Book Report 2020: Fiction

The year 2020 brought a plague on the world, but was a bonanza for my life in books. I am part of a half dozen book groups, so I read books I might never have read or known about otherwise. 

I group the books I read in broad categories: Faith, Fiction, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology and Science. The biggest category is fiction so I will start there. 

Nine of the 50 books I read in 2020 are volumes 13-21 of the Master and Commander Series by Patrick O’Brian. I read the first 12 in 2019. It is a wonderful series with many reflections on friendship and leadership and life. Here is a passage on leadership.

Here is last year's list which begins with my delight reading this series. Of course, men crowded on a wooden ship made me think about men crammed into a tank.

The movie is worth watching. The friendship at the center of books is portrayed very well in the movie and some of the good scenes in the book make it into the movie. 

The next two books on the fiction list are the first two of five, 1,000-page volumes in the Game of Thrones series.  This fantasy series was among the best and most popular series on HBO: 8 seasons of sex and slaughter and first-rate acting and political intrigue.  But the books are better. Even eight seasons comprising 80 hours of drama omits some of the depth and character development that can happen in 5,000 pages.  And there are still two volumes yet to be published.  The author is more than three score and ten years old and does not have a healthy lifestyle.  I hope he finishes the final volumes!!!

The next two fiction books I read with the book group that began as four friends who were ESL volunteers sharing books and then became a book club.  This year, two of the seven books of the ESL Friends and Others Book Club were plague books:  Love in the Time of Cholera and The Decameron.  

The best part of the discussion of Cholera was Sarah Reisert on a ten-minute rant about how the book is a beautifully written account of misogyny, child abuse, child molestation, pedophilia, and other misanthropies.  It is all of that and a wonderful story and since it is fiction, no actual humans were harmed and the discussion continued about the parts we liked and did not like.  

The Decameron was better than I remembered. We skipped some of the worst stories of anti-semitism although we did have a long discussion of the last tale which is a tale of terrible abuse of a spouse. Chelsea Pomponio guided us through the two discussions we had of Bocaccio's masterpiece. He PhD thesis is on Bocaccio along with his Florentine contemporaries Dante and Petrarch.  I keep returning to these stories. I am fascinated by the hundred-tale poetic form that I love so much in the cantos of the Divine Comedy.  

The Decameron is paired with The Divine Comedy as the "human comedy."  The New Yorker's Joan Acocella wrote a lovely article about a new translation of Decameron in 2013.

In the spring, I re-read Memoir from and Antproof Case by Mark Helprin.  I have loved his work since I first read one of his stories in the New Yorker almost forty years ago. This is a crazy tale of a coffee-obsessed American pilot living in Brazil who seems like an old crank--and that's all--but has a wonderful story that unfolds over 500 pages.  Winters Tale  and Paris in the Present Tense are my favorites by Helprin, but this one is good. Along with Kazuo Ishiguro, Helprin is my favorite living writer, but I hate is politics as much as I love the politics of Ishiguro. 

The only Russian novel I read this year was The Head of Professor Dowel a creepy tale of three people kept alive as disembodied heads.  I meant to read it for year's and finally got around to it.  It is clearly an antecedent of C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength in which the "head" of a conspiracy is a disembodied head.  

At the prompting of my friend and former co-worker and talented writer Michal Meyer, I finally read both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and I read them both by reading Good Omens. It's a very funny book on the near end of the world averted at the last moment by an angel and a demon who each "love the world" too much to be good at their respective jobs.  

The last book on my fiction list for 2020 is The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I first read this almost forty years ago. This tale of looking for the meaning of the universe--and finding out that it's meaningless seemed just right for a year of pandemic made worse by incompetent, pathetic leadership. "Don't Panic" is a great motto for 2020.  

A couple of months ago, I wrote about book groups as a diversion for the pandemic year. Some things don't work so well on Zoom, but book discussions among small groups of interested participants work very well. 

Book Report Preview in Pictures

This year I read 50 books. I have not even started writing my 2020 book report, so I am making a preview in pictures: both a preview of the books I will be writing about and a preview of what I will be reading and discussing in the coming months.   

This first picture is the next book in several of the book discussion groups I am participating in.  Starting from the top is "The Promise of Politics" the current book in the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. 

Next is The Mandrake, a play by Niccolo Machiavelli, which is the next book we discuss in the World Conquest Book Club.

The next two books are part of the Writers in Residences series that is hosted by Franklin and Marshall College and local synagogues, including the one I attend: Shaarai Shomayim in Lancaster, Pa. The discussion of "Hebrew Roots, Jewish Routes" by Jeremy Benstein was a week ago. "Red Sea Spies" by Raffi Berg will be in February.

"Some Assembly Required" by Neil Shubin is the next book in the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College.  I have been part of that group for more than a decade and a half.  Stephen Jay Gould sat in with the group when he visited the college in the 1990s.

"The Tiger's Wife" by Tea Obreht is the next book in a discussion group of ESL volunteers and others. 

"Morality" by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is the topic of a weekly discussion group at Shaarai Shomayim Synagogue. 

The photo above is the books we discussed this year in ESL Book Group mentioned above.

The books in this photo were the books we read this year in the World Conquest Book Club. 

I will say a lot more about these books in the eventual book report.  

Happy New Year!

Celebrating the 51st Anniversary of My Driver's with a 1,400-Mile, 44-Hour Trip

On Thursday morning, December 17, my daughter Lisa sent me a text saying that should would be in Chicago on Saturday, December 19.  I had said months before if she was going to be in Chicago, I would love to see her. She lives in Minneapolis, but her now-remote job is in Chicago.  

Saturday, December 19, would be the 51st anniversary of my driver's license.  What better way to celebrate than to drive to Chicago for dinner and drive back.  

At 8 pm on Friday, the 18th, Nigel and I drove west across Pennsylvania to Cleveland where we stopped for the night just before 2am.  I like driving at night. So much less traffic.  

The next morning we drove to my daughter's apartment on the north side of Chicago.  She was pretty much packed for the move. We walked along the lake shore then ordered dinner from Mr. Dumpling.

After dinner at about 7pm Nigel and I started the 700-mile journey east. We stopped outside of Cleveland again.  By 4pm we were back in Lancaster: 44 hours, 1,422 miles. The car switched to metric units with one click so the journey was also 2,288km getting using 8.5 liters per 100 kilometers traveled. 

Just a nerdy aside, but we use a measure of how far we get per gallon of gas, the metric world, which means the rest of the world except the U.S., Liberia and Myanmar, use a measure of how much fuel they use to go 100 kilometers.  Fuel costs two to three times as much in most of the world as it does in America, so the emphasis makes sense.  

I like doing two-day circle drives. Each of my last three trips in Europe and Israel has included a two-day car trip of either side of a thousand miles.  In 2017, I drove from Paris to Nice and Monaco, then Turin, Zurich and back to Paris: 47 hours, 1,203 miles.  In the fall of 2019, I drove a circle of Israel from Tel Aviv, to Eilat, to Mount Bental on the Golan Heights, back to the coast, then to Jerusalem: 750 miles, 32 hours. I also did a five country loop visiting battlefields and the Spa Francorchamps racetrack that went from Paris to Luxembourg to Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and back to Paris: 45 hours, 900 miles.

I really am a motorhead.

s

American Exceptionalism Died on Trump's Lying Lips

 

In an essay on Socrates, Hannah Arendt says Socrates wanted all of us to be at peace within ourselves: as much as possible our inner self should be in line with who we present to the world.

To Socrates, one of the problems with being a murderer is that, even if you are never caught, for the rest of your life, you are a murderer. Your inner self can never line up with your public self in a civilized place. You will never be a virtuous person.

In the same way, American exceptionalism died in the five weeks between the election and Mitch McConnell saying "It's over." We were the first successful revolution followed by an enduring democracy. Even if Joe Biden is sworn in as President and the orange liar leaves office, America is now a place in which the sitting President of the United States lied, is lying and will continue to lie about the result of the election. We did not have a peaceful transfer of power and 2018 may still be the last free and fair election in American history.

America is now no better than any broken country fighting against a would-be dictator.

And when the rest of the world laughs at us, as they should, they can point to more than 70 million voters who looked at four years of hate and lies and said, "I want more of that."

America will never again have standing to lecture another country about peaceful transfer of power and democratic norms.

Foreign policy magazine has a good summary of American Exceptionalism.

The Best Bicycle Racer I Know is the Most Humble

 

Barry Free and I when I extended my Army enlistment for the last time.

Today I went to the doctor for a routine visit. It was an hour before the snow started. I rode to the office, wearing clothes for a ride at a temperature around freezing.  Just after I arrived, about my age woman sat opposite me. She asked me how far I rode. Then she said before she retired she worked in East Petersburg and had a co-worker who rode to work every day from Lebanon, 20 miles north of their office.  

"He rode rain, shine, cold, heat, whatever," she said. "Once his wife came and picked him up because it snowed during the day. Once. In more than 20 years. I can't remember his name. I...."

"Barry," I said. "Barry Free."

"Right, that's him."  

I told her I had ridden with Barry many times over the past three decades.  And that Barry was the best racer I knew personally--he was twice the Masters National Road Racing Champion.  

"Really?" she said. "I knew he rode far. I never knew he rode fast. I never knew he raced."  

I told her some of his career highlights and that even though Barry is a full decade older than me, I was never happier than five years ago when I beat him by a few seconds in a time trial.  We were not actually racing each other, different age groups, but my time was a few seconds better. That never happened before. I was happier with knowing I could be faster than Barry than I was my place in the race.  Barry was 72 years old then.

Bicycle racers as a group are as humble as senators at a fund-raising event.  Barry is different, and now I knew how different.  A co-worker in the same office not only did not know he was a champion, she did not even know he raced.  

Barry no longer races, but at 77 years old, he is still riding.  In a world where humility is more rare than Dairy Queen stores in the Sahara Desert, Barry is the real deal. I hope we can ride again when the snow melts and old guys like us get the vaccine. 

Conventional Wisdom is not Always Wise

 

Are there phrases that cause you pain whenever you hear them?  All my life I have heard phrases taken as conventional wisdom that are blunt instruments used to beat people, to push conformity on people who actually want to think.  

In her new and very thoughtful podcast "Kelly Corrigan Wonders," Corrigan begins with four episodes that show the dark side of supposed truisms many people take for granted.  I find each of the phrases wrong as generalities and hurtful when thoughtlessly pushed on others.

The first episode is the best and the most painful.  Corrigan, a cancer survivor, interviews a woman currently dealing with cancer. Both have been told "Everything happens for a reason" by people who are healthy, thoughtless and willing to cause pain simply to have something to say or to spread their own shallow beliefs.  

Both women are believers in God, which means they have people in their lives who are more apt to say "Everything happens for a reason" or "It's all God's plan for your life" or another variant of an uncomfortable phrase that comforts only the speaker.  

The relationship of Chance, Fate, Luck, and Free Will is complex in any but the worst lives, where poverty and disease and war have so limited free will and chance that bad luck and ill fate are all one has. I have thought about fate and free will a lot in the context of war. 

After listening to this episode, I don't think anyone could say "Everything happens for a reason" without embarrassment.

The next phrase, "Never Give Up" is more sympathetic for me than the other three, but only for myself. I have pushed myself not to give up knowing how much I will suffer for my obsession.  I don't often recommend others do the same.

Over the three decades I have raced bicycles, people have told me they want to race but don't want to crash. I tell them not to race.  I have enlisted four different times over more than four decades, but I have not encouraged more than a few people to enlist. As with bicycle racing, when helmets are mandatory, the activity is dangerous. I only encourage people to race or enlist, who clearly want to do something dangerous.  

Giving up is always an option. And a good option. Someone who says "Never give up" has not lain in a ditch on the side of a road seeing inside their knees or hear the crunch and felt the agony of their own splintered bones.

In "What you don't know won't hurt you" Dani Shapiro finds out in her 50s, after her parents have passed away, that she is not her father's biological daughter. It was something she sensed all of her life, but only found out with a DNA test. She was devastated. She wanted to know from her parents.  The phrase is crazy in so many other contexts. More than a century ago, my grandfather did not listen to the news and almost died by being drafted into the Russian Army--not a good place for Jews. What he did not know--that World War I had begun--almost killed him 

In the fourth episode, Google Executive Annie Jean Baptiste talks about the pitfalls and problems of trusting your gut.  She makes an excellent case of how trusting your gut means trusting that what you already know is enough for any situation--that our own limited experience is sufficient for any whatever we might confront. The wider our world the more likely our gut will be deceived. 

The public figures famous for trusting their guts are among the more arrogant Americans who every lived:  the former President, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, to name a deplorable few.  

Of course, anyone with expertise can trust their gut within the area in which they are expert: pilots in aircraft, sailors in ships, chemists in labs, etc.  But put the sailor in a plane, the chemist in a ship, or a failed reality star in the White House, and the problems happen as fast as storm lightning.  

All four episodes were fascinating for me. I am going to listen to them again.  And go further in the series.  

Confident Military Walk: Apparently My Default Setting

 

So much of who we are is what we do. When I went to the hospital to visit my son Nigel the day after he was admitted, I smiled to myself when I walked into the Intensive Care Unit. I smiled about the way I walked into the ICU.

When I am in a setting that is bureaucratic, like a hospital or a corporate office or a military headquarters, my habit is to square my shoulders, look straight ahead and walk with the even pace I learned in Basic Training. I did this from the moment I stepped through the ICU doors.

In the military, I learned that everything goes more smoothly for those look and act as if they know what they are doing. I did not need to act this way. But long habit led me to walk and act in a way that said "I know what I am doing."

I was also glad to notice that despite my all of my various injuries, I can still walk straight and confident. Nigel was in the hospital for more than a week. I walked the same way every day.