Everyman by Philip Roth

Roth's canvas is a poignant meditation on being human. His everyman is painted fearful of illness and death and of growing old. Millicent tells him his choice (and ours) in life is to either be a force upon life and take control of it or let life control him. Following the latter, he is rendered worrisome, vulnerable, incapacitated by his choices, and limited in his ability to act. He believes that life is to be endured and taken as it comes. But as an old man, staring at imminent death, he is stricken with loneliness, desiring of intimacy, left to reckon with a fate of bleakness, oblivion, and nothingness, stagnate in his loss of youth and vitality.

Alienating everyone he cares for, save his daughter Nancy, he retires to his joy of painting. This finally renews his creativity and imagination, but, soon, it becomes boring and unsatisfying. He (and us) cannot sustain himself on something like painting alone. He misses the human connection, that need to love and be loved. No affair or lust for a younger woman or nostalgia for swimming or his father's jewelry store can fill that void or offer an escape.

Everyman is a novel about facing mortality. It is a novel about what it means to grow old. But it is also something more: like the bones in his parents' graves, it is a novel that strips down humanity raw. By depicting humans for what they are, it teaches us to live with vigor and meaning, with love towards others, lest we become like the everyman: feeble, ridden with regret and loss, becoming aware of our mistakes only when it's too late, diminished to a caricature of ourselves, all brought upon by ourselves: “I am seventy-one. This is the man I have made," he says.

With some of the finest prose I've ever read, this is one of the best books I've read.

Candice Millard - The River of Doubt

This book---a travel book, a book of adventure, but most of all a book about the feat of one man, Theodore Roosevelt, and his son Kermit and friends---is one of the best books I've ever read.
It is a gripping and powerful story of how TR led an expedition down a Brazilian river called The River of Doubt, a river that had never been explored, a river that some geographers doubted even existed, in 1914.

Theodore Roosevelt dealt with disappointment and tragedy in his life by embarking on sheer physical exertion---pushing his body to extreme physical limits. He embarked on this journey after losing his race for the Presidency in 1912.

The journey was successful, but took its toll on everyone involved. TR was pushed to the point of death, even to the point of suicide. There is no doubt that this adventure led to his early death in 1919.

The author is both a nature writer and an historian. You think YOU are on that river as you read the narrative.

This is a great story, a well-written book, and a compelling work.

J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace

My take on this fine, tight novel is that it's primarily about people trying to communicate with each other and not having much success.

David Lurie cannot properly explain to anyone his disastrous behavior. No one understands; no one CAN understand except him.

David cannot understand his daughter Lucy and she cannot fathom him. Petrus is mysterious, a creature of South Africa that he is.

Melanie's parents do not understand David, and he cannot relate to them.

The only communications that finally occurs is between David and Bev Shaw. At least David comes to understand why Bev devotes her life to taking care of animals. At least David ends the novel with SOME understanding of someone or something other than himself.

This is a great novel. I highly recommend it.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

A frolicking read... Britain is a surreal world here... Will-Speaks spout lines from Shakespearean plays and audiences perform Richard III nightly... time travel is frequent... debates rage over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays... even vampires and werewolves are a menace... Britain and Russia have warred for years over the Crimea... and the Prose Portal allows you to jump into a book and live in that world...

The fun doesn't stop there as Thursday Next tries to save Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit and, later, Bronte's Jane Eyre... with the manuscripts stolen by Hades, the third-most evil man on the planet, any change he (or anyone else) makes to the story when inside the book changes all copies of the book... Thursday lives in Jane Eyre to stop Hades and rescue her aunt from entrapment in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"... add a love triangle, and the entertainment never ceases...

The novel is delightful, especially for bibliophiles, with all its literary references... I think the end is hurried and has too many cases of deus ex machina, but that may be expected from a quick and light read like this... Still, a thoroughly enjoyable book...

I thank K-Dog for the recommendation!

Emory M. Thomas - Robert E. Lee

This biography of Robert E. Lee seems to be the standard biography of the great Southern general. Indeed, it is a carefully balanced account of Lee's life, sparing no praise, yet not sparing to point out his mistakes and shortcomings.

Bobby Lee (as I call him) will be one of reading projects in the coming months.

The Southern Man has to come to terms with Bobby Lee.

Summer Reading

My reading over the summer --- focusing on what I learned

The new FDR biography by Jean Edward Smith will likely be the standard one-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt for generations to come. It is excellent. What I learned that I didn't know was the build-up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. No, there is no evidence that FDR knew of the attack beforehand, but US officials did think that Japan would strike somewhere. You get the impression that war with Japan might have avoided with the right diplomacy. This book makes it seem like the US pushed into Japan into attacking us. Was this what FDR wanted.

Khaled Hosseini's THE KITE RUNNER is marvelous. Everyone should read this book. I can't believe I took so long to read it.

Carl Bernstein's biography of Hilary Clinton, A WOMAN IN CHARGE, is tremendous. I come away from this book with greater respect for Senator Clinton. I learned many things about her life that I did not know.

Still left to read this summer ---

Salinger's FRANNY AND ZOOEY

J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE

Emory Thomas's biography of Robert E. Lee

Book Quotes

"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."
- Erasmus

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
- Marcus T. Cicero

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"My home is where my books are."
- Ellen Thompson