

"The Two Drovers" tells the story of the falling out of two friends over a minor disagreement, and the tragic consequences. Pride and a faulty sense of honor are the villains, here. I only found this story moderately enjoyable, I'm afraid.

"The Surgeon's Daughter" is the longest story, the one I referred to as a novella, and it is, thankfully, the best of the three. The titular character is not the main one of the tale, though she plays a prominent role in the action. It is the two young men who both serve as apprentices to the kindly country surgeon of the title whose differing degrees of character strength and capacity for folly moves the narrative, as the scene moves from a small Scottish village to India in the days of the Raj and the heyday of the British East India Company. Who will prevail, and how will the heroine, buffeted by events mostly out of her control, fare in these stormy events. This one, as I said, was the most fun.

All in all, this is not the best of the Scott "Waverly" tales I have read, but there was enjoyment to be derived all in all from the set.

Book 8: The Rare Coin Score by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald Westlake)



This is the ninth book in Richard Stark's (a.k.a. Donald Westlake) guiltily entertaining Parker series. Parker is a psychopathic thief and all-round criminal who doesn't have any particular desire to kill you but will without compunction if you represent the slightest bit of trouble for him, the job he's in the midst of, or the security of his alias. This time Parker is brought into a scheme to knock over a rare coin convention. As usual, the development of the plan for the heist, and the interaction between the plotters, devious characters all of course, is one of the most entertaining sections of the story. Also as usual, though Parker is not the originator of the plan, he quickly assumes command of the proceedings as the most experienced, and most ruthless, of the crew. The planning is meticulous, as it is for every job that Parker agrees to take part in. But, also as always, the unforeseen will throw monkey wrenches left and right. The writing in this series is very sharp and the plotting swift and enjoyable, though Parker puts the "ugh" in anti-hero. I had found the series' previous entry, The Handle, to be the weakest of the series to that point, but I'm happy to say that The Rare Coin Score provided the bounce back I'd been hoping for.

Book 9: The Heiké Story by Eiji Yoshikawa (1892-1962)



The Heiké Story is a modern (1956) retelling of the The Heiké Monogatari, a Japanese epic from the thirteenth century that related the feudal wars that had raged throughout Japan during the previous centuries between the powerful, Heiké, Fujiwara and Genji clans. The action of Yoshikawa's modernization takes place during the 12th century, and centers around the maturation, education, rise to power and reign of Heita Kiyomori of the Heiké. (Reminiscent somewhat of watching Prince Hal grow to become Henry V.) The original epic, as we're told in the helpful translator's afterward, is essentially a chronicle of "the deeds of warriors and princes." Yoshikawa brings the story to a personal level, following the lives of several characters in both the dueling Heiké and Genji clans, also portraying the subservient lives that the culture's women were forced to endure. There are some battle scenes, to be sure, and these are pretty well done, without much graphic gore. But the dominant themes of Yoshikawa's narrative are clearly the burdens of power, the tragedy and futility of war, and the folly of human (particularly male) pride, as personified by the warrior class, whose members refuse to foreswear vengeance and bloodshed even when they know that the resulting wars will lead to suffering, starvation, disease and death for thousands of innocent people. Still, we spend time with characters working to mute these cultural imperatives, and the power of both family and romantic love is a theme that runs through the narrative, as well. According to the historical translator's afterward, the influence of the clans and the warrior culture in Japan endured right through the events of World War II, and those events clearly influenced Yoshikawa's work.

It was a little frustrating to read in the afterward that the translation (by Fuki Wooyenaka Uramatsu) was more than a straight Japanese to English translation: "It would be more accurate to call it an English version, since with the author's generous consent, The Heiké Story has been modified considerably for Western readers. Much tat is significant and of great interest to a Japanese audience familiar with the historical setting has been omitted in Translation; entire chapters have been condense and a large number of sub-plots and subsidiary characters entirely left out. This translation is therefore only a partial one and fails to do justice to the complexity and diversity of the original. None the less, it is the translator's fervent with that The Heiké Story will give Western readers an opportunity to share some of the delight that it gives readers here and also provide a diverting introduction to Japan and the Japanese." We are also told that at the time of the publishing, Yoshikawa had only completed about 2/3 of his rewriting of The Heiké Monogatari. All this is kind of frustrating to read after the event, but on the other hand, I guess I'd say that the 621 pages that are presented here were actually quite enough for me. So all in all I'd say that the author and translator had accomplished their stated mission with this publication, as I found The Heiké Story in the version I read to be engaging enough to be enjoyable in the reading and interesting in its historical context as well. Whether Yoshikawa ever finished his retelling of the epic I don't know. I assume it would be easy enough to find out, but I'll leave that research to others.

A note that the volume contains many lovely illustrations by Kenkichi Sugimoto
(https://www.tokyoartbeat.com/en/events/-/Collection-Exhibition-20-Years-Following-His-Passing-Kenkichi-Sugimoto/80569861/2024-07-26)

Book 10: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Moore



As others have said before me, The Yellow House is a stunning, multi-layered family history and memoir. Sarah Broom grew up, for lack of a better term, living a dual existence. As the youngest of a large family whose oldest siblings are decades older than her, she is both the cherished youngest sister and youngest daughter, but also the one who does not directly share many family experiences with the oldest of her eleven siblings, often being told about events that occurred "before," meaning before she was born or of age to take part or remember. Only six months old when her father dies, she is the only of the twelve siblings to grow up fatherless. Named Monique at birth, Moore, at her mother's prompting, begin going by Sarah when she enters school, her mother believing this more neutral name will make teachers and even classmates take her more seriously. As time goes by, only her family members continue to call her Monique, or, more commonly, Mo. In an important way, the whole family is one of outsiders, for they live in the New Orleans East neighborhood, a failed urban project, built on paved over meadows and swampland, at onetime promised to create a working-class neighborhood of dreams, but abandoned 20 years later as hopeless, morphing from middle-class white to hard scrapple black, with houses replaced by junkyards and tire factories, a place where bodies are dumped and where policeman park at night to get oral sex in their cars from hookers. Most maps of the town do not even include New Orleans East at all. {A note that I lived in New Orleans for seven years, and in a relatively nearby neighborhood, Gentilly, but I don't think I once set foot in New Orleans East.} The area is a toxic outlier, outside the margins of what New Orleanians, and all tourists, think of the parameters of their city. And finally there is Hurricane Katrina, which turns the whole of New Orleans into a city of outsiders, with huge swaths of the the population forced to emigrate, their neighborhoods and houses gone, many never to return. Some may remember the time right after the storm when there was a serious conversation throughout the country as to whether New Orleans was worth rebuilding at all. Sarah, a college graduate, a writer, leaves for New York to live in Harlem. But the city, and especially her family's stories continually pull her back.

The book's heroine is Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, high of personal standards and a steady and loving presence for her children. The centerpiece of Broom's story is the yellow house of the title, Ivory Mae's dream of independence and well-being, shoddily built at the outset and continually undermined by half-finished repair and renovation projects undertaken by never completed by various family members and friends that leave floors incomplete and unsteady, doors and windows sitting improperly in their frames, and plumbing jury-rigged. Yet it is the family's home and center, and the place where Broom lives the entirety of her childhood and adolescence.

For the purposes of this memoir, Moore conducted many interviews with family members, and delved into newspaper and government records to recreate not only the lives of her parents and siblings, but also the lives of the generations before them. Many of these stories are, of course, in the nature of oral history, their details at the mercy of the tellers' memories, and Broom presents them as such, though sometimes augmented from fragments she's been able to find through city records. Then there is the anguish of Katrina, referred to almost exclusively in The Yellow House simply as Water, is described in deeply affecting yet matter of fact terms: The danger of the storm itself, as her brother and a friend sit on their roofs, with the floods almost up to where they perch, for a week, waiting for rescue. The ruination of their delapitated yet beloved family home and its callous demolition by the city, with nary a warning sent, some time afterward. The family's scattering, with some siblings ending up as far away as California and Arizona. Ivory Mae's years-long wait for promised government grant money so the family house can be rebuilt.

And through all this we experience Sarah's search for herself, for her own place within the family, for a deeper understanding of her place as a New Orleanian, if indeed such a place exists for her. This is a compelling, multi-layered, extremely well written memoir full of compassion and love and frustration and tragedy, all seamlessly held together by Broom's sense of narrative and talents of description. Here's just one example of Brooms writing:

Grandmother was the kind of woman Eddie admired, hardworking and concerned with having nice things. She had two cars parked in the garage of her house on Mockingbird Lane even though she could not drive (cars for people to drive her around in). She was confined but occasionally mercurial. She could go off on you in a spoilt second. When the presentation of the body stands in fo0r all the qualities the world claims you cannot possess, some people call you elegant. Grandmother ws that, yes, but sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together.

Book 11: Spy Catcher: the Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer by Peter Wright



I would really call this much more of a memoir than an autobiography, despite the subtitle, as Wright here deals almost entirely with his professional life as a member, and eventually assistant director, of MI5, the British counterespionage agency, from World War 2 through the late 1970s. For the non-British citizens (like me) in the room, Wright explains MI5 as being roughly the British equivalent of the FBI and MI6 as being the equivalent of the CIA. Wright was a true believer that the struggle against the significant espionage efforts of the Soviet Union was a crucial mission. And he is also adamant in this memoir that MI5 in many very important ways were doing this job very badly. For one thing, both MI5 and MI6 were run as clubby old boys' clubs, with upper class "gentlemen" bringing their chums on board without any proper vetting at all, despite the fact it was well known that there had been a significant disenchantment with the British class system and capitalism in general among these very upperclass clubmen in the 1930s. The result was a series of postwar defections and also a cadre of British spies working for the Soviet Union within the British intelligence agencies. The subsequent refusal of those in charge to, in many cases, prosecute their old club pals and/or risk further public scandal causes Wright no end of teeth gnashing. Wright speaks with scorn of what he calls the continued British "delusions of Empire" within government and intelligence circles that caused them to refuse to accept the fact that postwar Britain was no longer a first level world power and and had in fact become a junior partner to the United States. Wright came to his intelligence work through his scientific background, hired to help develop new technologies in spying microphones and radio interception techniques for counterintelligence. He spent his career in trying to root out Soviet spies within the British government, both the traitorous British moles and the Russian spies in place within and without the Russian diplomatic corps. He describes effectively and in great detail his frustrations over his inability to convince his colleagues that a mole remained inside MI5 even into the 70s. In fact, Wright thought he could prove that it was his boss, Sir Roger Hollis, the director of MI5, who had been passing information to the Soviets for decades, allowing the Soviets to thwart all sorts of British espionage efforts over the years. Wright reports that the British dug what they thought was a secret tunnel under the Berlin Wall, only to find upon the tunnel's completion that the Soviets had been tipped off from within the British government about the project from its inception.

Wright's writing is clear and easy to read, though the book may suffer from an overabundance of details. I found it interesting to read about all the spies and counterspies, the inter- and intra-agency jealousies and feuds that created additional impediments and disfunction, the casual willingness to spy on everyone and everything, including allies (MI5 had every embassy in England bugged, and many on the continent as well, and Wright is both matter of fact and unapologetic about it all), but also the technological successes and brainpower that occasionally allowed them to crack Soviet and Eastern Bloc encrypted communications to their operatives in England and sometimes even catch spies. Looked at from the perspective of hindsight, however (Spy Catcher was published in 1987 when memories of the era were still fresh), one has to wonder what it was all for, and whether anything of substance, on either side, was really accomplished. I recall reading a comment several years ago made by a former CIA official (I have no memory of the name of this person) that the whole Cold War espionage campaign was simply, in the end, a colossal waste of time. Who knows?

Reading Spy Catcher was fun, though, as I mentioned above, you do have to wade through a lot of detail. I've had this book on my shelves since before my LT Big Bang in 2008. When I lived in San Francisco, I had a neighbor (I never found out who it was) who would occasionally put out stacks of a dozen or so books on the sidewalk across the street from my apartment and I would sometimes help myself to a book or two. Given that there's just a slight touch of water damage throughout my copy of Spy Catcher, I have a conjecture that this was the source of my ownership of the book.

Book 12: Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx by Roy White with Paul Semendinger



For baseball fans and, probably, for Yankee fans only. Roy White was a crucial member of the New York Yankees during the time when I was at the height of my baseball fandom, from junior high and high school through my college days and just after. He made it to the Major Leagues in 1966, just after the Yankee dynasty of the late 50s and early 60s had collapsed to to age and inattention to the farm system, and played on the team through the stormy Reggie Jackson/Billy Martin glory years of the late 70s. He was a fine fielder and a steady hitter, though he was quiet and steady, and largely played in the shadow of the team's flashier players. I was looking forward to reading White's memoir, but was somewhat disappointed in it. What White provides is, more or less, a summary of his life and career. He does talk about the struggles and hard work he went through to be able to play baseball at the highest level, and he offers a few insights into Jackson and Martin and their relationship to each other. But otherwise what we get is more or less a surface look at White's baseball life. Interesting anecdotes and real details about what it is like to be part of a major league team, on the field and in the locker room, are very thin on the ground. The short essays from White's contemporaries that are added in every so often are mostly filler, recapitulations of the same theme: White was a very nice guy who worked very hard and never blew his own horn, was nice to everybody, and served as a wonderful role model for players and fans alike. I did mostly enjoy reading this book because it was nice to stroll down memory lane with White about an era of baseball I have great fondness for, but I wouldn't particularly recommend this book to anyone, even baseball fans, not especially interested in White's career and the teams he played on.

I just noticed that this is the third straight memoir I've read!

Book 13: Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie



An anthropological study of a mountain village would normally not be up my alley, but there were several elements of this one that piqued my interest when I came upon the book in a Napa County small town thrift store four years ago. The village of Montaillou was (in fact, the village still exists, although a short distance from its medieval location) located in the French Pyrenees. In inhabitants at the dawn of the 14th century was largely part of the Christian sect called Catharism. Catharism, which included some pretty serious divergences from orthodox Catholic dogma (including but not limited to the virgin birth and the nature of souls and heaven and the Resurrection) had a century earlier been fairly robust in Lanquedoc, in the south of France, but between 1209 and 1229, the Church had launched what is now known as the Albigensian Crusade (the movement first bloomed in the French city of Albi). Around 200,000 Cathars were slaughtered and the remnants scattered. Almost 100 years later, the 250 people of Montaillou represented one of the last centers of Catharism. Technically, Montaillou was not even in the Kingdom of France, but instead within the Comte de Foix, though under heavy political pressure from the French king.

A cleric named Jacques Fournier became the Bishop of Pamiers in the Ariege region of Comte de Foix that included Montaillu in 1318. Fournier instituted at an Inquisition to find and punish the remaining Cathar "heretics." Many went to prison, and still others were burned at the stake. What Fournier gave to historians, however, was his methodology. He not only insisted in conducting long and exhaustive interviews with just about all of the inhabitants of the village, and many from the surrounding areas as well, but he also employed scribed to take notes on the spot, writing down the interviews pretty much word for word in the original Occitan (the native language of Languedoc) and later translating them into Latin. Fournier's skills as an interviewers were evidently prolific. He would get people talking about their lives and listen at length, eventually in this manner getting them to betray themselves or their neighbors as heretics. Often both. These written testimonies have come down to scholars, and because of the detail they contains, historians have been able to painstakingly piece together a fairly comprehensive picture of the home lives, religious and folk beliefs, how they made their livings, and how they treated each other: their friendships, loves and feuds, their affairs and sex lives, their faith and their fears. In relatively straightforward writing, mostly devoid of academic jargon, Le Roy Ladurie created a fascinating picture of a tiny microcosm of medieval life, unique in that we know that what we're seeing, and even the people whose voices we're hearing (we become familiar with several individuals along the way), are doomed to be victims of the inquisitors' repressive zeal. I found it all compelling, although some parts are admittedly drier than others in the telling. The fact that I already knew about the Cathars (I would imagine a much more common historical knowledge in Europe than amongst us benighted Americans), having traveled through the south of France with my wife and visited the ruins of at least two Cathar castles. Other than that, reading Mountaillou was for me like peering into a worm hole into the past--somewhere around 700 years ago!--and gazing on a picture of amazing detail and clarity.

As I said, this history was first published in the 1980s. It is far from a modern "literary history" emphasizing narrative skill and readability. This is an academic work, though a comparatively exceptionably accessible one. I suppose that all depends on one's interest in the subject matter, though. Le Roy Ladurie does write well and is able to humanize his subject matter, even injecting some wry humor along the way. The book was evidently a best seller in France upon its original publication. According to the description on the back of my paperback copy, Montaillou was a bestseller in France when it was published there in its original 600-page version. For the English speaking audience, the decision was made--for which I am most grateful--to edit the book down significantly. My edition is 356 pages. I very much enjoyed the reading experience, but 356 pages was plenty.

Book 14: A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools (a.k.a. Albion W. Tourgee)



A fascinating timepiece, A Fool's Errand is a novel about the Reconstruction era in the post-Civil War American South written and first published very soon after the events portrayed, in 1879. As hinted at by the humorous author designation, the book was originally published anonymously, though evidently Tourgee's authorship was soon discovered or revealed. At any rate, Tourgee had an interesting and important life. Born in Ohio, he served in the Union Army during the Civil War and soon thereafter moved with his family to North Carolina in order to help with the fraught work of Reconstruction, and in particular aid with the education of the recently freed ex-slave population, and in general with ensuring that the freedmen and women population received the new rights that Emancipation and the new constitutional amendments had promised them. He got involved in politics and served as a Superior Court judge from 1868 to 1874. During this time, he ran into the venomous headwinds of a southern population, and especially a southern leadership class, determined to keep African Americans subjugated and increasingly willing to commit violence to ensure these aims are met.

I've spent all this time with biographical material of the author because A Fool's Errand is really an only lightly disguised fictionalized accounting of these years of his life. Our fictional hero is Comfort Servosse, a former Union Army Colonel who had fought and been wounded during the war and then put in charge of administering a section of a never named southern state (but which I assume was meant to be North Carolina, since that was where Tourgee actually lived). Upon leaving the military, Servosse, referred to by Tourgee most frequently as the Fool, brings his wife and child back to that same area, buys a large former plantation and begins breaking much of it up into parcels to sell to ex-slaves to build homesteads on, and befriends the young northern women who have come south to teach in the new freedmen schools. This, unsurprisingly, soon puts him into conflict with his neighbors. Eventually, for this and other transgressions, threats against the Fool's life become depressingly common. He is, of course, labeled a carpetbagger and a Radical.

The narrative is extremely uneven in the telling. Much of the book is written as, more or less, a romance or adventure yarn, with nefarious plots and feats of derring-do. But Tourgee frequently leaves off this mode of storytelling to serve up long digressions regarding the political and social state of affairs as he experienced them, as a citizen, a politician and a judge. These sections are slower reading, but they are extremely interesting in their own right. Tourgee had nothing but scorn for the northern politicians, dubbed in his telling the Wise Men, who in order to maintain political power within the Federal government, withdrew northern administrative forces from the south after only a few short years, passed the constitutional amendments that gave blacks for voting and citizenship rights on paper, and left the administration of these changes to the southern state government. I found it interesting in the extreme to read Tourgee's clearly written accounts of these developments, his clear-eyed denouncement of them, and his extremely accurate predictions on how poorly, and bloodily, events were going to devolve into a reign of terror. His view was that southern whites had spent generations rationalizing slavery via pronouncements from both state houses and pulpits that blacks made up a subordinate race, certainly not fit to run their own affairs, let alone civic affairs in general. Therefore, a willingness to extend full rights, or any rights, for blacks was not going to be attained in the south simply by fiat by a hostile government of invaders whose only goal, as the southerners saw it, was to humiliate and subjugate the people they'd so recently conquered. He thought that the Federal government should have seen to supporting these major social changes much more directly, even if it meant keeping federal forces in the southern states for 20 years or more.

Tourgee, here in the guise of the Fool, was in the south during the rise of the Klan, a development written of forcefully in A Fool's Errand. While much of the information contained in the novel lines up with historical reading I've already done, especially via historian Leon Litwak's two important books, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery and Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. But I found it extremely interesting, as I've said here several time already I guess, to read these accounts of someone who was there. His expository digressions do get long and sometimes repetitive, but I realized halfway through that Tourgee wasn't talking to me, although I'm sure he would liked to have known that his accounts were being read 147 years after he'd written them. He was talking to, and desperately trying to convince, the people of his own time in describing how poorly things were going, and why they'd taken such a violent and depressing turn. At any rate, while those expository sections are fascinating (I know, that word again), the fictional narrative sections are intriguing and fun, told with rewarding amount of sly humor.

Tourgee had a fascinating and admirable life, as outlined, I'll hopefully assume reasonably accurately, on the Wikipedia page dedicated to him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion_W._Tourgée

Perhaps more reliable is this entry on the North Carolina State online encyclopedia about A Fool's Errand, which includes this quote:
"He served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1868, and a year later he was elected a superior court judge. In both capacities, Tourgée personified what most white North Carolinians found to be the worst in carpetbaggery. Former governor Jonathan Worth once called him "the meanest Yankee who ever settled among us." His bold attempts to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) made him a frequent target of their harassment.
https://www.ncpedia.org/fools-errand

Also, during my search, I found the quote in the November 21, 1891 Cleveland Gazette, and African American newspaper: "The most popular white man in the country to-day with Afro-Americans is that staunch friend of the race, Judge Albion W. Tourgee." (emphasis in the original quote)
https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83035386/1891-11-21/ed-1/?sp=2&st=image&r...

Book notes: So this is really quite an historical artifact. I love the fact that my copy of the book is a very early edition. Not a first, since Tourgee's name appears, but still one with an 1867 copyright date. As frequent readers of this space may recall, I am also very interested in learning as much as I can about the previous owners of the books in my library when such information presents itself. My copy of A Fool's Errand has two identifiers. First, we have a small embossing on the title page:

John S. Bugbee
Attorney At Law
502 Montgomery St. Rooms 12 & 13
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

To the right of this, we find handwritten in pencil:

John S Bugbee
San Diego Feb 25/81

I could not find anything online directly pertaining to San Francisco attorney John S. Bugbee. But I did find mention of him on a page about his brother, Samuel Charles Bugbee, an architect in early San Francisco. Evidently, John and Samuel lived together at 641 Harrison Street in 1869.
https://pcad.lib.washington.edu/person/6908/

Also, I found a page about John's son, Maxwell Bigbee, who also became an architect and designed an intriguing house full of Alaskan art and design in San Anselmo, CA. On that page, we read this:
"Maxwell Bugbee may have shared the Breck's interest in Native Alaskan art. His father, John S. Bugbee, a San Fransisco attorney, was appointed Judge of the U.S. District Court for Alaska in Sitka in 1889 and later opened a law practice in Juneau."
https://sananselmohistory.org/articles/the-igloo/

So there you have it. I could not find anything pertaining to John S. Bugbee in San Diego. I was assuming that this was probably a grandson named after his grandfather, but then I was also assuming that the "81" meant 1981. Given the dates above, it is, I guess, possible that it meant 1881 and is the same John S. Bugbee, and that upon moving to San Diego he rewrote his name in pencil so it would be clear to anyone finding the book, which he had at that point decided to read or maybe reread, that he was a local rather than a visitor from up north. Who knows?

Anyway, I think it's kind of cool that my copy of A Fool's Errand was owned by a person who at one point was Judge of the U.S. District Court for Alaska in Sitka.

Book 15: The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad



The End of the Tether is one of the few Conrad works that I hadn't read yet. Originally published in 1902, this short novel was republished during Conrad's lifetime in a single-volume collection also including Youth and Heart of Darkness. It's one of Conrad's lesser known and lesser read works, and I'd concur that it doesn't match up to his best works. Still, it's Conrad, which for me has almost always meant, at the very least, enjoyable reading. Captain Whalley has been at sea for decades. He's seen, with regret, the closing of the age of the sailing ship and the onset of the steamship era. Places in the Eastern seas that Whalley was among the first Europeans to enter, and passages he was among the first Europeans to chart, have now become commonplace shipping lanes and established colonial ports. Yet he is still a man of vigor and strength. He is a widower who still sharply mourns his wife, who had shared his enthusiasm for exploration and for the sea. And he has one grown daughter living in Europe who has made an unfortunate marriage to a man of ill luck in business, and now of health too poor for working. So she is entirely dependent on her father financially. So he must keep working, though at his age commands are harder and harder to come by. He buys into a partnership in, and a command of, a that steamship that plies a boring and barely remunerative trade among the islands. But his partner, who is also the ship's chief engineer, is a vane and grasping man, and the first mate is a conniver, endlessly scheming for a way to get ahead. Whalley is enduring it all for the sake of his daughter until fate pulls one more fast one on him.

At 174 pages, this is a relatively quick read. For me it was a pleasure, as I love having Conrad's voice in my head. And indeed I do find as I read him that I feel like he's talking to me and telling me a story one-on-one. I've always enjoyed his insights into human nature, his sometimes slightly off-kilter way with words, and his descriptions of nature. Here's The End of the Tether's opening paragraph:

For a long time after the course of the steamer Sofala had been altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sun rays fell violently upon the palm see--semed to shatter themselves upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapor of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady brightness.

And here's a short passage that struck me particularly. During a flashback describing Whalley's life and career, we come to the death of his wife at sea, their young daughter on board with them as well.

But Captain Whalley could in a half-hour of solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his voice. When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten, impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry. He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sailor of the crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child out of one of her black skirts.

He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish stream. It will break out and flow over a man's troubles, it will close upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has gone to the bottom.

So I enjoyed The End of the Tether and would recommend it to anyone without a previously minted antipathy for Conrad and/or his writing style. He's not for everyone. This short novel won't get you too deeply into the Conrad weeds: it's relatively straightforwardly written and it includes some of Conrad's frequent themes, including the ability or inability, as the case may be from story to story, of an upright, moral person to endure in the face of scoundrels and the cruel turns that life itself can dish out. But a reader is wishing to discover why Conrad devotees consider him to be such a great writer should start elsewhere, as this is not one of Conrad's classics.

Book 16: The Story Continued: The New York Times Magazine, January 13, 1974 by J. Anthony Lukas



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). As I've mentioned often before, I have a stack of old magazines in my hallway closet that I've been going through gradually, an article at a time, with an aim towards recycling them as I finish them. I always have one going in my "Between Book" stacks. At least a quarter of the time, though, I end up finding these historical artifacts too interesting to toss. C'est la vie!

"The Story Continued" was the second Special Edition of the NY Times Sunday Magazine dedicated solely to the ongoing story of Watergate. The first such edition, titled "The Story So Far," had come out in July 22, 1973. At that point, reporters were still piecing together who had done what when, at whose orders, and with money that had come from where, exactly. As this edition's brief introduction puts it, "No longer merely Watergate, the story has become to tale of a Presidency." All of the articles were written by journalist J. Anthony Lukas, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1968.

The story here begins with the revelation by Alexander Butterfield, former Deputy Assistant to the President, while being questioned in front of the Ervin Committee (The Senate Watergate Committee, known officially as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Sam Ervin), in response to a question from committee investigator Scott Armstrong, answered truthfully that, yes, the president was in the habit of recording all of his phone calls and meetings, and that these tapes were still on hand. The existence of the Watergate Tapes, as they came to be known, for the first time made people think that the famous question that got turned into a slogan, "What did he know, and when did he know it?" might get answered. Additional articles in the magazine include

* a description of Nixon's mindset and determination to last out the storm in any way he could; a story about some of Nixon's questionable financial deals, or at least deals that seemed questionable on their surface;
* a piece about Spiro Agnew's crimes (evidently, he'd spent his career as a strong-arming thug, more or less);
* a profile of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and his battles to get information out of the Nixon Administration and get his hands on those tapes, which the White House was trying to avoid turning over;
* a second article on the tapes issue and the growing public frustration with the Administration's stonewalling, and
* a final article titled "I Am Not a Crook" describing the increasingly embattled president and the growing clamor for impeachment or resignation.

The issue came out in January, 1974, and Nixon resigned later that year, in August. Lukas, who'd been covering these events all along, was an excellent writer of clear, uncluttered prose who provides here extremely valuable detail and insight into the proceedings. I was 19 in 1974, and I remember, in a very general way, these events. The names are all still familiar to me, but the chronology and the individual roles of all the participants had begun quite hazy over the years. It was very interesting indeed to get this refresher on what at the time seemed like quite momentous events. And of course they were momentous, although now it all seems quite tame in comparison to the rackateers and thugs we have running the country these days. Still, reading this "on the spot" report, a look through the time portal of what things looked like to the people living through it all, made for compelling reading for me.

Book 17: What You Are Going Through by Sigrid Nunez



I found What You Are Going Through to be a moving and oddly comforting revery of a novel about life and its travails, longing, loneliness, and dignity in the face of death. Nunez writes from what I found to be a place of empathy and wonder about the things life throws at people and the ways in which we cope with those things, or don't, as the case may be. For the first half or so of the book, Nunez takes us through several encounters she has (to quote the description on the back of my paperback edition) during the course of a day, or sometimes retrieves from her memory, and provides brief windows into their lives of the people she knows, or meets. For example, we have an older woman growing more and more reclusive, and her adult son, who is trying his best to care for her and keep her interested in life. The narrator knows them only because she's been neighbors with the woman for years, though they have barely spoken, and because she begins to have conversations with the son. The way that Nunez makes all of these encounters come to life is through realistic and believable detail. No one in the novel has a name. They are "the woman," "the man," "my friend," "my ex-." It would seem that this tactic would make the people and their circumstances distant and be somewhat off-putting in the reading. I found instead that it helped make their situations universal, at the same time Nunez's specificity otherwise brought her people alive on the page, even when they make but the briefest appearances.

Even the title's lack of a concluding question mark is, somehow, a leveler, though Nunez includes the mark when explaining the phrase's origin:

What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one's neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel set ton torment?

In the book's second half, Nunez expands her theme by focusing in, for the most part, on her narrator's experiences with a friend from college who asks for her help. Our narrator agrees, and the two women, now late in life, explore all of the many elements of life, but very close up, and with daily discoveries, both depressing and uplifting.

At any rate, I haven't done the novel justice but I highly recommend the book to anyone who enjoys fiction that doesn't necessarily rely on plot. There are also some brief, terrific side roads taken. Or, anyway, what at first seem like side roads but in fact fold seamlessly into the themes of the novel as a whole. In talking about sexism in publishing and in reading, for example, the narrator describes Ingeborg Bachmann, who wrote a wonderful collection of five longish short stories called (in English) Three Paths to the Lake. (Coincidentally, I read this collection many years ago.)

You write ladies' novels, correct? said the novelist to his female colleague.

Oh what dark neck of the woods have we entered here.

The Bachmann story, "Three Paths to the Lake," appears in her collection Three Paths to the Lake, which was published in 1972, a year before she died of burns suffered in a fire. Five stories. Five women, each one suffering from some form of emotional turmoil, each one feeling trapped, isolated, anxious, and confused about her place in patriarchal society, and struggling for a language to express what she's going through.

George Balanchine said, If you put a group of men on the stage, you have a group of men, but if you put a group of women on the stage you have the whole world.

If you put a group of women in a book, you have "women's fiction." To be shunned by almost all male readers and no few female ones as well.

I'll just end with one more quote:

Jesus, you know, it wasn't supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now has having been inevitable. But doesn't love always feel just so: destined, no matter how unexpected, no matter how improbable.

Nunez, of course, has written many novels, including The Friend, which won the National Book Award. This is the first of her novels I've read, but I'll certainly be catching up on her works soon. Also, What Are You Going Through was made into the movie The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovar's first English language film, in 2024.

Book 18: No-one Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi



No-one Loves a Policeman is a Argentinian noir thriller. The novel was first published in 2007 in Spanish and published in English translation in 2010. The action begins in December 2001, at a time when Argentina, having relatively recently thrown off its dictatorship, is going through a dizzying parade of short-lived governments, obstensibly democratic but subject to toppling by the army, or by monied interests of all sorts, and/or by elements of organized crime, at least according to the testimony of our narrator. That would be Pablo Martelli, also known as Notan a bathroom appliance salesman who many years ago had been ejected from the federal police force known to Argentinians simply as the National Disgrace. As the book opens, Martelli is awakened in the dead of night by a call from an old friend pleading with Martelli to drive hundreds of miles to come to his assistance for reasons he can't go into over the phone. When Martelli finally arrives, his friend has been shot in the head. And so begins our tale. Soon, of course, the assassins, whomever they might be, are also after our hero. Martelli doesn't even know who they are or why they killed his friend. Over the course of the story, alliances come and go, information is gradually accumulated, a lost love is achingly mourned, and details about Martelli's past are gradually doled out. There's no small amount of violence, though the nice atmosphere of suspense Orsi establishes is really the dominant paradigm in this tale. Things do get a little chaotic, and I'm not sure it all really holds up, plot-wise, as we race to our finale, but I didn't think that factor really mattered in the end. Orsi's real theme, I felt, was the lawlessness and violence with which governments were being toppled and the degree to which the average Argentinian was being dealt out of any decision-making roles in a society that was being advertised as a democracy.

As an U.S. native with only a passing knowledge of Argentinian history, I was frequently in the dark regarding incidents in the country's recent past that Orsi clearly assumed his readership would be fully knowledgeable about. That was all fine with me, of course, and in fact I found it all quite interesting. It was instructive to read a novel in which the action begins in December 2001 and in which 9/11 is never mentioned, even in passing, though the battles for the Malvina Islands are frequently referred to.

So I enjoyed No-one Loves a Policeman all in all, and though I would guess that there would be many alternative interpretations of the history Orsi relates, I would also not be surprised to learn that, even given more knowledge of these events, his take would turn out to be relatively accurate. The characterization of Martelli, I thought, was nicely done, and with enough depth to keep him an interesting voice to have in my head for a while.

Just a note that that lower-case "o" in the midst of "No-one" in the title bugs me every time I write it, but maybe that most closely approximates how the word would be written in Spanish. The copy editor in me continually want to change it to "No One."

Book 19: Theodore Herzl: The Charismatic Leader by Derek Penslar



Growing up Jewish in America in the 1960s and 70s, I've frequently heard Theodore Herzl mentioned, mostly reverently, in Jewish settings of all kinds. Herzl, an assimilated German Jew who was active in the latter part of the 19th century, was one of the most important figures in the early days of the Zionist movement in Europe during that time. I've always heard contradictory things about him and been interested in learning about the actual person, what he really did or didn't stand for, and how his views may have evolved over his relatively short (44 years) life. I have a good friend here in New York who is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Colgate University. I asked him how accurate thought I would find the information in this bio, and he told me that Penslar is "as good as it gets" as far as being an authority on the history of the Zionist movement, so I felt like was in good hands. Also, this book was published by Yale University Press as part of their rather extensive "Jewish Lives" series of biographies, so I assume it got some thorough vetting. Finally, the bio checks in at a slim 210 pages, just long enough to provide the necessary details with some depth but without getting bogged down in "here's everything I learned in my research" exposition. Herzl was a copious diary keeper, and Penslar makes excellent use of those diary entries to help us understand who Herzl was, how his beliefs changed, and how he experienced life.

As is made clear in the book's title, the Herzl Penslar shows us is a charismatic speaker, and extremely impressive in build and appearance. As I mentioned above, Herzl was a fully assimilated German Jew who had made a name for himself as an excellent journalist and essay writer. Even a successful and assimilated Jew would have been aware of the growing antisemitism in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, during the late 1800s, and Herzl certainly was. The standard story goes that Herzl became seriously concerned, and convinced of the need to provide someplace for Russian and Polish Jews to emigrate to, while covering the Dreyfus trial. Penslar isn't so sure that this event was the major catalyst for Herzl, as his reporting on the trial doesn't lean into the antisemitism issue in a major way. It was more likely a combination of Dreyfus and many other similar incidents that set Herzl on his path. Although Herzl always retained his role as a journalist and editor, once he was aroused to the cause of what became known as Zionism, that cause became his consuming passion. He became the movement's main leader and spokesman, organizing several Zionist Congress meetings (the first in 1897), though there were many factions who were far from unanimous about how they should proceed. Some of the major points in Penslar's biography include:

* Herzl was prone to depression his entire adult life. His marriage was very unhappy, although it did produce three children, and he poured his passions into his work.

* Herzl died in 1904 (again, at the young age of 44) from heart disease. His career took place, then, before World War I, when Palestine was still a part of the Ottoman Empire. So Herzl foresaw Jewish Palestine not as an independent nation state, but as a semi-autonomous protectorate within (and loyal to) the Ottoman's. Therefore, Herzl was against Jews moving to Palestine en mass until they had the buy in of the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Herzl spent years trying to obtain an audience with the Sultan, certain that he could convince the Ottoman leader that the Jews could bring much expertise and much needed funding that would create a net plus for the empire. According to Penslar, there was never a chance that Abdul Hamid was going to acquiesce to a mass immigration of Jews to Palestine, Herzl's perceived advantages of such a policy notwithstanding. (Small cooperative farming communities--what became known as kibbutzim--had already been established in Palestine by a Zionist group that had been in operation before Herzl came on the scene and only reluctantly folded themselves into the greater Zionist movement.)

* Because Herzl became ever more convinced of the urgency of getting Jews out of both Tsarist Russia and Poland in particular, he began to explore the possibility of more or less stopgap solutions. South America and Africa were considered, and Herzl actually succeeded in receiving an offer from England for a land grant more or less the size of current-day Israel, minus the Negev desert, in British colonial East Africa, despite the fact that there would have been vociferous objection from the British colonists already on the ground there. Even more significantly, there was never a chance that the other leaders of the Zionist movement, or the rank and file, would go along with such a scheme. (Herzl considered their refusals to be a betrayal of his judgment and leadership.) Not to mention the difficulties in convincing the Polish and Russian Jews to move to Africa. (Though of course many were already beginning to move to the U.S., which without getting my ruler out I'd guess to be equally as far from St. Petersburg.)

* Herzl always maintained that emigration to Palestine would be voluntary. Jews who wanted to stay put were welcome to do so.

* The Jewish Bund, the Jewish socialist workers' party that had been active since the advent of socialism and remained active long enough to become leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during WW2 (when a great many were killed) were from the outset firmly anti-Zionist. They believed in staying put and defending themselves as Jews in their native countries, and thought that antisemitism would die away after the workers' revolution. Penslar spends very little time talking about the Bund, so the degree to which their stance was also a matter of seeing the displacement of the Palestinian population as an injustice is not made clear in this book.**

* As to Herzl's own views about the Palestinians, he doesn't seem to have given very much thought to the question. In an early diary entry he speaks vaguely of the indigenous population being "spirited out of the country" with zero elaboration about how this might work. But in a later novel Herzl wrote explaining his views, he writes of Palestine as a country of justice and brotherhood where all nationalities would live together in peace.

* But Herzl's ideas about what Jewish Palestine would entail were constantly shifting. At one point he talks about Palestine having an army to defend the territory from its enemies and to show that Jews would henceforth be able to defend themselves. Later he says the Jewish army of Palestine would only be formed to be at the service of the Sultan to help defend the Empire. Or Jewish Palestine wouldn't have an army. They would be too busy building and farming and would put themselves wholly under the protection of the Ottomans. The driving, and urgent to Herzl, idea was to facilitate to entrance of Jews to Palestine, and out of harm's way in Europe, and see what the best system would be at that point.

For anyone interested in learning who Theodore Herzl was and what he was all about, as well as learning what the early Zionist movement actually looked like, this book is very valuable indeed.

** I'd be very interested to read a more in-depth history of the Bund. Last week I bought the recently published history, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple. Upon actually looking the book over and reading three reviews (you'd think I might have done that before buying the book, but impulse control is not my very best attribute), it seems to be more of an anti-Zionist polemic than a real history of the organization. The reviews I saw (Kirkus Reviews, The New York Times, and the Jewish Forward) were all quite adoring and proclaimed its front-and-centering of the anti-Zionist issue to be a strength. My conjecture is that this would be an indication of the positions of the reviewers themselves on the issue. Although I'm well aware that the Bundists were indeed firmly anti-Zionist, I'm not sure that in the grand scheme of things they didn't find themselves with bigger fish to fry, as it were. At any rate, I'll eventually give the book a chance, now that I've lugged the thing home from the small but interesting Quimby's Bookstore NYC in Brooklyn, in hopes that it gives a more in-depth look at the Bund than only its anti-Zionist stance. There are certainly compelling reasons to be anti-Zionist these days, and I can say that I put myself in that camp for the most part, but if I read a history of the Bund, I want to learn all about the Bund.