The Book Shopper

More Book-Film Connections

In keeping with a recent blog theme of Oscar movies and books, I was reminded of another book while I watched Jonathan Glazer's historical drama The Zone of Interest.  The plot centers around the mostly mundane domestic life of Auschwitz commandant's family whose garden backs up to one of the walls of the concentration camp.  It wasn't Martin Amis' 2014 novel that the film was "loosely-based" upon. (I have not read the book.) 

Instead, it was a book that I read last year, which made my 2023 Best Books Read list— Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)*. Not only can you read my thoughts about the book there, but I added some extensive notes on a separate page, including some excerpts about Auschwitz. You can find those notes here. 

* a later 2020 edition includes Snyder's discussion about the 2014 invasion of Ukraine (Crimea).

 

 

More Poor Things

Encouraged by the editors of Tropics of Meta: Historiography for the Masses, I expanded my previous posting about Alasdair Gray's book Poor Things (1992) into the essay, "Re-Visiting Poor Things:  The Book vs. the Movie."

This is my eighth essay (listed here) for Tropics of Meta, but who's counting?

Book Shopping Memories with Alasdair Gray

Just when you think a book/author has disappeared from your reading life they show up again— even 30+ years later. Such is the case with the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (1934-2019) who is riding a revival wave because of Poor Things, the movie starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe. Based on Gray's 1992 novel. Poor Things has already won several Golden Globes awards and is up for the Best Picture in the Oscars race. I am currently reading the book in hopes of finishing it before I see the movie. 

Historically, I go back a ways with Gray. My second published book review was about his book Something Leather (1991) and then there is this anecdote that appeared in this blog's name sake The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2008). Here's an excerpt:

"I am not the only one who admires Alasdair Gray. National Book Award finalist Madison Smartt Bell, in his acknowledges for his novel Doctor Sleep (1991), recognized Gray as one of the people who contributed to his book. However , Bell quipped, 'Gray will hardly be expecting it.' For years after I read the acknowledgement, I wondered what it meant. At the Nashville Book Festival I saw Bell on a panel, but I was too shy to quiz him in front of a packed house. Still, it confused me how these two seemingly disconnected writers were linked—Gray, an off the wall writer and illustrator from Scotland, and Bell, a novelist whose trilogy of books about the slave revolt in Haiti is an incredible work of history and imagination.

Finally I had an opportunity to hear Bell give another reading, this time at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee. A writer friend of mine was doing the handling of Bell and invited me to attend. After the reading, Bell graciously answered all the standard writing student questions: Where do you get your inspiration? What is your workday like? How do you get a goddamn agent? Since the discourse in the half-filled auditorium was lagging and I did really want to know, I decided to ask my question. Bell didn't miss a beat in answering that Gray's bawdy book 1982, Janine (1984) had influenced him while he was writing Doctor Sleep. Bell and my friend were pleased enough by the odd question to invite me to join them for the post-lecture beer and literary chat. Thank you Alasdair Gray."

Library Book Sale

If you like the possibility of finding great books for a couple of dollars or less, check out the Decatur Friends of the Library Book Sale on Saturday, February 2nd,  9 a.m. to  3 p.m. at the Decatur Public Library, on 215 Sycamore Street, Decatur. Denise and I will be working Saturday morning. Stop by, say hello, quiz me, but please only ask me questions that I can answer.  

 

Best Books Read in 2023

Looking through my list of books read this year, (a sidebar on the home page) and comparing it to Best Books Read 2017-2022, this year’s notables share certain characteristics. Besides being compelling reads, they have a thematic unpleasantness (read: misery). Is this just a reflection of 2023 or a pattern of the kind of book I naturally read? Let’s review.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder

I became a reader of Tim Snyder when a friend directed me to an interview with the Yale historian and a world expert on Eastern European history. In this interview Snyder predicted that things would happen during the 2020 election that would totally surprise us. I quickly read his succinct On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) but this year I expanded to his tome Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010).  In the introduction Snyder writes “that the mass killing of the twentieth century is of the greatest moral significance for the 21st century.” The book has added a new chapter includes an updated view of the 2020 election and The Big Lie, which by the way, was an Adolf Hitler technique.

Extensive ramblings can be found at My Random Bloodlands Notes.

Looking back at previous Best Books Read (2017-2022).  I had admired similar books: Josef Skorvecky’s The Bass Saxophone and Other Stories (set in Czechoslovakia), Astra Taylor’s Democracy May Not Exist But We Will Miss It When It Is Gone and Eric Vuillard’s The Order of the Day which tells how Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

Dispatches (1977) by Michael Herr

Books on Vietnam seem to be another pattern in my reading. This year’s offering was Michael Herr’s Dispatches. This short book is a mix of Hunter S. Thompson and George Orwell.  Based on the Thompson manic writing style Herr’s book could be renamed Fear and Loathing in Vietnam, but the comparison to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia fits as well. Not only did Orwell write candidly about combat and conditions on the front lines during the Spanish Civil War but he also integrated the politics of the country into the narrative as well.  Herr reveals the damaged psyche of the grunt and while questioning the mindset of journalists like himself.  He also reveals cluelessness of the commanders in the field. (Ironically, the U.S. Commander William Westmoreland’s was heavily criticized by others in the military for allowing correspondents access to the frontlines.)

"...some piece of helmet graffiti that seemed to say everything... 'Born to Kill' placed in all innocence next to the peace symbol..."

Herr was one of the screenwriters for the films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. A line from the movie came back to me as I read the book. It’s the point when the Marines have finished basic training and are marching on review.  Joker (Matthew Modine) narrates, explaining what he has learned: “The Marines do not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers.”

Dispatches fits on my shelf with other recently read Vietnam classics like Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Vann was not clueless) and more recently the works of   Viet Thanh Nguyen including the novel The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. He writes in Nothing Ever Dies:

"Apocalypse Now and Herr’s Dispatches converge in their honesty about or perhaps exploitation of the nitty-gritty core of war, which is the fusion and confusion of lust and killing, sex and death, murder and machinery, resulting in homicides that were illegal at home but encouraged overseas in the war zone."

The Nickel Boys (2019) by Colson Whitehead

Historically, (historically?) less than a third of the books I read are fiction, but one of my favorite writers has been Colson Whitehead. I’ve read four of his books, but not his most well-known— Underground Railroad. (My favorite is Sag Harbor.)

 In the Nickel Boys two Black teenagers Elwood and Turner struggle to survive in a reform school in Tallahassee during the 1960s. There is plenty of misery and brutality in the book which is more pronounced, because you emotionally become invested in (and root for) the two main characters.

Whitehead’s prose is fast-paced and energetic with description that gives the book some levity. For example:

"After the judge ordered Elwood to Nickel he had three nights home. The state car arrived at 7 o’clock Tuesday morning. The officer of the court was a good ole boy with a meaty backwoods beard and a hungover wobble to his step. He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against his buttons made him look upholstered."

Question Answered

I am already anticipating more Whitehead books ahead in 2024 and Eric Vuillard’s A Honorable Exit about the French withdraw from Indochina in the 1950s is already a scheduled read for my book group (GRSG).  

It is rather easy to answer that question about my reading tastes. There are definite patterns in my selections. I can only wonder whether types of books will dominate in 2024. With wars raging in the Ukraine and Gaza, I expect I will gravitate to similar titles in the days ahead.  

Milestone or Millstone

2023 was the year that the Book Shopper blog marked its 500th posting.  And in case you missed the celebration; there was no celebration. Admittedly I thought about renting some space and inviting notables who have made tangential cameo appearances throughout the years (Filmmaker James Benning, rapper Killer Mike and author Thomas Chatterton Williams, Book artist Brian Dettmer, essayist David Shields, photographer Emily Berl) and throwing a party on behalf of the blog. I might have called it “Not the Decatur Book Festival Festival.” For now, this remains a fantasy.

The blog premiered on November of 2008 when I reviewed a showing of “Paperback Dreams”, a documentary on the demise of two bookstores in the San Francisco area followed by a panel from the local book selling scene. Ironically, I have been a book seller myself for three years with my book popup Destination: Books. No brick-and-mortar store for me, which was one of the memorable takeaways (financial ruin) from “Paperback Dreams” along what a soulless gorilla Amazon was and still is as a bookseller.

Yet, the blog plods on. In the early years  I used to “report” on happenings around the city, but that became tiresome as writer events often become almost cliché.  Moreover, the response was underwhelming considering the work I put into it.

However, looking back on the postings about the notables was a fun trip down memory lane and I did learn some things worth sharing. For example, when the poet Billy Collins reminded his readers should not confuse the narrator of his poems with the poet himself.  However when my longtime partner Denise and I ran into Collins outside the chapel at Agnes Scott College before showtime, he seemed charming and whimsical like his poems. Another worthy author event featured the historian Rick Atkinson who wrote The Liberation Trilogy. In the Decatur Library Auditorium Atkinson graciously fielded World War II questions from the audience like it was a game show. 

 Though I continue to march with a one-foot-after-the-other attitude, I have lightened my load by adopting a more wistful format, which I share on a monthly basis. Receiving occasional feedback from you fabled few readers who haven’t unsubscribed me, is always encouraging. But the main motivation of continuing the blog is that it gives me an excuse to generate ideas, to write, knowing I have some hassle-free place to publish it.  A few posts have generated other writing ideas and larger essays on other platforms. One of the most notable was The MARTA BOOK CLUB where I listed the books, I witnessed people reading while riding the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit System for 12 years. It spawned my 2016, Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire, (see video trailer) book.

Well, it’s back to work as I compile my Best Books Read List for 2023. Time to get started on that next 100 to make it to the 600th posting, which I will I expect will drop sometime in 2030. Book your party reservations now.

Clockwise from upper left: James Benning's re-creation of the Unabomber's Library, Brian Dettmer's art work, Shields best known book, Williams and Killer Mike at the Decatur Library, Emily Beryl's photo of Liz Goldwyn at an LA bookstore.

 

 

 

Book Launched

It seems rather fitting that this Veterans Day weekend also marks the launch of my new book, A Father’s Letters: Connecting Past to Present which is finally on the shelves (at least virtually). It follows my writing pattern of publishing a book once every seven years: The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009), Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire (2016). At first glance, no three books could be more different from each other.

I began A Father’s Letters after I was blessedly packaged out to retirement from Turner Broadcasting in 2019. The first draft was awful. And on the advice of brave friends who saw the first iteration, I blew it up. However, some of the remnants had a half-life—especially my father’s correspondence which I had kept with me over the decades. This included approximately 600 letters chronicling two distinct periods of his life—as a combat infantryman in World War II Europe and 30 years later as accountant tethered to a desk job at a small Midwestern canning company. (The picture above is my father Glenn R. Browne Jr. as a 19-year-old infantryman near Kaiserlauten, Germany in 1945.)

I am a slow writer and I spent most of 2022 writing a new book, with assistance from some of those same brave friends. It was a great improvement but only five chapters and 63 pages in length.

Not only did I retrace my father’s combat action, but I also examined the letters he wrote me from 1976 when I graduated from college to his premature death from leukemia in 1985.  Certain themes emerged—such as how do we define ourselves in retirement. However, what surprised me was discovering how this correspondence shaped my life then and now. Part of the self-discovery was the process itself, which I write about.   

Fortunately, this was not a catharsis of trauma that so many books of this type can often be, but the writing of it felt more like a Field of Dreams movie moment of “Hey Dad, do you want to have a catch?” And since I grew up in east central Illinois it has that Midwestern influence as well.

Most of 2023 was spent getting it proofread professionally, designed professionally and finally printed through Ingram Spark and distributed through Ingram with my Muted Horn publishing imprint. The book contains photographs, a truncated map of my East Central Illinois homeland, cartoons (and I had to get permissions) and this cover art which is part of a permanent exhibit at the High Museum in Atlanta. Like Down & Outbound, I wanted the content to determine the physical form of the book.

Limited Availability

By working with Ingram Spark, the book is available online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble or you can purchase it through Ingram’s book direct sales. (Link to the book here.) I have a few “advance copies” here in my study and they will be available at my book popup Destination Books, which makes a monthly appearance at the Carter Center Freedom Farmers Market (Saturday morning, November 18). I expect that after Thanksgiving I will have more copies readily available for purchase directly though my personal website.

It seemed only appropriate that you blog readers should be among the first ones to know. Thanks for your support.

 

Grave Significance

Last month, my longtime partner Denise and I traveled to the Basque region of Spain and Belgium for a couple of weeks. Everyone knows about traveling in Spain (pintxos, wine, beaches), but Belgium is a lesser-known destination unless you are big fan of Colin Farrell movies (In Bruges).  Not only did I want to see my older daughter who flew over from Berlin, but Denise planned the trip so I could visit one of my bucket list items, the World War I battlefield at Ypres, Belgium. What initially intrigued me about Ypres is The Last Post ceremony. Held daily since 1928, it commemorates the 500,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers that died in the four major battles fought there between 1914 and 1918, The bodies of 100,000 of those fallen were never recovered. In a brief ceremony held at 8 p.m. three buglers play a haunting homage in front of the Menin Memorial Gate in Ypres. The Menin Gate is undergoing a major renovation, so I attended a considerably scaled down version to the one shown here on YouTube. 

The tour I took began with a forty-minute bus ride from Bruges to Ypres (pronounced E-pra,) beginning at 9 in the morning and extending through the Last Post. The tour visits monuments to the British forces, including the Australians, the Canadians, and New Zealanders and some stops where the battlefield has been preserved. Live ordinance is still being unearthed on a regular basis and has to be disposed properly. 

In preparation for my trip, I began reading British historian John Keegan's The First World War (1999), but it is a dense book explaining in detail not only the trench warfare on the Western Front, but he goes into the often-forgotten campaigns of the Eastern Front too where the Russians lost 1.7 million men, and the Hapsburg Empire (Austria) lost another million. Keegan explains why four years of wholesale slaughter was even possible. I did not finish the book until I returned home. Thus, I didn't fully comprehend the significance of the cemeteries until I read this passage in the book's final pages:

"The British chose an entirely different and absolutely standard method of honoring the fallen. Each body was given a separate grave, recording name, age, rank, regiment and place of death; if unidentifiable, the headstone bore the words, composed by Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved father, "A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God." The names of those who had been lost altogether were inscribed on architectural monuments...It was also decided that the cemeteries, large and small, should each be walled and planted as a classic English country garden, with mown grass between the headstones and roses and herbaceous plants at their feet...Over six hundred cemeteries were eventually constructed and given into the care of the Imperial War Graves Commission which, working under a law of the French government deeding the ground as sèpultures perpètuelles, (perpetual military graves) recruited a body of over a thousand gardeners to care for them in perpetuity. All survive, still reverently tended by the Commission's gardeners, much visited by the British, sometimes by the great-grandchildren of those buried within, as poignant remembrance cards testify, but also by the curious of many nationalities. None fail to be moved by their extraordinary beauty. Eighty years of mowing and pruning have achieved the original intention of creating 'the appearance of a small park or garden,' while the passage of time itself has conferred an ageless maturity. In spring, when the flowers blossom, the cemeteries are places of renewal and almost of hope, in autumn, when the leaves fall, of reflection and remembrance."

Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendale (near Ypres). Contains 12,000 soldiers killed and commemorates 35,000 whose bodies were note found

 

In Ypres, every day is Veterans/Memorial Day.

Conspiracies Explained

The Gravity’s Rainbow Support Group (GRSG), is a two-member book club/duo made up a college friend of 50 years and yours truly. Founded during the first months of the Pandemic, the GRSG’s first book was Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

In the three years we have read over 30 books together ranging from classics like Tristram Shandy and The Odyssey to historical tomes such as Barbara Tuchman’s Stillwell and the American Experience in China (1971). We recently finished Colin Dickey’s Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (2023).

Dickey begins his book about the Freemasons in England and France and their influence in the American colonies. Both Ben Franklin and George Washington were supporters of Masonry. Dickey writes that “Rather than a shadowy organization pulling strings behind the scenes, the Freemasons of the eighteenth century were a prominent, public group who sought to display their power and clout in the open streets.”   (Masonic buildings still dot some town and city landscapes like this one in my home town of Decatur, Georgia.)

The book gains momentum as the Civil War approaches.

Dickey points out how the abolitionists of the North used conspiracy theories to taint the Southerners and likewise how the Southerners used conspiracy theories to strike fear and defend being slave owners. Many Northerners complained that free slave labor gave the Southerners an "unfair" economic advantage. This feeling was especially true in agrarian Midwest.

One of the more ridiculous arguments was made by the future 10th President of the United States John Tyler who argued that the abolitionists "were not ‘friends’ to enslaved Americans but instead their 'enemies' since their agitations drove enslavers to crack down on those in bondage." This sounds as idiotic as the current Florida governor Ron DeSantis redefining slavery as on the job training.

Dickey's breakdown of the different eras of the Ku Klux Klan include the marketing strategy of merchandising of robes and hoods in the 1920s. This along with KKK's membership model which was basically a pyramid scheme is nothing short of eye opening. 

Towards the end of the book, Dickey gives us examples of how conspiracies and the belief that secret societies and cabals control our society, but he relates them to the current political landscape of Donald Trump, QAnon, January 6th rioters, militias, and replacement theorists. He explains why they endure:

"The morass of global politics is difficult to understand and unpredictable even to experts but conspiracy theories off a straightforward explanation that cuts through all that. They suture all available facts together and do the work of organizing the chaos of history into an explainable, overarching theory."

Coincidently those of at GRSG know only too well that one of major themes in Pynchon’s novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is that paranoia conveniently provides some kind of framework to explain our world. 

The Next Step

The CRSG thought this book was a worthwhile read for all its American history alone, but the author does seem have a point of view (not necessarily an agenda). It’s not a gospel, but it can be the familiar first step, to an education. "DO THE RESEARCH," as they say.

Solzhenitsyn Humor

In the previous posting about Milan Kundera*, I made a waggish comment placing Kundera on the humor spectrum next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) the Russian dissident and Nobel Prize winner. Solzhenitsyn was the author of August 1914 (1971), The Gulag Archipelago (1973-78), Cancer Ward (1968) and many other works.

The reasoning behind that joke was that it reminded me of the work of another writer Ian Frazier who is also mentioned briefly in that same posting. Frazier has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1974 and author of gobs of other books. (Many of which I have read and enjoyed, see The Book Shopper, pages 80-82 ).

But one of my favorite pieces of his is "Kimberly Solzhenitsyn's Diary" which comes from one of early collections Dating Your Mom, a copy which I rescued in true book shopper fashion from a discount dolly at the Hoopeston (IL) Public Library. 

Enjoy.

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Example of Kundera humor: "Fiction that avoids or denies feces, Milan Kundera has written, is kitsch". - Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review (7/23/23)

 

Kundera: A Final Review

My first thought when reading The New York Times obituary on the Czech ex-pat novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023) is that if you live and write for decades, not every reader or critic is going to admire your work. (In the obit, he is described as brilliant, witty, with "his poetically prizefighterish* looks, a misogynist, and a traitor to his country, etc.) Of course, if you have read enough of him, I think his rebuttal to these judgments would be an impolite version of "I don't care what you think, idiot."

That's why I never expected a thank you for including him in The Book Shopper's pantheon of notable writers in the chapter, "What Every Good (Used) Bookstore Should Have." In this chapter I included a rundown of contemporary writers I would use to measure the quality of any secondhand book shop I visited. The list in alphabetical order includes: Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, T.C. Boyle, Bruce Duffy, Ian Frazier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jim Harrison, Oscar Hijuelos, Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Milan Kundera, Alice McDermott, and E. Annie Proulx.  

In the The Book Shopper (pages 98-101) I gave a rundown of some of his works including a slap-on-the-wrist for recommending an Unbearable Lightness of Being, which after rereading years later I described as "overwrought." The movie version was even worse. As a humorist, I placed Kundera on the funny spectrum next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 

No wonder he never expressed any appreciation for making my list.

Still, I have a soft spot for him. I read a lot of his books and I still carry two quotes of his forever in my head, which originated with him and that counts. They both come from the book The Art of the Novel and the chapter entitled "Sixty-Three Words":

One the terms is the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (U.S.S.R.), which he describes as "four words, four lies. " **

The second term is that we live on the Planet of Inexperience. 

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their own age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.

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* The description of "prizefighterish good looks" from a character in Philip Roth's The Human Stain who sees Kundera at a book event.  

** Kundera acknowledges that "four words, four lies" originated from the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis.