Gift Guide 2014 — Steve’s Annual Book Picks

One of the long traditions at Apt. 11D is Steve’s annual post with his history books picks of the year. This year, his choices are more fiction that history. Here’s Steve… 

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First, apologies for not providing a list of books for 2013.  I had put together a list but for whatever reason didn’t finish my reviews in time for the end of the year.  Maybe I’ll post the 2013 list in the future.  Second, there isn’t much in the way of history this year.  Can’t really explain why; I just happened to spend the year reading and re-reading works of fiction, with a couple exceptions.  A few old friends stand out, so let’s meet them.

Adams, Richard.  Watership Down

At this year’s Christmas party a colleague and I got to talking about the past few years in the financial industry.  How colleagues are in the office one day, and on the next they’ve mysteriously disappeared.  At my old firm we called the HR reps “Angels of Death”.  At my colleague’s old firm they had another name for it:  Watership Down.  Cowslip’s Warren, in particular, where rabbits get fat off vegetable refuse left in a pile by a farmer.  But in return a rabbit gets trapped and carried away to the stewpot.  The rabbits never talk about the disappearances, they simply accept what has happened.  Their fate is to live off the bounty given to them and accept the occasional loss.  One never questions, and indeed avoids all questioning of, the system.  “Whatever happened to X?  Watership Down.”

And my response to my colleague?  “Know the book?  I just read it for the fourth time last month!”  When I first read it in elementary school, it was an adventure story.  I think I read it a second time in college, but I don’t remember why (make of that what you will).  The third time it was a story of leadership.  This last time it was again an adventure story, but more a myth about a quest for a better life than about feats of daring and victories over evil.  I suppose that’s why certain literature is memorable; it carries different meanings as one grows older.  A person’s mind evolves over time, and good literature is able to keep up.  Cliché perhaps, but clichés hold a kernel of truth.

Maugham, W. Somerset.  Of Human Bondage

 There’s no better example of good literature keeping up with a person’s changing mind.  I first read this book in the ‘90s, during the years between graduating from college and entering graduate school.  My “Heidelberg and Paris” years, so to speak.  Then the most meaningful storyline concerned unrequited love, passions for Mildred that were emotionally and mentally unhealthy.  No surprise there; everyone goes through their 20s and unusual is the person who doesn’t have their “Mildred Phase” at that age.  But upon my second reading Mildred didn’t have as much meaning for me as she did the first time around.  This time, Philip’s struggle for success and validation held my attention.  Characters come in and out of Philip’s life, some remain and become old friends, others drift away.  And the riddle of Cronshaw’s Persian rug, within which holds the meaning of life.

Dos Passos, John.  U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money (Library of America)

 I read a part of this trilogy in my gap year, between high school and college.  I was an exchange student to Austria and my school had an English section in the library.  That year I read a lot of Chaucer, George Bernard Shaw, and Dos Passos.  I remember all fondly, and found Dos Passos’s writing style liberating.  So this year I decided to give him another go.  His style is still remarkable.  A couple reviewers on Amazon think he’s “too liberal”.  Well, yeah.  He wrote the trilogy during the Great Depression, and set his tale in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with American industrialization as the backdrop.  Of course he wrote about Labor and Capital.  Does the trilogy still have meaning in early twenty-first century America?  Certainly.  The actors may be different, but the play is familiar.

Fermor, Patrick Leigh.  A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics), Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics), The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (New York Review Books Classics).

 Another trilogy, from one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary memoirists.  In the 1930’s, young man Fermor set to walk across Europe from Rotterdam to Istanbul, following the Rhine and the Danube with a couple diversions along the way.  The characters he meets and his adventures along the way are remarkable.  There’s nothing quite like these works.  I’ve only read the first and second parts of his travels.  The Broken Road, the third paperback in the series, will be published in January.  I know what I’ll be reading in February.

Meyer, David L. and Richard Arnold Davis.  A Sea without Fish: Life in the Ordovician Sea of the Cincinnati Region (Life of the Past)

Trilobites and stuff.  When I was an undergrad at Miami University I sometimes found in the stream behind the dining hall fossil corals and brachiopods.  450 million years ago my dining hall would have been at the bottom of a shallow sea, somewhere just south of the equator.  This was an unbelievably long time ago; 100 million years before the trees which later became coal.  200 million years before the formation of the supercontinent Pangea.  400 million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Astonishing that we know anything about this era.  More astonishing that geologists and paleontologists have been able to piece together an impressive story, down to silt laid by ancient hurricanes.  I approached this book with some trepidation, worried that it would be out of my league.  To my surprise it was a quick read with the science behind it clearly explained.  Strange yet familiar beasts inhabit these oceans:  corals, bivalves, cephalopods, starfish, and vicious-looking arthropods.  And an odd wormy creature with the first indications of a single bundle of nerves strung along its length:  the ancestor of the vertebrates.

Enjoy the reading, and a happy holidays to all!