After recently reading Truman Capote’s famous 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I realized that my periodic posts over the years about a specific decade of literature had not yet included the 1950s. That will be remedied today faster than an Elvis Presley hip swivel.

Looking back, the ’50s are considered a relatively conventional time in certain ways, but there were definitely signs of change bubbling under the surface that would explode in the following decade – among them pushes for civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. So, not surprisingly, many ’50s-released novels contained both conventional and unconventional elements – with the unconventionality also including a bit more candid depiction of sexuality and a bit more use of four-letter words than in prior decades and centuries. 

Civil rights and the Black experience in general were reflected in novels such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Unfortunately, the otherwise pretty open-minded Breakfast at Tiffany’s has some racist elements, whether that involved Capote thinking that way himself or the author just showing what many people’s views openly were back then.

Some non-white ethnic characters were also treated non-stereotypically in some ’50s novels. One who comes to mind is the highly educated Chinese-American cook/housekeeper Lee in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952); he’s that book’s smartest, most ethical, and most relatable person.

Independent or partly independent women appeared in novels such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (starring the flighty but strong-willed Holly Golightly), Daphne du Maurier’s Mary Anne (1954), Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (1955), and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). There’s also East of Eden’s Cathy Ames — though that evil, driven character is far from a role model.

LGBTQ+ characters, whether closeted or not, in ’50s lit? There were certainly some in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – one of the before-its-time highlights of Capote’s novella. Giovanni’s Room (1956) by James Baldwin comes to mind, too.

Meanwhile, Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951) gave readers food for thought about the necessity to distrust authority when the person in authority isn’t worthy of trust. A sentiment that would become more pronounced in the 1960s and beyond.

Also published in 1951 was J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, with its prescient look at teen angst and alienation through the lens of annoying protagonist Holden Caulfield.

Other ’50s novels of note include, among others, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 (1953), with its book-burning government’s thought-policing and anti-intellectualism; William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which explored how things can go bad when “civilization” is lost; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955), the pioneering fantasy classic that some considered a World War II allegory despite the author’s denial of that.

Major releases that decade, to name some, also included Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (both 1951); Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (all 1952); Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954); Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955); Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956); Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (all 1957); Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (both 1958), and Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (both 1959).

The ’50s novels mentioned in this post are ones I’ve read; there are of course many other books from that decade I have not gotten to.

As an aside, I’ll mention a novel I recently read by 1955-born author John Grisham. That book is The Widow (2025), and I must say that, after 50 or so novels, Grisham’s still “got it.” The Widow, about a small-town lawyer falsely charged with murdering the title character, is a riveting page-turner.

Thoughts on this post and the books in it? Any other 1950s novels you’d like to mention?

Misty the cat: “I’m keeping the pillow warm for when my college human comes home for Thanksgiving.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about a very interesting Township Council meeting — is here.

Angine de Poitrine! The video I took this screenshot from is at the end of today’s post.

I recently heard about a French-Canadian musical duo named Angine de Poitrine, and I must say that getting-very-popular band is delightfully quirky in its goofy appearance and mesmerizing songs.

The “q” word reminds me of some of the quirkiest authors and novels I’ve read over the years. Sometimes that quirkiness can be too much, but it’s often a nice change of pace…entertaining, compelling, and original. 

One of the first authors to come to mind is John Irving. He frequently deals with quite serious matters – war, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, etc., but mixes in all kinds of weird things. Bear appearances, wrestling situations, a deadly foul ball during a baseball game, and more. Life is unpredictable…

There’s also Franz Kafka’s writing, which is…Kafkaesque. 🙂 One obvious example is the human Gregor Samsa becoming a giant insect in that author’s The Metamorphosis.

Herman Melville got quirky in his rare 100%-land-based novel Pierre, which includes strong hints of incest as well as the author using his title character as a vehicle to obliquely reference Melville’s real-life dismay over the poor reception for his previous year’s Moby-Dick.

Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman? The title alone telegraphs just how oddly the author uses food in her debut novel.

Anthony Burgess’ dystopian A Clockwork Orange is also very offbeat with its slangy different language and more.

Or how about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five? It mixes horror, black humor, time travel, and more as it makes its antiwar points.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle features an isolated ultra-eccentric family, strange murders, and other eyebrow-raising content.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita includes the devil in its cast as well as a flying human (no airplane involved) and other fantastical elements.

Which reminds me that magic-realism novels, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, can also feature flying humans and other peculiar things.

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman includes absurd content such as cops who speak mostly in non sequiturs and are obsessed with bicycles.

And we can’t forget Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, who offers readers all kinds of surreal stuff: Alice’s body changing sizes, bizarre chess goings-on, the fading-away Cheshire Cat…

I’ll end by noting that there are novels that are mostly not weird but have at least one weird element. For instance, the tragic-yet-delightful ghost in Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

An Angine de Poitrine song:

Misty the cat says: “Before the rain the birds get noisy/That doesn’t mean I live in Boise.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about ICE agents again menacing my town and more — is here.

Reading fiction offers many pleasures. I’ll discuss one of those pleasures today.

Discovering an excellent living author you’ve never read before is a great feeling, and it can be even greater when that author has been around for a while — meaning you suddenly have a number of novels to enjoy from that writer’s back catalog.

Such was the case when I read the quite-literary, character-rich mystery writer Tana French for the first time last week. I liked The Searcher a lot, and was happy to see that French had written nine other novels – the first dating back to 2007 – from which I could choose to read without waiting for new ones to be published.

The Searcher (2020) stars a 40-something retired Chicago cop who moves from the U.S. to rural Ireland (echoing the American-born French’s relocation to that European country) and has two sequels — the first of which, The Hunter (2024), I’m reading now and finding even better than The Searcher. Then there are six books in French’s “Dublin Murder Squad” series and one standalone novel.

Changing the name Tana by one letter to Tara, Tara Jenkins Reid is another author I recently tried for the first time, starting with her novel Daisy Jones and The Six. I liked that Fleetwood Mac-inspired story enough to quickly read two more Reid novels – Carrie Soto Is Back and Malibu Rising – and am impressed with the way the author infuses pop culture and sports into serious fiction. Six more novels in her back catalog…

Isabel Allende came out with her masterful debut novel The House of the Spirits in 1982, but I didn’t read that magic-realism classic until around 2010 or so. Meaning I subsequently had 14 previous Allende novels from which to choose, of which I would particularly enjoy reading Daughter of Fortune and Zorro. (Allende has written eight more novels since 2010.)

I was also late to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander time-travel series, which launched in 1991 even as I didn’t read the first novel until 2019. By then there were seven more installments, all of which I addictively polished off during the height of Covid in 2020.

Kristin Hannah’s first novel was also published in 1991, but I didn’t discover her until reading The Nightingale less than five years ago. By then, there were more 20 other Hannah novels to catch up on, including the gripping family saga The Great Alone and the moving tale of friendship Firefly Lane.

It was more than 20 years after Elin Hilderbrand’s 2000 publishing debut that I belatedly began reading that author – starting with her delightful 2022 novel The Hotel Nantucket. By then, there were nearly 30 other Hilderbrand books to enjoy – and I polished off most of them.

When I first read Lee Child about a decade ago (his mid-career Jack Reacher novel 61 Hours), he had already written 20 Reacher books. So, there would be many Reacher page-turners in Child’s back catalog to enjoy, while also reading each of his new thrillers that arrived every fall since then.

Similar situation with John Grisham, who I didn’t start reading (choosing The Client) until he was in mid-career.

Of course, reading a deceased author for the first time usually means there are various other novels by that writer to enjoy in the future.

Your thoughts about this topic, and examples from your own reading experiences?

Misty the cat says: 🎵 “‘Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.’ 🎵 Except it’s Sunday.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, and include many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about a daycare center’s 100^th anniversary and other topics — is here.

Parties in fiction! They can be wild, weird, fun, entertaining, stressful, somber, tragic, etc. These gatherings can tell us a lot about the characters as well as put a spotlight on the culture and customs of their time. Meanwhile, those in attendance might meet for the first time, reunite, break up, and experience many other things. Parties can advance a novel’s plot, too.

Among the craziest parties I’ve encountered in a book is the 1983-set one in Taylor Jenkins Reid’s excellent 2021 novel Malibu Rising, which I read last week. The California shindig features plenty of drugs and sex, couples starting and ending relationships, changes in the lives of the Riva family members who star in the novel, celebrity cameos, police called to the door, and a mind-boggling conclusion. The novel basically alternates between that all-night party and various chapters fleshing out the backstories of the Rivas: rock star father Mick and the wife (June) and four now-adult children (Nina, Jay, Hud, and Kit) he abandoned.

Other novels with memorable parties? Let’s go chronologically back in time (of publishing date) to some examples.

In Zadie Smith’s London-set White Teeth, one of that 2000 novel’s main characters (Archie) is thinking of suicide but decides to go to a party instead – where he meets his future second wife (Clara). There is also much more to the book, which might be the most multicultural novel I’ve ever read.

Don DeLillo’s ambitious Underworld (1997) includes a scene at a real-life party: Truman Capote’s famous 1966 “Black-and-White Ball” at New York City’s Plaza Hotel. A rather high-profile guest list: Lauren Bacall, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite, Ralph Ellison, Mia Farrow, Henry Fonda, Joan Fontaine, Katharine Graham (the Washington Post publisher), Lillian Hellman, Lady Bird Johnson, Harper Lee, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Frank Sinatra, John Steinbeck, Andy Warhol, etc. As one can see, some prominent writers attended in addition to the host Capote.

The first book (1954) of J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic The Lord of the Rings trilogy opens with a massive party for the aged Bilbo Baggins, star of The Hobbit (1937). It’s a party that also serves to introduce Bilbo’s much younger adopted relative Frodo Baggins, who goes on to co-star in the trilogy.

Hermann Hesse’s existential 1927 novel Steppenwolf features a lavish masquerade ball, after which we witness the Harry Haller character’s famous visit to the fantastical “Magic Theatre.”

Two years earlier, in 1925, saw the release of Virginia Woolf’s masterful Mrs. Dalloway – which unfolds in one day as the title character prepares to host a party that then happens. But there is plenty of backstory and profound stuff going on in a book set soon after the trauma of World War I.

Emile Zola’s tragic The Drinking Den (1877) features a Paris wedding party that’s way too expensive for the bride (Gervaise) and groom (Coupeau). The extended scene depicts some happiness but mostly portends the doom to come.

Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre (1847) includes a high-society gathering at Thornfield Hall during which Rochester dresses as a gypsy fortune-teller to question governess Jane, with whom he has been falling in love.

The orgy scene in The Magic Skin certainly has a big impact on things in Honore de Balzac’s 1831 novel.

Short stories of course also feature their share of parties, with two of many examples being James Joyce’s poignant “The Dead” (1914) and Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842).

Thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “I’m where ‘the deer and the antelope play,’ minus the antelope.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – my 500^th column for that website! — is here.

A view of Boston and the Charles River from the 26^th floor of my daughter Maria’s sophomore-year dorm. (Photo by me, taken yesterday.)

My wife Laurel and I were in Boston from Friday to this afternoon moving in our daughter Maria for her second year of college. Not as much time as usual to think of and write my weekly Sunday book post, so I decided to stick with a second theme and write about some of my favorite second novels by authors. I’ll also mention a few not-favorite second novels.

A second novel can be excellent because an author has “practiced” with one published novel and is perhaps ready to move on to greater things. Or, in some cases, an author has been working up to that first novel for years and poured all kinds of effort and pent-up elements into it – creating the conditions to maybe disappoint somewhat with the next book.

I’ll only be mentioning authors whose first and second novels I’ve both read, so these will be my personal opinions and not necessarily the overall critical opinions. 🙂

One great second novel was Anne Bronte’s proto-feminist The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – whose quality was just a step below the Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights classics written by her sisters Charlotte and Emily. Unfortunately, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall would be Anne’s last novel because of her early death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne also hit a home run with his second novel: The Scarlet Letter. That came out a whopping 22 years after his little-known first novel Fanshawe; during the time between the two books, Hawthorne focused on writing short stories.

George Eliot? Her very good first novel Adam Bede was followed by her brilliant The Mill on the Floss. Some consider that semi-autobiographical work to be her best book, though fans of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda might have something to say about that.

Mark Twain co-wrote his uneven debut novel The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner. Twain’s second novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, of course became a classic.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s debut novel The Hobbit is delightful, even as his iconic follow-up The Lord of the Rings trilogy nearly two decades later has more sweep and depth. 

In the not-great-but-very-good category of second novels, we have Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. It’s certainly well-done and memorable, but a bit of a letdown after Dickens entered the fiction realm with his hilarious The Pickwick Papers.

Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was a stunning debut for an author in her early 20s, but her somewhat-less-impressive (and much shorter) second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye is still quite riveting in its quirky way.

Your favorite second novels? Any you’re not particularly fond of?

Misty the cat asks: “If this bouquet is from 1-800-Flowers, where are the other 799?”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about the vicious ICE agency detaining two restaurant employees who worked in my town — is here.

I’ve previously covered this topic here and there, but I wanted to return to some of the ways modern novels differ from older ones.

Several examples of this are cropping up as I read The Hallmarked Man (2025) — J.K. Rowling’s eighth excellent book, under her Robert Galbraith alias, starring private investigators Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott.

This long (897 pages) crime novel includes mentions of lots of digital technology that was of course not an element of long-ago books. Strike, Ellacott, and their employees frequently text each other while on stakeouts, pore through social media to seek information about possible suspects and witnesses, explore “the dark web” for clues, etc.

Rowling’s series also features plenty of cursing — taboo in older novels — as well as somewhat explicit sex scenes and somewhat graphic depictions of violence one doesn’t see as much in long-ago literature. (Although Rowling’s work is more reserved than some recent fiction in those respects.)

And, unlike many older novels, The Hallmarked Man and Rowling’s earlier Strike/Ellacott books feature various characters of different ethnicities, various characters who are LGBTQ+, etc. – with all that diversity depicted, like it should be, as an unremarkable part of life.

(Rowling’s unfortunate personal views about transgender people are fortunately not reflected in any of her novels.)

Getting back to the tech thing, one of the first 21^st-century authors to strongly incorporate the digital world was Stieg Larsson in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels — with the Lisabeth Salander character’s computer expertise germane to the plot in Larsson’s 2005-2007 trilogy. There was also Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell (referring to the phone not a prison space), though it was sadly one of that author’s lesser books.

Of course, early sci-fi writers such as Jules Verne and E.T.A. Hoffmann imagined approximations of stuff in our digital age, but this post’s focus is mostly on authors more current to our time.

Other recent or relatively recent books with many four-letter words and/or frank sexual situations and/or queasy violence? Kristin Hannah’s The Women (2024), Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022), Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), among many others. The cursing and violence in a war-set novel like The Women – which spotlights three American nurses dealing with horrific injury situations in Vietnam — is to be totally expected if the author wants to convey realism.

Other 21st-century books with all kinds of multiculturalism and diversity? Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), to name just two.

As I alluded to earlier, there are always exceptions to the rule. For instance, some older novels, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence, contain fairly explicit sexual content — and some newer novels are written in the more prim way of decades or centuries ago. (This is also the case with formal and/or wordy prose.) And there are the rare older novels with diverse, non-stereotypical casts – Georges (1843) by Alexandre Dumas is one that comes to mind – while some newer novels have homogenous casts.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Sheesh…I paid good money for a luxury automobile and get this?”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 (Not my voice. 🙂 )

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about not-beloved builders and an unpopular board — is here.

All authors write some novels that are better than others, but occasionally there’s an unusually large gap in quality between a specific author’s books.

(At least in my opinion; a book I dislike might of course be liked by others, and vice versa. 🙂 )

I thought about this when recently reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2011 novel The Marriage Plot until giving up on it after about 100 pages. I loved that author’s 2002 novel Middlesex – which I thought was a brilliant look at a gender-confused character, the immigration experience, and more. It deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize.

The Marriage Plot? Almost plot-less as well as boring – and filled with spoiled, whiny, unlikable, pretentious, annoying characters at an Ivy League university. One Amazon reviewer drolly and accurately described these fictional collegians as “self-absorbed, over-educated noodles with cartoon parents.” Also, through his characters, Eugenides did way too much name-dropping of authors and books to beat us over the head with how well-read he was.

In short, I found the gap between those two novels astonishing – though, as I said before, others might feel differently.

Other huge gaps I’ve found in books by the same author? The first example that came to mind was between Jack London’s A Daughter of the Snows (1902) and London’s The Call of the Wild (1903). In the first novel, I admired London’s attempt to create a strong female protagonist, but the writing in general and the dialogue in particular were laughably clunky. Then, a year after that amateurish effort, came a stone-cold classic that couldn’t have been written better. Here was a case, also seen with some other authors, of a young novelist struggling to find writing confidence and a distinct writing voice before those both kick in – which can happen gradually or, as with London, seemingly overnight.

Large quality gaps between an author’s books can also have a late-career element. For instance, the chasm between Willa Cather’s exquisitely written My Antonia (1918) or Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her abysmal Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) is stunning. Something like that can be caused by factors such as ill health or running out of ideas after penning many novels.

I also noticed this late-career phenomenon with Martin Cruz Smith: his Gorky Park (1981) and its first seven sequels are excellent, but eighth sequel The Siberian Dilemma (2019) is…ugh. It didn’t help that the author was dealing with advanced Parkinson’s disease at that point. 

And with Jack Finney: Time and Again (1970) is a riveting time-travel classic, but its sequel From Time to Time (1995) is pretty bad. Perhaps not a coincidence that Finney was in his mid-80s in 1995 and died that same year.

Of course, other reasons for a great author writing a bad book – say, in mid-career – could include a temporary health crisis, other challenging stuff going on in her or his life, having to rush a book for some reason, etc. Or sometimes a dud happens inexplicably; authors are human like everyone else. (So I’m told. 🙂 )

Staying with a novel and a sequel, Kristin Hannah released the terrific Firefly Lane – about two very different friends – in 2008. Then came the 2013 follow-up Fly Away, which I found to be a yawn (though not awful). I’ve read 17 novels by Hannah – one of my favorite contemporary authors — and Fly Away is the only one I didn’t love. (My very favorites of hers are the most recently published four: The Women, The Four Winds, The Great Alone, and The Nightingale.)

And Darryl Brock came out with the fabulous, should-be-better-known baseball/time-travel novel If I Never Come Back in 1990. Twelve years later, his Two in the Field sequel was a near-dud.

Going back to the 19^th-century, Wilkie Collins wrote lengthy superb novels such as 1860’s The Woman in White. One rare Collins misstep was A Rogue’s Life, which I struggled to get through despite it being short. But I did finish it, unlike The Marriage Plot. 🙂

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “This is fan fact, not fan fiction. It’s hot in August.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about a tone-deaf hire and a long-overdue audit — is here.

Most of us like to root for the underdog. I’ll first discuss an underdog winner of a real-life political race last week, and then discuss underdog characters in literature.

The candidate is Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat representing Michigan (the state where my wife Laurel spent much of her childhood).

Dr. El-Sayed’s victory was a narrow one, but it impressively happened against great odds. He’s Muslim and he’s progressive, which means establishment politicians (including some fellow Democrats) and the corporate media did all they could to tarnish him with various kinds of nasty nonsense. Plus Dr. El-Sayed was outspent a whopping 11-1 by his center-right opponent Haley Stevens, partly “thanks” to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) pouring millions into Stevens’ campaign because she supports Israel’s far-right government and because Dr. El-Sayed has correctly called that government’s assault on Gaza a genocide – plus he wants to end the billions of dollars in military aid the U.S. sends each year to Israel. 

I should emphasize that I’m criticizing AIPAC and Israel’s current government – not the Jewish people, of which I’m one. Heck, a clear majority of American Jews have a negative opinion of reactionary Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Dr. El-Sayed has also taken various other progressive positions, including advocating for the much-needed Medicare for All in the world’s only developed country (the U.S.) without guaranteed health care for everyone.

Underdogs in literature? I just finished (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s intriguing dystopian novel Mania, in which the protagonist (Ms.) Pearson Converse gets major pushback when objecting to an alternate-universe America’s “Mental Parity” policy that equates stupidity and intelligence. The 2024 book can be viewed as partly a satire of the utterly incompetent (yet very dangerous) Trump and his regime.

Of course, many older and newer literary classics have an underdog as the central character. That kind of person – who might be impoverished, have a difficult upbringing, be a member of a marginalized group, be bullied, be small in stature, etc. – is usually someone readers can admire, respect, and root for. Most readers can’t resist a character trying to surmount major obstacles with smarts, courage, resilience, and other attributes – including a measure of luck. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t.

Just a few examples of underdog characters: Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Silas Marner of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Oliver Twist of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Carrie White of Stephen King’s Carrie, Jeanie Deans of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, Denise Baudu of Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, Offred of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Valancy Stirling of L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle, Dana Franklin of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dellarobia Turnbow of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Humphrey Van Weyden of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, the Mirabel sisters of Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc.), and the hobbits populating J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In sports literature (the subject of a 2015 post here), many athletes are not-surprisingly depicted as underdogs. Among them are Roy Hobbs of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (made into the stirring Robert Redford movie) and Joe Boyd of Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (which inspired the hit Broadway musical Damn Yankees).

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Dave matched my harness color to that wire’s color? The man needs therapy.” 

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – in which I “bank” on my town making news even during the summer — is here.

My feline self is seen next to Sue Grafton’s final novel. The airborne tail is a commentary on Wuthering Heights. 

I’m Misty the cat, returning for my every-two-month guest blog post about books. What have I been doing since June? Well, among other things, sampling from the four major food groups: Nestlé, Tyson, Unilever, and General Mills. Actually, the four major food groups are treats, more treats, perpetual treats, and apocalyptic treats from when the Earth nears extinction at the end of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

Speaking of endings, I just read Sue Grafton’s final “alphabet mystery”: Y is for Yesterday (2017). Unlike some authors who peak several books before their series conclude, Grafton mostly got better and better. In fact, Y is so good that The Village People wrote a song about it, although they inexplicably added “MCA” to the title.

Dave is nudging me to say that “YMCA” was first heard on the radio in 1978, not in 2017 or later. IMHO, he can “scram,” “get lost,” “kick rocks,” “pound sand,” “shove off,” and “take a hike.” He can also “hit the road”; I borrowed Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from the library so Dave can do just that.

Grafton of course planned to write a concluding Z installment, but sadly died in late 2017 before that happened. This was the same month (December) I adopted Dave and his family, not knowing then that I would eventually write for WordPuss. Maybe I’m a bit off with that blogging platform name. 

It was also in 2017 that Dave purchased the phone he used to film my daily leashed walks until nine days ago, when he FINALLY upgraded from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 17. Going nine years before buying a new phone is a weird way to pay tribute to Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers – a good novel by an author who also wrote What Alice Forgot. Alice forgot to feed her cat, leading that hungry feline to reluctantly have her human jailed in the notorious Chateau d’If island prison featured in The Count of Monte Cristo. Harsh.

When borrowing Y is for Yesterday at the library, I also took out and will soon read Lionel Shriver’s Mania, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and James Michener’s The Bridges at Toko-ri. 

Before I say more about that haul, you’re probably wondering how a cat can borrow books from the library. Simple: I grab the ones I want from the shelves, use the check-out machine, and print a receipt shorter than the CVS receipt on which Tolstoy wrote War and Peace. 

Anyway, as you might know, Lionel Shriver is a woman who changed her name from Margaret Ann as a teen because she was a tomboy. Among her other novels is So Much for That, which discusses the high cost of my feline asthma inhaler. Or maybe not.

Jeffrey Eugenides is also the author of Middlesex, whose protagonist is intersex. Much of that novel is set in Detroit, which has the Meowtown nickname that’s sometimes shortened to Motown. A Motown Records sampling: “I Heard It Through the Meow Vine,” “Meowing in the Street,” “What’s Meowing On,” and “Meow! In the Name of Love.”

James Michener? I’ve read several of his novels, including Tails of the South Pacific. 

That’s all for now. Dave will reply to comments as I prepare to endure the existential dread of not blogging about books again until early October. 

Misty the cat says: “I’m here at Chappell Roan’s ‘Pink Pony Club,’ minus pony and club.”

Dave and I’s comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – which includes riffs on “The Odyssey” movie — is here.