Category: Reading

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“Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go….”

Your Humble Narrator, decked out in Renfest-cottagecore regalia for an evening’s reading in Middle Earth. Note that I’m quaffing a beer, as rum isn’t a thing in Middle Earth, so far as I can tell!

Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go
To heal my heart and drown my woe.
Rain may fall and wind may blow,
And many miles be still to go,
But under a tall tree, I will lie,
And let the clouds go sailing by.

Drinking Song from The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien.

A while back I embarked on a re-read of The Lord of the Rings. My progress has been slower than usual, because of reasons, but as ever I find myself loving this story deeply, and Tolkien’s luminous, lyrical writing continues to astonish and amaze me. I am as drawn in as ever, and this time I’m paying special attention to the poetry, of which JRRT writes many different kinds…including a drinking song or two.

The Peter Jackson movies did a decent job of incorporating Tolkien’s poetry, as much as they could for mass audiences, and here’s an artist who compiles some of the drinking songs from the films into one medley. The songs aren’t entirely Tolkien, but they contain enough of him that I don’t think he’d object to any of this.

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January Reading (From the Books)

I’m going to try, in 2022, to write a monthly recap of the books (and other things) I read each month. I had a good reading month and am well on my way to meeting my annual goal of 52 books! I track this on Goodreads, and I feel no qualms in including graphic novels in my reading; a good graphic novel is its own challenge and reward because the art demands attention as much as the words. I will also admit that I’m trying to get ahead of my Goodreads challenge a bit because I have some long “doorstop” kinds of books that I’d like to read this year, and those can really get time-consuming. (We’re talking Brandon Sanderson-sized epic fantasies and space operas later this year.)

So here’s what I read in January (or, a few items I started in December but only finished in January):

::  The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, Michio Kaku. I’ve become a big fan of Kaku’s science writing over the last few years. As a science fiction writer (even one who tends to play at the George Lucas end of the pool, rather than the Arthur C. Clarke end), I feel it important to read some science every year, and Kaku’s work always keeps the “sensawunda” flowing. He writes big-scale, wide-eyed books about the Really Big Questions, and this one is no exception. If you want the kind of optimistic science writing that gives you the kind of feeling you might have had as a kid when you emerged wide-eyed from the planetarium show, Michio Kaku is your writer. (I confess that at times in his books I really can’t quite understand the more esoteric details of the things he writes about.)

::  Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat. This is the best kind of cookbook. Only about half of it is an actual collection of recipes; the rest is like a textbook in Cooking 101, in which Nosrat writes extensively about the how and why these four facets of cooking work the way they do to make food taste good. Reading this gave me much greater appreciation and insight into how to salt my food, why and when to add acid, what I can do with fat to enhance flavor, and the ways heat, applied in different ways, impacts flavor.

The book is richly illustrated, and it has fold-out charts that show how various ethnic cuisines around the world approach each individual element of cooking. Nosrat writes wonderfully, with a strong personal element in which she brings her personal experiences from working in the food world to bear. If you cook, you should check this book out.

::  For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World, by Sasha Sagan. Sagan is the daughter of Carl Sagan, who is one of my all-time heroes for many reasons: his scientific curiosity, his unyielding skepticism which was also bonded tightly to his unending ability to find wonder in what really is. Maybe some people were disappointed to learn that the surface of Mars is not segmented by great canals whisking water around the planet, but is instead rocky and thus far barren of liquid water and life; not Carl Sagan, who found the fact of the Martian surface even more wondrous than the dreamed-up version from the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels he read as a kid.

One common objection to atheism, especially the rigorously empirical version of atheism as endorsed by Carl Sagan, is the idea that absent any kind of spiritual force, our lives are directionless and meaningless. This is false for any number of reasons, but Sasha Sagan answers that objection in this book, and more than that, she endorses the embracing of rituals in our lives, even the ones that have religious origins, as a way of giving our lives meaning, direction, and purpose. Sasha Sagan is every bit as skeptical as her parents (her mother is Carl Sagan’s former wife, scientist and writer Ann Druyan) were as far as religion and spirituality go, but she writes refreshingly that skepticism need not mean a life devoid of ritual and the comfort that ritual provides.

Ms. Sagan writes with a lyricism that at times echoes Carl Sagan so strongly that it does feel, occasionally, like he is writing from “the beyond”. Of course, he isn’t…but his influence lives on, which is one of the points Ms. Sagan makes here.

A few quotes:

We all deserve holidays, celebrations, and traditions. We all need to mark time. We all need community. We all need to bid hello and goodbye to our loved ones. I do not believe that my lack of faith makes me immune to the desire to be part of the rhythm of life on this planet.

—

An old tradition is not intrinsically better than a new one. Especially when it is such a joy to make new ones up—ones that reflect exactly what you believe, ones that make sense of your life as you experience it, ones that bring the world a little closer to the way you wish it could be.

—

Gifts were exchanged, but the biggest gift was the idea that celebrations could be invented, that we could choose to honor what was most meaningful to us, that and the knowledge that spring was finally here.

—

On the scale of our human history, rituals like putting up Christmas trees, lighting menorahs, reading Hafiz, and baking rice dumplings are new. We humans have celebrated the earthly repercussions of our orbit longer than we’ve celebrated virtually anything. Before Christmas and Hanukkah, before monotheism or any other kind of theism, our ancestors were staring up at the stars, trying to gather clues about the changing of the seasons, the passing of time, and what the darkness might bring. The idea of marking the longest, coldest night with the knowledge that the warmth and light is not too far off, that is ancient. And no matter where we’re from, what religion we are, or to what ethnic group we belong, we can be sure that our ancestors, all of our ancestors, contemplated Earth’s place in the universe with awe. For them, it was sacred. And it still can be for us. Even more so because science has brought us a deeper understanding of the mystery and beauty of nature than our ancestors could have ever dreamed.

Sasha Sagan is not a scientist by trade, but she shows how you don’t have to be a scientist by trade to allow science and the rational approach to life govern you and guide you toward meaning that isn’t based on superstition or religion.

::  Eve’s Hollywood, by Eve Babitz. I read this on the strength of Sheila O’Malley’s paean to Babitz on the occasion of her passing last year. I really had no idea what I was getting into with this book, but after reading this by Sheila:

Let’s hear it for the outlaws of this world, particularly women outlaws. Let’s hear it for the swashbuckling romantics, the adventuresses dancing outside the perimeter of the picket fence, unprotected but free. Eve Babitz was their patron saint.

I had to read something by Babitz.

I started this book, actually, on the plane to Hawaii, the last leg of that journey, which stared from LAX, so I think it fitting that I started Babitz’s memoir about growing up in LA while I was however-so-briefly in LA. My first hint that I was in for something very different was the dedication. There isn’t just one. Or two. Or three. Babitz dedicates her book to a cast of hundreds, in a dedication section that spans pages. Here is just one of her dedications:

And to the word, brouhaha.

Wow.

I wouldn’t dream of trying to sum up what Babitz writes about here. All of it is personal remembrance of a woman whose parents were friends with Igor Stravinsky, among others. (That’s the part that kept catching my eye. My entire life, Stravinsky is a genius composer who helped classical music kick Romanticism to the curb and embrace Modernism, the composer whose ballet The Rite of Spring cause a riot when it was premiered, but for Eve Babitz, he was a guy whom Dad knew and who showed up at parties.) Babitz’s Los Angeles isn’t a glitzy Beverly Hills experience, but it’s not the gritty place of Jake Gittes, either. It’s an interesting combination of the two, along with other incarnations of the same place. I’ve certainly never had the sense of LA that this book gives me. As the introduction (by Holly Brubach) states:

With a father who was a baroque musicologist and violinist under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox, a mother who was an artist, and a godfather who was Igor Stravinsky, Babitz grew up surrounded by a circle of illustrious family friends that included Edward James, Joseph Szigeti, Eugene Berman, Marilyn Horne, Kenneth Rexroth, and Kenneth Patchett, with poetry readings in the living room and premieres of works by Arnold Schoenberg under the palms.

A few quotes:

Studio musicians and musicians in general, men who have grown up practicing minute things their whole lives, are special. The general rules accepted by the players are that violin players are all lovers of women to an extravagant extent, oboe players are crazy and French horn players are sexy. Everyone else is square as square can be as far as I’m concerned, and if you go to an L.A. Philharmonic rehearsal you’ll see a bunch of accountants sitting around in plaid shirts and you’ll realize that musicians are the most innocent benders to Art there are. Imagine binding yourself into the confines of an orchestra, under the stick of a conductor, having to play what someone has written 200 years ago!

–

Stravinsky himself was Stravinsky. He was tiny and happy and brilliant and drank. He used to slip glasses of scotch to me underneath the coffee table when my mother wasn’t looking when I was 13. At my 16th birthday party, I wore white (very low necked white, of course) and he slipped rose petals down my top when my mother wasn’t looking.

–

Of course, gym teachers being what they are, they couldn’t just let us alone, they had to tell us what to do so they used to have “dance contests” with processes of elimination and envy and all that other stuff they have. The idea was to applaud who you thought was best—judgment by your peers, it’s called—and the ones who got the loudest applause won. Only the gym teachers decided which applause was loudest and it was never for the Pachuco couple no matter how obvious it was. Because how could kids who weren’t white and who’d been sent to Le Conte because they’d been expelled from other schools win? So the runner-up always won.

–

We were hot, the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment. We didn’t know, as kids in other schools seemed to, what we were supposed to be, but we knew that somehow we were being taught something about life and that it couldn’t get much better. And when the sun began to set and we’d gather our things and walk silently back to the cars, we only wondered how the waves would be tomorrow in baked, half-conscious curiosity.

I remember reading something George Carlin wrote once, in which he talked about how much he loved and adored the New York City of his home; he closed by saying something like, “So why do I live in Los Angeles, then? Because the sun sets across the street from my house!” That’s the kind of sense I get of LA from Eve Babitz, only she’s kicking over rocks to see what’s underneath, and honestly, what’s underneath those rocks is utterly fascinating. I loved this book and I savored reading it.

::  The 13 Clocks, by James Thurber. I’m an old fan of Thurber’s, though I confess I’ve not read him in a very long time. I found this hardcover…someplace. I don’t honestly recall where: maybe a used bookstore in Ithaca, maybe one of the library book sales, I’m not sure. The story is a fantasy fable about a Princess whose father is an evil wicked Duke who promises her hand to the Prince who can complete the impossible quest set by the Duke. The book abounds with Thurber’s wordplay, so much so that it reads like a prose poem or actual formal verse, complete with rhyme schemes, set in type to look like verse. It’s frankly a delightful read, and it might be a good gateway for younger readers to Thurber’s kind of urbane wit that bites a little bit harder than you realize. I loved it.

If you can find a copy with the illustrations, please do so. The text is available in the Library of America’s Thurber volume, but without the illustrations, alas. (Thurber was also an artist who famously illustrated his own works, but apparently by the time he wrote this his eyesight had deteriorated too far for him to be able to do it himself.) Here’s an example of the illustration (by Marc Simont) in The 13 Clocks:

::  The Starship and the Canoe, by Kenneth Brower. Billed on the cover as “In the spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this is an exploration of the lives of two men, astrophysicist Freeman Dyson and his son, George. The elder Dyson is transfixed by the idea of the Orion Project, a proposal from the 70s for an interplanetary (or even interstellar) spacecraft that would use nuclear bomb detonations for propulsion. Basically the ship would have a very large shielding plate on its back end, and every once in a while a nuclear bomb would be chucked behind the ship to explode, giving the ship a kick forward. There’s something about that idea that sounds a bit absurd, but it would actually work and was seriously studied (Carl Sagan himself noted its potential in Cosmos) before international treaties banned the detonation of nuclear bombs in space.

Orion is the “Starship” of the title; the “Canoe” is a project of George Dyson’s. The Younger Dyson lives in the Pacific Northwest, as something of a quasi-hermit who builds a treehouse and uses paddle-boats (canoes, kayaks) to get around the hundreds of islands and island communities off the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia. As Brower gets to know him, Dyson the Younger is building a large sea-canoe that will accommodate six adults; Brower follows Dyson on various journeys up and down that coast as he meets people and acquires raw materials for his project.

The Dysons were somewhat estranged for many years, while Brower traces their lives in parallel, highlighting the ways their respective journeys mirror each other even while seeming wildly divergent. I found myself enjoying the chapters focusing on George more, mainly because of Brower’s nature writing, but Brower also does a good job of highlighting the ways these two men are very much alike.

There is very much a kind of 1970s “Search for oneself” vibe here, the kind of thing that makes me think of John Denver songs (not disparagingly, either, I love John Denver), but nevertheless, I was surprised at how much I liked this one.

Not a day passed without whales. The sound of their blowing was always around us, like the respiration of gods. We were trespassing, but with indulgence, I felt. We were like small boys who have sneaked into Neptune’s room and hear him breathing in his sleep.

::  The Sea of Trolls, by Nancy Farmer. I read this aloud to The Daughter years ago, and I remember enjoying it greatly. In fact, it might be the last book I ever read aloud to her, before she declared that she wanted to read herself at night–a wish I granted, though it made me sad to do so!–and we never finished reading the trilogy of which this is Book One. I found all three books on the Used Books section at Savers a while back (I always find something of value in the Used Books at Savers!), so I snapped up all three, and I’m reading the entire trilogy this year. It’s a Young Adult fantasy about a boy named Jack in Dark Ages Britain, who is learning from the local mystic when the Vikings come raiding. Jack and his little sister Lucy are abducted by the Vikings and proceed to have adventures and quests.

The Sea of Trolls is an exciting book, full of violence and magic and ghastly creatures and evil Queens and trolls and magic wells and enemies who become allies and allies who become enemies. It’s a complex tale full of memorable characters, and Farmer doesn’t sugarcoat things while also maintaining a sense of youthful fun. It reads like a more violent, slightly-more-adult Lloyd Alexander novel. I’m looking forward to the next two books.

::  Sergei Rachmaninov: An Essential Guide to His Life and Works, by Julian Haylock. I read this as part of my perparation for this coming April, during which I plan to do a bit of a “deep dive” into the music of Rachmaninov. This book is a short (under 100 pages) bio of the composer, well written but obviously not terribly deep. It’s a good starting point for exploring Rachmaninov’s life and world. (The book carries a label reading “Classic FM Lifelines”, so I assume there’s a whole series of these for various classical composers, to fill the need for bios longer than a single chapter in, say, The Lives of the Great Composers but shorter than long-form biographies.)

::  Firefly graphic novels: Watch How I Soar and The Unification War, vols 1 and 2. I love and adore the Firefly universe, and I’ve long had the sense that if further teevee or film tales from that universe are not forthcoming (and at this point, short of a straight reboot, the moment has probably passed), comics were the ideal medium for further storytelling in The ‘Verse. And lo, that’s exactly what’s happened! After some fits-and-starts, there has been a steady stream of Firefly comics tales over the last couple of years, which I’ve started exploring.

Watch How I Soar is a story, or rather a collection of vignettes, involving our beloved pilot Hoban Washburn (or “Wash”), as his life flashes before his eyes in the moments before…what happens to him toward the end of the movie Serenity takes place. This one might not be rewarding for anyone who isn’t already a fan of this universe.

The Unification War is the kind of tale Firefly did best: a story in which our heroes, who are just trying to keep on flying in the present, find their past deeds still coming back to haunt them. The story alternates between the present day and flashbacks to the “Unification War”, the big conflict that took place a decade or so before our “present day” in which the overbearing Alliance secured victory over the freedom-loving “Browncoats”. (I admit that as much as I love Firefly and its universe and characters, sometimes the whole thing feels like Star Trek for libertarians.)

Part of the delight of The Unification War is in the way the story keeps getting more and more complicated as things progress. Writer Greg Pak splits the crew up, sending each person into various perils that spin more and more out of control, until…well, there’s my problem. I thought that The Unification War was a two-part story. Turns out…it’s three. And I don’t have the third volume yet.

Sigh.

::  Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot. I can barely describe this book. It’s billed on the cover as “An Entertainment”, and it certainly is that: a lone reveler wanders into a seemingly abandoned theater, whereupon he is present with a one-man show that incorporates a literary history of Alice in Wonderland, a biography of Lewis Carroll, a travelogue of Sunderland (a city in the UK), a meditation on stories and storytelling, and an exploration of history and meaning and the intersection of art and life. Alice in Sunderland is a staggering work where you never have any idea what’s around the next page turn: a tale about the ghosts that haunt old theaters? a tour of a tavern that’s a couple hundred years old? the life tale of an industrial robber-baron whose fingerprints are still on the landscape of this old city? a comics creator’s ruminations on the famous illustrations of John Tenniel? Who knows!

Talbot writes an immersive and dizzying work here, and the art–comprising traditional comics art, photographic collage, and other styles–is first-rate. I hold Alice in Sunderland as a masterpiece of the graphic novel form and a stunning example of the very best possibilities of the format.

Here is one spread from the book:

(Go here to embiggen.)

That’s all for January for me. What have you been reading?

 

 

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Bridges

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.

—The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller

In a real way, an era of my life can be defined by novels I read with the word “Bridge” in the title.

This period started in the back half of my senior year of high school, when I read Richard Bach’s The Bridge Across Forever, a book (and author) with which I have a long and mildly complicated history:

But back to that afternoon in the bookstore: the last Bach title on that shelf was The Bridge Across Forever: a lovestory. Like One, its back cover copy consisted of a single, brief item:

If you’ve ever felt alone in a world of strangers, missing someone you’ve never met, you’ll find a message from your love in The Bridge Across Forever.

As a Romantic at heart, that single blurb caught me. I bought the book and proceeded to read it pretty quickly. Without getting into too many details, my love life in high school was non-existent; I didn’t go on my first date until about a month before I graduated, and I didn’t have what I could by any reasonable definition a “girlfriend” until I was in college. (I always suspected my general high levels of geekiness and my general low levels of good looks as being prime causes of this, but I digress.) There was something about that bit on the back cover of that book that really captivated me: Missing someone you’ve never met.

As I recall, I read The Bridge Across Forever over the course of a week or so.

The Bridge Across Forever started an almost literary obsession during which I read everything Richard Bach wrote over the next year or two, and I ranked him among my very favorite authors for a while afterward. There is something to be said about hitting particular authors when you are most susceptible to their own unique magic, and maybe it’s a bit judgmental of me, but I do think you can tell something about a person by which author hits them between the eyes in those formative years between, say, 17 and 19 years of age. A person who gravitated to Richard Bach–weird mysticism and refusal to deal honestly with the details of his life aside–is more likely to be a person I can groove with than someone who discovered Ayn Rand at that same time.

Bach lasted for me through college, though my fascination with him did start to wane a bit as other fascinations came to the fore. (During summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I found an old copy of John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights in the basement that had belonged to my sister, and that single book launched me into a fascination with Arthurian legend that has also blown hot-and-cold, but never died, to this day.) But then in 1992–either toward the end of my junior year or at the beginning of my senior year, I don’t recall exactly–a new book with “Bridge” in the title hit the world. The author was a guy who actually lived and taught at another college, the University of Northern Iowa, just twenty miles away from my own school. His name was Robert James Waller, and the book was called The Bridges of Madison County.

This book was a colossus at the time, a hugely successful nationwide bestseller that catapulted Mr. Waller to enormous fame, giving his next few books instant best-seller status that eventually faded. Bridges was even bigger, though, in Iowa, for obvious reasons: a hometown writer hit it big with a story set in the backwaters of Iowa, a state no one ever thinks of as “exotic”, with a story of passion and forbidden love. A nature photographer comes to small-town Iowa to take pictures of some covered bridges for National Geographic, and while there he meets a farm wife whose husband and kids are off at a state fair someplace. In the space of about 48 hours, they have an affair and decide that they are the love of each others’ lives…and then, because she cannot bring herself to leave her family, their relationship ends and they never see each other again.

This story was huge in 1992, and as all such things do, it led to a movie, starring Clint Eastwood as our photographer and Meryl Streep as our farmwife. General consensus seems to have decided that the film is actually better than the book, and it probably is. Like lots of folks back then, I bought a copy of Bridges and read it in about a day. It’s a really short book, actually, and it was attractively published in a small-sized hardcover. The cover is a pleasant aged-paper color, with an inset sepia-toned and weathered photograph of a covered bridge, and the words “A Novel” present in a stylized postmark stamp.

Each chapter heading has a photograph from a covered bridge–the work of our hero photographer, Robert Kincaid–and the book itself is set in a typeface I honestly don’t recall seeing again anywhere else. It’s a nice bit of book design, in all honesty.

As for the writing, well…it’s complicated.

For all the love The Bridges of Madison County received back in 1992, in the years since Robert James Waller has sadly become something of a literary punchline. It’s not hard to see exactly why, though I do think it’s a little unfair. For one thing, when you read Waller’s descriptions of Robert Kincaid–a lanky fellow in an old denim shirt and omnipresent orange suspenders–and then you look at a photo of Robert James Waller from around the time he wrote Bridges, it’s honestly not hard to envision this as a “Mary Sue” story in which Waller is basically writing himself into an erotic tale. I don’t know if there’s any biographical genesis for the story Waller tells in this book that would make it a de facto confessional piece, but I rather doubt it, for the most part. Surely that would have become common knowledge afterwards, and he did have a long career after that. (Waller died in 2017.) Still, I wonder if Waller’s wife read the book and wondered if he was trying to say…something. The marriage ended five years after Bridges came out…probably right around the same time that Richard Bach and Leslie Parrish were deciding they weren’t soulmates after all.

I didn’t love The Bridges of Madison County when I first read it in 1992, but I did like it just fine. For a story set in as down-to-earth a place as you can find, there’s a kind of mysticism that underlies the story, and my impression as I read it was as if Robert James Waller was coming from the same kind of place as Richard Bach, albeit with less overt New Age mystical mumbo-jumbo. Waller’s world is still a place of magic, where lyrical spells are cast in the golden haze of the sinking Iowa sun, particularly if you’re on a covered bridge over a lazy Iowa river (all rivers in Iowa are lazy, and if you don’t believe me, go to Cedar Rapids and look for the rapids sometime). Waller’s magic turns erotic in a way that Bach’s does not, once he moves us from the bridge to the candle-lit kitchen of a lonely Iowa farm house whose wife’s family is out of town. Bridges reminded me of Bridge, with less astral projection and more removal of clothes.

Reading the book again, I’m struck much the same way.

Also, reading the book again, I’m struck by Robert James Waller’s writing style. It’s…well, look…he’s not a bad writer! There are some really good passages in here, and he sets a scene very, very well, often choosing details that matter (such as when Francesca works to dig out the coffee cups that don’t have chips in them). But he also does some really strange stuff, mostly in the form of words he puts in Robert Kincaid’s mouth. This very odd bit of self-description, for one example:

I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.

I do not pretend to have the slightest idea what that means.

And Robert has other speeches about manhood and how he is one of the last of the real cowboys and such. This snippet comes in the middle of a long (several pages long) speech about the loss of the cowboy or some such thing:

Eventually, computers and robots will run things. Humans will manage those machines, but that doesn’t require courage or strength, or any characteristics like those. In fact, men are outliving their usefulness.

OK, I guess. I was discussing this stuff online with a friend of mine recently who suggested that this was part of the whole “Iron John”, Robert Bly movement about masculinity that took place in the years around this novel’s publication. I don’t know enough about the Bly movement to assess that claim, but Waller’s constant description of Kincaid as more force-of-nature than human being always strikes me as odd. Richard Bach doesn’t even go that far.

Waller writes poetically, and his scenes work from the standpoint of the descriptive stagecraft, but it’s hard to home in on either of these two characters. Francesca is a bit easier to sympathize with, since I suspect we all have our “Am I living the correct life?” moments, but it’s not easy to buy her insta-romance with Robert Kincaid because it’s just not easy to buy Robert Kincaid. He doesn’t feel like a character to me; he feels like a device. And when their romance ends, in a moment that I know we the readers are supposed to find deeply sad and moving, the person who gets my sympathy is Richard, Francesca’s husband, who gets home at the end to a wife who will never love him again, if she ever did. Richard can sense something is wrong, something is amiss, something has shifted in his beloved wife. He is riding around with her, running errands, and Robert Kincaid drives past her one last time, on his way out of town forever:

Richard took the truck across the intersection heading north. She looked for an instant past his face toward Harry’s [Robert Kincaid named his pickup truck “Harry”] red taillights moving off into the fog and rain. The old Chevy pickup looked small beside a huge semitrailer rig roaring into Winterset, spraying a wave of road water over the last cowboy.

“Good-bye, Robert Kincaid,” she whispered, and began to cry, openly.

Richard looked over at her. “What’s wrong, Frannie? Will you please tell me what’s wrong with you?”

“Richard, I just need some time to myself. I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”

Richard tuned in the noon livestock reports, looked over at her, and shook his head.

And then, later on in a letter that Francesca has left for her kids once she has died–a letter in which she explains to her son and daughter just why Mom seemed emotionally distant for the rest of her life–there’s this:

I think Richard knew there was something in me he could not reach, and I sometimes wonder if he found the manila envelope when I kept it at home in the bureau [containing a compromising photo that Robert Kincaid had taken of Francesca]. Just before he died, I was sitting by him in a Des Moines hospital, and he said this to me: “Francesca, I know you had your own dreams, too. I’m sorry I couldn’t give them to you.” That was the most touching moment of our lives together.

I can’t lie: I hate that. I hate that at no point does Waller give us any sense that Francesca anguished in the smallest measure over the fact that she denied her husband the emotional intimacy that is supposed to come with marriage. She let him carry the knowledge that he had lost her, somehow, some time, all the way to his death. I hate that.

Waller structures Bridges in flashbacks: Francesca has died and her two kids are seeing to the final dispensation of the estate, when they find the box of stuff Francesca left behind to explain her choices, which end with her request to have her ashes scattered where she herself scattered Robert’s, by the bridge where they first met. We don’t even get to delve very deeply at all into how this affects these two people, now adults, who are learning that their own mother had emotionally wed herself to someone else.

Ultimately The Bridges of Madison County is a story that tries to put a happy gloss on adultery, by assuring us that the affair really was true love, and that it ended quickly, and that everyone lived…well, ever after, anyway. I find it a hard book to love and a hard love story to be captivated by. But once upon a time, it captivated a lot of people.

Robert James Waller returned to Bridges some years later, with an “epilogue” titled A Thousand Country Roads. This is a really strange book that feels to me like a cash grab, an attempt by an author who had lightning in a bottle once to try and grab that market again, this time with a book that purports to tell “the rest of the story”. Problem is, Bridges already assured us that there is no “rest of the story”: Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson had their affair in one weekend, he left town, they never saw each other again, end of story.

A Thousand Country Roads revisits Robert Kincaid after the affair, and we see Francesca a little too, but they never meet. They can’t, after all. The only thing this book can do is give us a scene where Robert and Francesca visit one of their covered bridges, but an hour or two apart, so they don’t meet. There’s a manipulativeness to A Thousand Country Roads that rankles, and it’s odd to have this book that calls itself an “epilogue” to the original book when the “epilogue” book is actually longer than the original!

But anyway, the period of my life when I was open to “mystic love”, that began when I read The Bridge Across Forever, almost certainly drew to a close when I read The Bridges of Madison County. I came to see love as more of a practical thing between two people, and less of a union of two luminous spirit-beings, or the fate-driven intersection of a woman and “a peregrine and all the sailing ships” Last Cowboy. I suspect this transition was driven by another fictional entity, a sitcom that showed up a year later called Mad About You…but that’s a post for another time.

 

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From the Books: “This Will All Be Over Soon” by Cecily Strong

Cover art, THIS WILL ALL BE OVER SOON, by Cecily Strong

Cecily Strong is one of my favorite performers on what is a very strong present cast on Saturday Night Live. In fact, this particular season she is getting featured a lot more than usual, possibly because Kate McKinnon has been on a leave from the show while she makes a movie. Strong is brilliantly versatile and funny, most notably for the shrill bombast she evinces when she is impersonating FOX News “personality” Jeanine Pirro. Strong also did a recent bit during an installment of SNL’s “Weekend Update” where, while dressed as a clown, she discussed the fact that she had an abortion in her early 20s. Strong is the kind of performer who is willing to leave however much of herself on the stage she needs to, and it’s often amazing to behold.

Like most of us, Cecily Strong had a very bad year in 2020. Unlike most of us, she wrote a book to document and process what happened to her and her family that year. For her it wasn’t just a year lost to COVID and the turmoil and uncertainty COVID brought; for Strong, 2020 was a year of profound loss and deep grief. Strong’s 2020 started with the death of her beloved cousin Owen from brain cancer. This was followed by the onset of the pandemic that for a time seemed to put the whole world on hiatus. It was during this time that Strong wrote this book.

Actress, comedian, and author Cecily Strong.

This Will All Be Over Soon is structured as a diary, chronicling Strong’s experiences and thoughts and feelings as the year unfolds, starting with her beloved cousin’s death and progressing into the pandemic. As such, she has to grieve not just his passing but others, and the loss of her home and her certainty. Strong meditates throughout the book about her relationships, her upbringing, and her previous struggles–if you want more insight into the abortion she recently discussed on SNL, it’s here–as she, like many of us, was forced to grapple with the uncertainty of life on an almost daily basis for an entire year…and more.

Cecily Strong is, it turns out, a gifted writer in addition to her skills as a performer. This book was on my To Read list as soon as I found out she was writing a book, and it stayed there even when I learned that it was not a comedy book but a memoir of grief and struggle. As such, I am even gladder to have read it. It’s not just a journal of a personal grief, but a primary document of a time that already feels somewhat distant. There’s a definite sense of Did it all really happen? Was it like that? Was all that fear real?

It was, and we need books like this to remember.

From This Will All Be Over Soon by Cecily Strong:

Maybe I can offer up one answer to my dad’s question: why Owen?

Owen fell madly in love after being diagnosed. He released two of my favorite songs with his band. One amazingly right before his last week in the hospital. He helped arrange the strings on that song, without even being able to play any of the strings. He went to basketball games. He covered scars with hats and became the fun guy who collected hats. He came to SNL. He danced. he smiled. He laughed. He read. He ate ice cream. He told my uncle he’d had the best year of his life.

The entire world will be affected in some way by coronavirus. We don’t know how. We don’t know if we will be sick or someone we love will be sick. Could the unthinkable happen and could we actually lose someone? And why can’t we control this fucking thing? I watch Cuomo speak to try to understand the science. We try to wrap out minds around the language of COVID-19 and Ebola drugs and malaria drugs and what it does to your body, and we can only watch, helpless.

I hear and feel the fear and pain and grief and sadness in people and how it manifests in lashing out and hoarding and turning on one another, and it’s dangerous and it’s sad and every day I have started to feel it more and more: the world needs Owen Strong.

This sound hyperbolic and, quite frankly, impossible, I realize. I don’t mind the hyperbole, since I still see him as a bit of a superhero figure. But I guess what I really mean is this: I was afraid to talk too much or share too much of this loss for many reasons. It would mean acknowledging something as real when I wasn’t ready to, I wasn’t sure it was my loss to share, and I was afraid of never being a good enough writer to properly honor him, just to list off a few.

Now I’m ready. Leda is ready. I want to write about him. I want to talk about him. I want you to know him. I want you to feel a little better after knowing a bit of his story. Maybe, just maybe, somebody will feel less afraid about the uncertainty that lies ahead. Maybe we can find moments during a very scary and difficult time to feel lucky.

Because who knows: as Owen proved, the worst year of your life could turn out to be the best year of your life.

Maybe that’s why, Dad.

And yes, there’s a reason why I’m posting about this book, this day. Grief isn’t a thing that ends, after all.

Sixteen years gone, today….

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“I shall read you to the bitter end!” vowed the Reader….

An interesting discussion erupted over on Twitter the other day, occasioned by this tweet:

https://twitter.com/nakedvix/status/1448595705128529920

Almost exclusively the discussion hewed to one side of this argument: that it is, in fact, deeply silly to suggest that a reader is insulting an author by leaving a book unfinished, for whatever reason. One writer and book commenter and critic and reader after another came forth to insist that no, as a reader, you absolutely should stop reading books that for whatever reason aren’t clicking for you. You owe the author nothing, and there is utterly no insult to an author simply because one reader didn’t connect with a book.

In short, everyone piled on the writer of this tweet, and given the formulation of the position stated therein, that’s probably correct. I myself do not hesitate to leave books unfinished if I am not enjoying them.

However!

(There’s always a “however”, isn’t there?)

In this case, the writer behind the tweet above, Victoria Richards, is merely paraphrasing the headline above in the article she links in her tweet. Reading that piece, I found myself agreeing–at least a bit. The actual point the article’s author, Rupert Hawksley (a writer with whom I am unfamiliar), is a bit more nuanced.

A bit.

Yes, the headline reads “It’s an insult to authors to not finish each and every book you start,” but when we dig in we find something else:

Earlier this week, the novelist Mark Billingham caused a minor stir when he suggested that readers should throw a book “across the room angrily” if it hasn’t gripped them in the first 20 pages. Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Billingham said that he gives up on about half of the books he starts because “life’s too short … There are so many great books out there.”

Plenty of others agree with him. Hilary Rose, writing in The Times, explained that she “bitterly regret[s] not heeding Billingham’s life lesson sooner”. Crime writer Linwood Barclay added: “Think of it this way. If the first three bites of your meal taste terrible, you don’t need to keep on eating, expecting it will get better.” Well, no, though I’d point out that if the starter was disappointing, you might still stick around for the main. Plenty of iffy prawn cocktails have been followed by an excellent steak.

Reading is, for the most part, a private pursuit; it’s unlikely many of us would seriously change our habits based on the advice of others. Whatever works for you, I suppose. Still, I have found the discussion this week dispiriting and, dare I say it, a bit childish. The idea that we read simply to be entertained – as an easy form of escapism – seems to underpin all the arguments for giving up on a book: “I couldn’t get into it”, “it didn’t grip me”, “too slow”. But entertainment, surely, isn’t the only reason why people read – or indeed why authors write.

Reading should challenge and confound us; it should take us into the minds and lives of those we don’t like or find hard to understand. This may not always be gripping but it is often rewarding. We owe it to writers to give them a full hearing before passing judgement – and finishing a book is the only way to do this. To give an author just 20 pages of your time is insulting.

That last bit is key: We owe it to writers to give them a full hearing before passing judgement–and finishing a book is the only way to do this. To give an author just 20 pages of your time is insulting.

Also of note is the way Hawksley starts: he is responding to someone who has said that a reader should fling a book angrily aside if they’re not enjoying it just twenty pages in. Now, there’s no link there to substantiate the quote, so it seems to me that Hawksley is framing a stronger-than-necessary response to an argument that is, the way he depicts it, also a bit strange.

All I can do here is offer my testimony as a reader myself. I stop reading books (what the kids today call “DNFing”, with DNF standing for “Did Not Finish”) probably around a quarter of the time. That is to say, I suspect that I DNF around a quarter of the books that I start. Why? Well, there are many reasons! There’s the “It didn’t grab me” thing, which is a thing, I have to admit. There might be other factors involved: I’ve had to DNF books that came due at the library before I could get all the way through. (This may, in fact, be the main reason I DNF stuff. Sometimes I’ll make a note that I was liking the book and check it out again; other times I won’t bother.) And sometimes there are other reasons for DNFing a book. I’ve had a few instances of starting a book just in time for the author to, well, show their ass on the Internet by saying something awful. I don’t like to do that, but I can’t really enjoy a book knowing that the author has just exposed themselves as a big jerk.

Here’s what I don’t do, though: I never pass judgment on a book that I did not finish. A cursory glance at my Goodreads account makes it look like I like all the books I read, but that’s not quite it: I won’t review a book I didn’t finish (I have a DNF shelf on Goodreads for my own record-keeping, and it has only seven titles on it), and I don’t finish what I’m not enjoying. This seems fair to me.

I also very rarely conclude that a book isn’t good. When I DNF a book for a reason involving the book itself, it’s because of that dreaded “it didn’t grab me”…but even so, I don’t read too much into that at all. I’m more likely to say “This wasn’t doing it for me right now, but maybe it will some other time.” And that is always possible. Many of my favorite books of all time are books that I couldn’t finish the first time I tried reading them. I see a DNF for this reason as not being a statement of any kind about the book, or me, or me and the book. It’s just “Meh, this isn’t what I feel like reading right now.”

That original author’s statement about flinging the book aside angrily if you’re not grabbed in 20 pages? Isn’t that a little weird? How can 20 pages possibly be enough to know if a book has “grabbed” you? And why be angry at a book that simply hasn’t engaged your emotions on this particular day? In fact, the books that make me angry might be the ones I’m more inclined to finish, for whatever bizarre reason. It doesn’t happen often, but I will note that I wish, from the vantage point of experience and time, that I had chucked The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged against the nearest wall. But even in those cases, I doubt I’d have done so a mere twenty pages in.

Ultimately I think readers and authors put way too much stock in a book’s need to “grab your attention”. The advice is constant: “You have to grab your reader! You have to command their attention from the first line! If they have the slightest reason to put your book aside, you’re done!” Sometimes you hear this stuff from editors and agents, but those are special cases: their jobs involve reading more stories or novels than any human can reasonably process in a week, so of course they’re going to reject books within a few pages, if that. But what of that? What does that mean? Again: merely that the book didn’t click with that person at that time.

So, in the end, I think the only real insult to an author comes when you judge a book harshly without having finished it. You should come to a book with the most open mind possible, but it is simply unreasonable to expect that in every single case a reader will be prepared to go where the author wants to take them. You never know until you try, I guess…but don’t worry about insulting the author. Especially if you bought their book, because then, well, they’ve already got your money.

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From the Books: Why We Swim

Swimming in the rain.
Swimming in the rain. Via benchandcompass.tumblr.com

Sometimes people cite the lack of browsing as a reason why it sucks that the independent bookstore has fallen on hard times in these, the Days of Amazon and other online retailers. And that’s true: one of the great joys for me, as a bookish person, is wandering through the shelves of this bookstore or that, seeing what random things I may find that I didn’t even know I wanted (while likely carrying around a stack of things I already knew I wanted). Well, indie bookstores seem to be rebounding of late, but there’s another place where you can get your Serendipitous Finds Whilst Lazily Browsing game on, and those places are libraries.

A couple weekends ago I had occasion to be in the Hamburg, NY public library. It’s a lovely place, recently renovated and a member branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, so my library card works there, too! I wasn’t planning to leave that day with six books under my arm, but that’s what happened. Among them was Why Se Swim by Bonnie Tsui.

Tsui is an Asian-American journalist who has written on issues of interest to that community, including a book called American Chinatown that was a bestseller and won an award for Asian-American journalism. (I have not read it, but on the strength of Why We Swim, I may.) Why We Swim is her second book, and it is quite simply exactly what its title suggests: a look at why human beings, evolutionarily descended from sea creatures but no longer of the sea, are so strongly compelled to the water. Swimming is one of the most common things we do as humans, despite the fact that this obsession with the water so often brings us to harm. We keep coming back. Why?

There are a number of basic reasons, Tsui argues, and she boils them down the sections of her book. We firstly swim for survival, and she opens here with an examination of an Icelandic fisherman who survived alone the capsizing of the fishing boat on which he worked. He swam three miles through icy seas after his mates either froze or drowned, and he lived to tell his tale and become a folk hero for the people of Iceland.

Next Tsui discusses how swimming heals us and how swimming regularly contributes to our overall fitness. She writes about the effects of regular swimming in cold water and how some competitive endurance swimmers turned to their activity after suffering illnesses or injuries.

We also swim for community, and Tsui describes impromptu swim clubs that formed after the fall of Baghdad in the Iraq war. She also discusses the sad history that racism played in the destruction and dismantling of public swimming pools in American cities, during the decades of white flight from urban centers for the suburbs. It’s another example of the fact that no matter how hard we try in America, we can never get far from our deplorable history of racism and the racist motivations behind some of our oldest public policy choices.

These are all practical reasons for swimming, but Tsui saves the most profound reasons for the latter portions of Why We Swim. Water is almost a psychological need for humans. She reports that hospital patients report better sensations of well-being when the decor of their rooms includes water imagery, and she notes that Henry David Thoreau included a great deal of swimming in his treks to Walden Pond and the woods where he went to live deliberately. The water calls to us and guides us, even if we are no longer a part of it; we recognize that some part of us comes from there.

In this passage, Tsui relates a bit of personal history in how swimming played a part in forging connections with her family-to-be. The book is full of beautiful passages like this.

Once upon a time, I fell in love with a family and a lake. In the ritual of swimming, the connection of one body to another, of one person to another, there is flow of a different sort to be found.

The first summer we were together, Matt took me to visit his grandparents at their cottage on the northern shores of Lake George, five hours north of New York City. Ted and Shirley met on a swimming raft on that lake, in 1939, and got married after the war. Their safe harbor was the tiny hamlet of Silver Bay and the grand old YMCA resort that had been there since 1899. Matt and I were young ourselves on that visit, just out of college, and would not be married for another eight years. But that liquid-mercury lake–framed by evergreens in the picture-postcard view from the screen-in back porch–would be a touchstone from the first.

Everyone in the family had a particular way of crossing the lake. Grandpa Ted had a special affection for tooling around in fishing boats. He owned three in his life: The Ultimate Folly I, II, and III, each larger and more elaborate than the last. No one could remember him having ever actually caught a fish.

Uncle Chris, all six feet five of him, folded himself into a kayak before paddling across. Matt’s mom, Robin, loved to float around in a rubber dinghy–she wasn’t a frequent lake crosser, but she was a spirited shore dabbler. Her husband, Jan, a marine surveyor, traversed the waters on a windsurfer and, later, on a stand-up paddleboard. Uncle George, a National Outdoor Leadership School instructor and all-around outdoorsman, like to sail; Matt’s little brother, Jesse, had just earned a license to pilot the thirteen-foot Boston Whaler.

One morning over breakfast and his daily crossword puzzle, Grandpa Ted casually mentioned that he and his friends used to swim the mile from Silver Bay across the lake to Diver’s Rock, for generations the spot where children have made a heart-stopping jump into the water. “That was the thing to do back then, like swimming the English Channel,” he said, his eyes sliding over to me before returning to the crossword, each completed square lettered in unwavering ink. “If you said you’d swum across the lake that day, that was something.”

My ears perked up. I smiled back at him. This was something I knew how to do, and he knew it. I loved the idea of joining the generations of lake crossers before me, in a way that was me. He was handing me a personal invitation.

That afternoon, we pushed off from Silver Bay, Matt swimming and me beside him, paddling Grandma Shirley’s old blue kayak, so he wouldn’t get run over by speedboats.

We made our way past the sailboats and motorboats bobbing in the harbor; past the raft at Bay Beach, where Ted and Shirley first set eyes on each other; past the tiny island of Scotch Bonnet, where Matt’s parents were married; past a man in a boat who yelled at us through a megaphone, “Swimming in the lake is hazardous to your health,” what with all the boats and Jet Skis racing about. Forty-five minutes later, we arrived at Diver’s Rock, the stone-faced cliff where each member of Matt’s family has made the jump. It was a veritable water tour of his family history at Lake George.

After we performed the solemn ceremony of jumping off the ledge, it was my turn to swim back across the lake. I tried not to think of the speedboats and trusted my man in the blue kayak to keep me safe. When I beached myself on the shores of Silver Bay, I felt initiated. I thought I finally understood something about what the place meant to Marr and to the company of lake crossers before us.

Eight years later, we continued our Lake George swim, the day after our wedding, with forty of our closest friends in the flotilla. Both sets of our maternal grandparents were there to witness it, and I suppose you could say that I swam from one family into another. We returned, year after year. Even after we moved across the country to San Francisco, we kept going back–sometimes in fall or winter, mostly in summer. There have been variations on the swim. One New Year’s Day, our bare feet stinging in the snow, Matt and I held the first and only meeting of the Silver Bay Polar Bear Swim Club (total members: two).

In the years since, Grandpa has gone. Jesse, too. When we go back now, it’s the fireflies and the stars that get me every time. Much of modern life is filtered out through the dense trees and mountains on the winding approach to the lake. Those winking lights, bobbing along the ground and filling up the night sky with their impossible density, send a signal. It’s a reminder to slow up and be awake to the real connections we have while we have them.

…

Pablo Neruda wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published when he was just nineteen; he uses aquatic imagery to depict the intoxicating gorgeousness of being in love, the loss of control when we’re immersed in it. The ninth poem in the collection, “Drunk with Pines,” is my favorite, for its vivid conjuring of a pair of swimmers caught together in the outer waves; two passionate, parallel bodies, one yielding to the other, “like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul.”

What are these if not stories of love?

Why We Swim is a wonderful book that made me think, most of all, of the fact that I really do miss swimming. I could claim that there’s not much opportunity for swimming around these parts, but come on: I live in a city that’s near one of the Great Lakes. That notion doesn’t pass the smell test, does it? I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of at least some way of how to swim, when I was uncomfortable in the water. I remember public pools like the one in Hillsboro, OR, where one summer I had diving lessons; I remember pools at the colleges where my father taught. I remember sandy-bottomed ocean beaches and rocky-bottomed lakes, lakes full of seaweed and other lakes where the water was warmer than the morning air, even in August. Lakes, two oceans, and rivers whose names I don’t remember. Small streams that don’t even have names. All of it, water.

I was good at swimming in grade school, sufficiently so that my school’s swim team coach would occasionally say to me, “Hey, goin’ out for swim team this year?” I always laughed and said no. I assume he was kidding around with me.

Thing is, that’s one decision I’d like back…because now, I’m not so sure he was joking. And what a thing that would have been….

 

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From the Books: SO MANY WAYS TO LOSE

NY Mets win 1986 World Series
Image: NY Daily News

It’s been my experience that any baseball fan will hate at least one of New York City’s two teams, either the Yankees or the Mets. I’ve never really hated either, which makes me an outlier, I suppose. I just like New York City too much to hate on its teams (though that can’t be the only factor, as I adore Boston the city and yet I’d like to see all of its teams fired into the sun*). Back when there were only four divisions in Major League Baseball, the Mets were in the same division as my team, the Pirates, and for a couple years there, the Mets were a thorn in the side of the Pirates as they strove to win three division titles in 1990, 1991, and 1992. Since then they’re all in different divisions, though, so the Mets don’t figure too much. And the Pirates are usually terrible, so what’s to root against? Fifth place?

One of my best friends is a Mets fan, which might seem a bit odd living in Buffalo, where all baseball fandoms basically boil down to a whole lot of Yankee fans, some Red Sox fans, and then a fan or two of everybody else. My friend came by his Mets fandom honestly: he grew up in the days of 1980s cable television, when every local provider had a couple of indie stations from NYC (WOR and…another one), and on one of those stations resided the Mets. Since they were what my friend saw most often, that’s what he came to love, and to this day he roots as hard for the Mets as he ever has, though I’ve noted over the years a certain jaded amusement at the Mets fortunes (which are more often misfortunes) and a general feeling of “Hey, what did you expect” when the Mets flirt with something wonderful only to end up losing.

I’ve seen this same attitude from other Mets fans I’ve known: a certain even-keeled acceptance of their likely fate, which oddly allows them to have more fun in the face of their team losing than other fandoms out there. In all honesty, it’s my sense that a lot of sports fans could learn from Mets fans. They get as deliriously happy when their Mets win, obviously, but they avoid the soul-crushing despair and rage that comes of losing. (Mostly. I mean, it’s still sports, and when you lose the NLCS four games to two because your pitcher walks in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth in Game Six, well, no amount of baseball zen is going to keep you from wanting to take a chef’s knife to every teddy bear you can find.)

The Mets are that odd duck of a sports franchise: they haven’t won a ton (two World Series titles, and five total National League pennants), but still, they’ve won enough in their nearly 60 years of existence to make them rank just a bit above the “lovable losers” thing that the Cubs once managed to hold down for over a century. Mets fans aren’t long-time sufferers the way, say, Bills fans are. Because they’ve won, and because Mets fans seem to choose not to suffer in the first place.

When we traveled to New York City for Thanksgiving in 2015, I thought I’d grab my friend a Mets souvenir when we went into this big NYC gift store in Times Square. Place was huge, loaded with every NYC-related gewgaw and tchotchke you could want, including stuff for the Yankees, the Rangers, and the Knicks. And there wasn’t a single Mets-related item to be found anywhere in that store. Which was really weird, because the Mets are still a NYC team, they have some lore, and they had just won the NL pennant that year. Just six weeks before our visit, the Mets had hosted World Series games in New York City, and this gift shop didn’t have anything. Not a single pennant, shot glass, poster, snow-globe with Citi Field in it, nothing.

In America’s biggest and most important city, one of two resident Major League Baseball teams is a beloved institution of American sports history, and the other is a niche interest, like indie comic books. Weird.

Anyway, a new book came out earlier this year called So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team In Sports, by Devin Gordon. That’s a great title that sets up the tone of the book to follow: Gordon’s walk through Mets history is (mostly) warm and humorous. It’s Mets history not as a scholar would relate it, or a sportswriter striving for “objectivity”; this is the history of the Mets that you would hear from a Mets fan, and that’s what makes the book special.

Gordon, like my friend, adopted the Mets as his favorite team from an early age, and he’s been with them since their rise to late-80s powerhouse and beyond. Gordon is also an experienced writer, and not just about sports, so he knows his way around telling stories with flare and a good viewpoint. Gordon writes like what he is: an erudite fan who can spend a couple of pages breaking down just why Willie Mays’s “Catch” is as great a baseball play (for many, it’s the greatest baseball play) as it is, while at the same time using chapter titles like “Fuck the Yankees”.

Buffalo’s own sportswriting market is awash in talented writers and journalists who undermine their own work by beating everyone over the head with their heated insistences on their own “objectivism”, so it’s frankly a relief to find a book like this where fandom is admitted and embraced and allowed to shine.

I honestly had a great deal of trouble selecting a passage to quote from So Many Ways To Lose, because it’s packed with great passages. I thought about his lengthy breakdown of the Willie Mays catch, which he uses to prelude what he considers an even greater outfield catch (by Endy Chavez). I considered some of the passages in which Gordon speculates on why discussion of Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden tended to focus on drug use when the topic of other players’ drug use never seems to come up much (you don’t really need to think too long to figure that one out), and there’s a passage about the design and construction of Shea Stadium that is helpful because it’s frankly always helpful to remind ourselves what an asshole Robert Moses was.

Instead, I’ll go with this, from early in the book, when Gordon is making the case why the Mets are “the best worst team in sports”, even though they have done something at least twice that a lot of other perennially losing teams have not, i.e., actually win.

Now, there may be some fans of trash teams out there who have read this far and who think I’ve been too cavalier in dismissing their body of work. They’re wrong, but I suppose they deserve a fair hearing, so let’s go through the top contenders, if only to condemn them to yet another defeat.

The Detroit Lions might be the worst team in sports, which is to say: they’re not even good at being bad. They’ve never won a Super Bowl, never been to a Super Bowl. They’ve played (lost) in a conference title game once, and that was before we all had cell phones. I don’t have to consult the Internet to know that the Lions have never had a memorable postseason moment, because if they had, I’d remember it. It’s been nothing but decades of cold, slushy, uninterrupted losing. Even their uniforms, bluish-gray and grayish-blue, are colorless. Playing for the Lions is such a demoralizing experience that the two most gifted players in team history, running back Barry Sanders and wide receiver Calvin Johnson, both retired in their primes rather than spend another season with Detroit. They didn’t just quit the Lions, they quit football. They ghosted. After Johnson walked away in 2016, at age 30, the Lions’ front office demanded that he return a $3.2 million roster bonus, which is sort of petty for a team owned by the Ford family. It also means the Lions now have a frosty relationship with at least 50 percent of their franchise icons.

The Cleveland Browns have a better claim to the “best worst” throne, because unlike the Lions, they are easy to like, and unlike the Lions, their postseason defeats are so infamously excruciating that they have names like The Fumble and The Drive. The Browns have only made the playoffs once this century, despite starting 29 different quarterbacks over the course of 20 years. For three years in the 1990s, the Browns ceased to exist because their greedy, heartless owner, Art Modell, may he rest in peace, hated it so much in Cleveland that he tried to move the team to Baltimore. Nest he fired his head coach, Bill Belichick. Now that’s some first-rate ineptitude. The problem with the Browns’ case may be Cleveland itself. It’s too grim. The 21st century hasn’t been good to the city, and every unlikely defeat, every clumsy failure is cut with rust and resignation. You can laugh at the Mets all you want. If you take pleasure in the Browns’ misfortune, you’re a dick.

Same goes for all of Minnesota’s crappy teams, the Vikings in particular, who have been waiting decades for the chance to lose another Super Bowl. In 2020, the Minneapolis-based sportswriter Steve Marsh compared the NBA Timerwolves’ Mets-ian flair for comic incompetence to a night of experimental dining–“Maitre d’, surprise us!”–but even he admits that in a city famous for its losers (the Vikes, Walter Mondale), the Wolves can’t get no respect. Their losing, while admirable, is just too small-time. Ditto for the Cincinnati Bengals, another small-batch loser, whose principal resume for “best worst” champion is the Icky Shuffle.* In order for the Bengals to be the Mets, Cincinnati would have to be New York. This is yet another case of small-market franchises getting overshadowed and disrespected, to which I can only say boo-hoo. To win at this level of losing, you need a big canvas.

Gordon goes on a bit, discussing why several other prominent never-winners in American sports can’t beat out the Mets for “best worst team ever” status, but curiously, he doesn’t mention a few other franchises known for their relentless losing. Surely the fact that the Chicago Cubs won a single World Series a few years ago doesn’t blot out their entire century of losing from our collective memory, does it? Or how about the Arizona Cardinals, a team that until its single Super Bowl appearance (which they lost in heartbreaking fashion despite a superhuman effort by their Hall of Fame quarterback and one of the greatest receivers ever in that very game) had to admit that its greatest moment in franchise history was a fictional moment that happened in the movie Jerry Maguire? And how about the Buffalo Bills, whose four consecutive Super Bowl losses from 1990 to 1993 still boggle the mind of sports fans to this day?

The Mets have done a lot of losing, sure–but they’ve done some winning, too. I’m not ready to grant the Mets the title of “best worst team” just yet, but Gordon does make a compelling case for his team, and that’s what it’s all about, anyway. And really, one of the great subgenres in sports writing is when gifted writers take on bad teams.

In the last year, I’ve read two great baseball books. First was Roger Angell’s iconic The Boys of Summer. Now I have So Many Ways to Lose.

I wonder if it’s time to start watching baseball again.

Endy Chavez makes amazing catch
Image: Metsmerizedonline.com

*This is a metaphor.

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Reading in Review: 2019

Reading, with coffee
Reading, with coffee.

Greetings, Programs!

The last few years I’ve adopted a self-challenge on Goodreads to keep my reading on track: 52 books a year. And I’ve been successful, so, yay, me! Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. It’s fuel for stories, as much as food is for life. Writers who don’t read are kidding themselves.

Anyway, if you want to see the roster of everything I read in 2019, feel free to peruse my Goodreads shelf for 2019. It was a good year for reading, and I didn’t suffer through too many slumps last year, which was nice. “Reader’s Block” can be a deeply frustrating thing. Fortunately, that never happened to me in 2019. I was quite consistent.

You may note that almost every book has a rating of four stars or higher. The absolute lowest rating I will almost ever give a book is three stars, and that’s for a book that’s perfectly fine and unobjectionable. My reason for this is simple. No, I don’t love every book I read, but I only finish books I love and I only rate books I’ve finished. The books that I either dislike, or decide aren’t my cup of tea, or that I simply peter out on…these get set aside in favor of something else, and not rated. Many times I’ve “bounced off” a book at one time only to read it sometime later and have it become a beloved favorite, so I am generally loath to genuinely pan a book. It’s something I just don’t do very often.

Likewise, on Goodreads I often won’t even list a book under “Currently Reading” until I’m sure I’m going to finish it. This isn’t for appearances’ sake, since I use Goodreads mainly to track the books I’ve finished. Filling it up with all my various DNF’s doesn’t seem useful to me.

Finally, here are the cream of the crop, the very best books I read last year. I recommend each of these very highly! (Links are to my Goodreads reviews.)

FICTION

The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin.

A Brightness Long Ago, Guy Gavriel Kay.

The Night Circus, Erin Morganstern.

The Serpent of Venice, Christopher Moore.

On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden.

NONFICTION

A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes.

These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore.

Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects, Neil MacGregor

Maestros and Their Music, John Mauceri.

These are just the books that stand out in my mind from 2019. In truth it was a wonderful year for my reading life, and if 2020 is half so good it will be a great year too. If you read anything really wonderful last year, by all means, let me know!

 

See you ’round the galaxy,

-K

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