Part II
Years ago, I wrote for and subscribed to a journal of transpersonal psychology that had a section called "What Our Editors Are Reading." I’m going to borrow a leaf from that journal to tell you what your blogger has been reading of late. So this blog will just be about what I am currently or recently have been reading. Let’s start with the fiction.
Belle had grown up with a love of fine art and beautiful things. The story is set in the early part of the 20th century in New York. And by a series of remarkable circumstances, she becomes the personal librarian of the famous financier and art collector, J. P. Morgan. In time she becomes indispensable to him in his quest to obtain many treasures for his collection. Over the years, because Belle is attractive, articulate and very witty, she begins to consort and dine with the aristocrats of the city like the Vanderbilts. Morgan, who is married, but has many mistresses, is drawn to our heroine – there is an erotic charge between them – but they never become lovers. Morgan dies without ever learning Belle’s secret.
All this actually happened. It is a matter of history. Belle essentially created the J. P. Morgan Museum as it exists today, and recently there was an exhibition all about her.
As the novel opens, we learn that she is fast friends with a fellow Ph.D. candidate named Nathan. They are not lovers, however, because Nathan is celibate for reasons that are unclear. He is an enigmatic man, and although he comes from a wealthy family, he lives a life of poverty, like a monk. What they do together are drugs – cocaine, Ecstasy, Ketamine, acid, you name it.
One day, Sarah goes over to Nathan’s house for one of their rendezvous, but he doesn’t answer the door. When Sarah breaks in, she finds out the reason. Nathan is dead, a needle his left arm (though we learn Nathan is left-handed). Nathan has been murdered. Sarah needs to find out why and who did it.
The story is more than a whodunit, however. The backdrop is the fires that are always burning in California where Sarah feels alienated – she’s from the woods of main, drives a trunk with a gun rack, and is a bad ass. She has also been raped, knows who did it (he’s still a student at the school), but has never received justice for the crime. There’s a lot about rape and its victims in this novel, and much of it is difficult to read, but gripping.
I won’t divulge more of the story in case you read it. I will just say that this is Christine Murphy’s debut novel, and she is someone to keep your eye on.
But after some days of fruitless search, we find ourselves reading excerpts from Amy’s diary, which describe episodes in her marriage to Nick. So, apparently, Amy is alive after all, though still missing. During the course of the novel, from reading Amy’s diary, we learn about how her marriage to Nick when she is at first wildly in love with him gradually curdles, especially after she learns he has been carrying out an illicit affair with a young woman. And to add salt to Amy’s wound, she had already lent him all her money so that Nick could open a bar in town.
At the beginning of the novel, all our sympathy is with Nick, but over the course of it, we can see why Amy has left the scum she had been married to.
I won’t say more except this – nothing is what it seems. This riveting book has more twists than a pretzel. It is a helluva good read. I can see why’s been so popular.
Tilt by Emma Pattee
Obviously, there has been a massive earthquake.
Do you know about the Cascadia subduction zone? It’s an area encompassing northern California, Oregon and parts of Washington. An earthquake there would have a value in excess of 9 on the Richter scale. The 1906 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed the city. An earthquake here would devastate the entire Northwest coast. The last one occurred around 1700. Nobody knows what would happen when the next one will hit this region. But that’s what Annie is about to find out. It happened to occur while she was shopping for a new crib at IKEA.
With the help of the woman who had been waiting on her at the time the earthquake struck, Annie is able to get out. She is injured, but she can walk. But where can she go and how can she get there? She doesn’t have her purse, her phone or her car keys. She has no way to reach her husband, Dom. Outside, she finds an apocalyptic scene, hell on earth, everything destroyed.
She has lost touch with the woman who saved her. She is alone. She begins walking. She wants to try to reach the café where her husband works.
During the course of the book, we learn a lot about Annie, her husband, and their marriage. But all the time she is walking, walking, walking from the afternoon until night comes when the only lights are from cell phones flashing like lonely beacons to nowhere.
The book is often funny – laugh out loud funny, uproarious – when it isn’t terrifying and heart-wrenching. And what about the baby? I won’t tell you how it ends or if it does. Read it. It may make you quake.
I still read a lot of fiction, but only at night before retiring. I try to keep up on current trends and the latest styles and writers who are blazing new trails in fiction, such as the Irish writer, Sally Rooney. Or the auto-fiction of writers like Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez. I will never run out of books to read until I run out of time.
Non-Fiction
But now I have a new hero – Neil Shubin, the author of the book I am currently reading. He’s a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago who has spent most of his life exploring the polar regions of the earth, the Arctic and, especially, Antarctica. Not only does he recount of his own explorations and discoveries, but he also gives vivid accounts of previous explorers who lived and sometimes died in the 19th and early 20th century when they made epic journeys to reach to poles. And, by the way, did you know that the south pole sits atop a volcano over 9,000 feet high? Imagine what it took to reach it! A man from Norway, Roald Amundsen, was the first to do so in 1912, breaking the heart of the English explorer, Robert Scott, who arrived at the pole a month afterward, only to find a Norwegian flag fluttering in the frigid air. What’s worse, Scott and all the members his team perished while making their descent down the mountain.
There is so much of interest in this book about glaciers and the forms of life, ancient (when the south pole was warm) and current that manage to survive there. But there is no room to mention these fascinating findings, especially about the history of lce and its importance in the modern world. You’ll just have to read the book, which I’m now eager to finish.
Just a tidbit here. Did you know that deep under the Antarctic continent there are lakes? And in those lakes there are microbes that have never seen the sun. Some of them can turn off their metabolism for five years and hibernate for all that time. I sometimes wish I could do the same….
Still, I decided to read this book because I admire the author, some of whose books, both fiction and non-fiction, especially on Buddhism, I had already read.
Still, it was tough going. It’s really a book about the extent to which the modern Western world, especially in the U.S., has had a long history of white supremacy and race-based nationalism. And the extent to which, especially under the administration of Joe Biden and now Donald Trump, we have been complicit with Israel in providing the ordnance, especially our cluster bombs, that the Israeli depend on to commit their acts of savagery against the innocent, mostly women and children. Gaza will never recover.
Mishra is an intellectual and a gifted writer, but one thing irked me about this book that I hadn’t expected. Some writers wear their learning and erudition lightly. Not Mishra. He is forever quoting other authors, almost as if he wants to show off how widely read he is.
Still, it’s worth a read if you have the stomach and head for it.
"The Impossible Man" is a superlative biography of a world-famous mathematical physicist and cosmologist, Roger Penrose, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2020 when he was 89. Widely recognized as a genius, the story of his life, quite apart from recounting his many original contributions to science, is a painfully moving and ultimately very sad, even tragic account of a tormented and deeply troubled man.
The author, Patchen Barss, a science journalist who writes with the hands of a novelist, spent several years in conversation with Penrose and was given access to many of Penrose’s letters, particularly to a succession of women whom Penrose courted as his muse. He needed intimate contact with women with whom he could share his ideas, but none of these relationships could survive his desperate, insatiable need for their love, support and understanding. He burned through them all, and wound up alone in his early nineties, effectively blind, estranged from his family, including his four children, still tinkering with his iconoclastic theories, which appear to indicate that he lost his way down the rabbit hole of his obsessions, few colleagues thought made any sense.
This is a beautifully written book, which honors a great man, but which leaves the reader to ponder the personal cost of pursuing the call of genius, no matter what the consequences. It is a cautionary tale no reader will soon forget.
I recommended the book to a couple of my friends who knew about Penrose and were interested to know what I thought about the book. To one of them, I wrote the following:
I know some of his students didn’t think much of this book, but many of his students — and some of his colleagues — were in awe of him and adulated him. But they only knew the public man. They were not privy to his personal life and to his deep anguish about his relationships with women. But Barss is a sedulous researcher and a gifted writer. He had extensive contact with Penrose over about four years and read all of his letters and correspondence from others. He made himself an expert on Penrose. I think if you read the book, you’d be impressed by it and convinced of the portrait he gives of Penrose.
One of things I found especially moving and so deeply poignant about Penrose is the portrait Barss paints of him in the prologue to his book when Penrose is nearly blind. This is a short excerpt from that prologue:
He willfully ignored medical issues – high blood pressure, macular degeneration, mobility problems, subtle but perceptible cognitive decline – that created challenges for his work and personal life.
He could concentrate when interrupted, but small disruptions could throw him off for hours as he struggled to recover his train of thought. He had increasing difficulty recalling names and words and often grew frustrated with his inconsistent memory….
His eyes had also betrayed him, blurring shapes and obscuring words on the page. He’d had a customized magnifier embedded in the right lens of his thick glasses, and by closing one eye and holding up a paper up to his nose, he could still read. For e-mail and digital publications, he bought the largest computer screen he could find and blew the text up to marque-sized letters.
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I can still read my books, but I have to use a patch over my right eye to do so. I was never a fast reader, but now I read at a glacial pace, and it takes me forever to finish a book!
Fortunately, I can still concentrate, not lose my train of thought, and comprehend well, even though not so well as when I was younger. But increasingly often, I can’t remember how to spell certain words or find the words I want to express myself or remember the names of certain actors, etc.
So, I have a lot of compassion for Penrose, God bless him. He’s still alive at 93. I can only wonder how he’s doing now.
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Time to start wrapping up this blog. I have just a couple of things to add before doing so.
One is about the books I will never read or finish. There are plenty of them. I remember I stopped reading Moby-Dick on page 338. I never got much farther in Dante’s Divine Comedy than the beginning of Purgatory.
I’ve read only a few of Shakespeare’s plays, always meaning to read more, but never have and never will. I did read The Odyssey and The Iliad, at least. I have a big book of the complete essays of Montaigne, but have only read about fifteen or twenty of them. I read Anna Karenina, but never tackled War and Peace. Or McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. And most shocking of all, although I’ve read the four gospels, I’ve never read the Bible, aside from dipping into it to read various sections, such as The Book of Job. A scandal, really. What can I say?
Yes, I know. Woody has porous boundaries and is always falling for younger women, both in films and in life, it seems. His reputation has certainly been tarnished in recent years, but I have no interest in litigating his character. Many highly creative artists would not win any awards for their character. That’s not the issue here. Let’s not get distracted. Getting back to what I had started to write about his latest book….
The New Yorker writer, Daphne Merkin, who wrote the foreword, says that Woody is as witty and wildly imaginative as ever, and I agree. I may no longer identify as being Jewish, but I have never lost my love for Jewish humor, and Woody is a master of that.
He's the same age as I am - 89. We were born twelve days apart in 1935, but he got there first. In his film, Radio Days, he obviously grew up listening to same pop songs that I did. I identify with the guy. If you ever see his film, Deconstructing Harry, you will understand why. It's a kind of autobiographical film, but it's the story of my life, too. Still, this is a blog about what I’ve been reading, not my life as a film critic! Fortunately, I’m not gonna write a book about my life and crimes, so you won’t have to read that one. Anyway, I’m now written out, so I’m ready to put this blog and myself to bed. Good night, Irene.
