Oh, what the heck, a screen shot I grabbed off YouTube of Taylor Swift singin’ in the rain.

Sometimes, bloggers have no idea what to write for their next post. Such was the case with me this past Friday, trying to think of a topic as the rain poured down.

I looked out the window and decided to write about…rain. In literature. Fiction’s precipitation can be quite atmospheric, set a mood, reflect a character’s state of mind, be a plot element, portend nature’s growth, and more.

There’s an evocative scene or two of rain in A Gentleman in Moscow author Amor Towles’ debut novel Rules of Civility, which I had finished the previous night. Set mostly in 1938 New York City, the 2011 book stars a young, plucky, literature-loving ( 🙂 ) career woman named Katey Kontent (!) and is full of elegant writing such as these damp-weather words: “Come September, despite the waning hours, despite the leaves succumbing to the weight of autumnal rains, there is a certain relief to having the long days of summer behind us; and there’s a paradoxical sense of rejuvenation in the air.” Not a bad passage to read when it’s almost September.

Published in 1939 — a year after Rules of Civility is set — The Grapes of Wrath features days of torrential rain near book’s end. Sometimes a downpour is just a downpour, as the 1939-deceased Sigmund Freud might have said, but the rain in John Steinbeck’s classic novel also symbolizes the gloom and despair of the ever-more-impoverished Joad family as they struggle to survive after economic conditions forced them to migrate to California.

Rain and other bad weather is of course potentially even more catastrophic for homeless characters, as the Joads became.

Another example of relentless, dramatic rain near the end of a masterful novel is in the unforgettable scene that concludes George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.

There’s also the symbolic four-plus years of rain after the brutal massacre in still another classic novel — Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s as if the sky is mourning the many murdered workers.

On a more personal scale, Jane Eyre‘s memorable storm and lightning-split tree at a moment of great happiness for Ms. Eyre and Edward Rochester foreshadows that the star and co-star of Charlotte Bronte’s novel will soon be experiencing rough times.

In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the exhausted Hagar character being soaked by rain when returning home from a shopping trip is among the novel’s pivotal scenes.

Some novels of course literally have a certain weather event in the title, with Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain one example.

There’s also significant rain in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and many other fiction books.

Including this passage from William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying: “It begins to rain. The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense. They are as big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun; they sweep across the lantern in a vicious hissing…”

Examples of, and thoughts about, today’s topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about a mayoral withdrawal, a developer’s bait-and-switch, quarterback Aaron Rodgers moving close to my town, and more — is here.

My town’s Montclair Book Center, August 19, 2023. (Photo by me.)

Last week, I discussed some libraries in my life. This week, I’m following that up by focusing on some bookstores in said life.

I’ll start with my New Jersey town of Montclair, which has two independent bookstores — unusual for a suburb of about 40,000 people.

One of those retailers is Montclair Book Center, which opened in 1984 (thanks, George Orwell 🙂 ) but appealingly feels much older. Rather scruffy-looking, but filled with a ton of new and used titles in its crowded aisles. I can’t count the number of book (and calendar) gifts I’ve purchased there over the years.

The second Montclair literary haven is the less quirky but quite nice Watchung Booksellers, a mere five-minute walk from my apartment.

In nearby New York City, where I lived and worked for many years, perhaps the most memorable bookstore is the renowned Strand — which has 2.5 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books. Formerly also very convenient, given that the Manhattan-based magazine for which I used to write was only two blocks down Broadway in the East Village.

Among my memories of shopping at the Strand, from when I was in my mid-20s, was surprising a woman I was dating at the time with a present of a very hard-to-find book she said she’d been seeking for years. The Strand had it in stock during those pre-Amazon days. But the woman was rather blasé about the gift, and we didn’t date much longer. 🙂

Further afield in the United States, I have fond memories of visiting famous bookstores such as City Lights in San Francisco and Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. And a not-so-famous one in Tennessee whose name I can’t remember — but I recall several other things about that 1991 experience.

I was in Memphis to cover the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention for a magazine when a free afternoon allowed me to walk around the city with Jerry Robinson, whose many accomplishments in cartooning included creating the iconic character of The Joker (and naming sidekick Robin) while working on the Batman comic books as a pre-World War II teen. Anyway, we found a great shop with comic books and other cartoon items — and Jerry, who was 69 at the time, was like a kid in a candy store. Needless to say, he made several purchases.

While I prefer independent bookstores to chain ones (especially indies with cats 🙂 ), I’ve certainly frequented some nice Barnes & Noble outlets. The now-defunct Borders, too; I even visited its flagship store in Ann Arbor with my wife Laurel — who spent the majority of her childhood in that Michigan city.

Airport bookstores? Usually pretty basic, but they’ve come in handy at times.

After flying to Paris, one has to at least browse the many outdoor book kiosks near the Seine — as I’ve done several times. And I found a bookstore in Moscow many years ago that featured some English-language offerings among its Russian-language titles. I still have Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered from that visit.

Bookstores you have known?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about an “emergency” meeting that wasn’t an emergency, and more — is here.

The library in Chatham on Cape Cod, August 10, 2023. (Photo by me.)

When my family and I enjoyed a Cape Cod vacation again this past week, we again passed the small, old, lovely library in downtown Chatham. That Massachusetts sight made me think of libraries I have known during my life. A very good feeling.

I’ve only been inside Chatham’s 1896-built Eldredge Public Library once — during a very rainy day several years ago. (When I go away, I bring books from my hometown Montclair, New Jersey, library; this time the quietly eloquent author Kent Haruf’s poignant Eventide and Benediction sequels to his poignant Plainsong novel.) But that one look inside Eldredge was quite nice — and the Chatham facility even allows vacationers to borrow books they can return before their Cape Cod stay ends.

My first library memory was of the one in Teaneck, New Jersey, where my parents moved from the Bronx, New York, when I was a toddler. Befitting the importance of libraries, the 1927 brick building was part of the township complex along with the municipal building and more. My parents didn’t read many books, but my mother did thankfully bring me to this library whenever I wanted.

I first borrowed children’s books, of course, and then went on to kid-friendly biographies of historical figures and baseball players. Not too much fiction back then (what was I thinking? 🙂 ), but I did take a liking to the “Danny Dunn” sci-fi/adventure books for young readers.

Finally, as a teen, I got interested in more-mature novels and borrowed many. If I loved a book we were assigned and given a copy of in my high school English class, I’d later borrow the same novel from the library to reread. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Richard Wright’s Native Son? I’m thinking of you.

Then came Rutgers College, where the 1956-opened Alexander Library was utilitarian-looking but large. A great place to study when one wanted to get away from the noisy dorms, and also the place where I took out a ton of novels in addition to the ones that English majors purchased at the campus bookstore for their courses. Among the many books I borrowed from Alexander to read for the first time was The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre (not Alexander 🙂 ) Dumas.

After getting an English degree from the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Rutgers, I remained in that city for a year sharing an apartment with a good friend while working as a reporter at a daily newspaper about 30 miles away. The New Brunswick library was a Carnegie one that opened in 1903.

Returning to the academic life to earn a master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, I got a job in…a library! Specifically, Medill’s library, to help make ends meet. Basically one large room, with me sitting at the front desk checking out books and other materials for students long before you could do that on self-service machines.

Northwestern’s main library complex consisted of two linked 1933 and 1970 buildings — the older of which was rather ornate inside. I spent a lot of time there working on a thesis about how the media covered South Africa’s appalling system of apartheid, which was still formally in existence back then. No Internet or Google to speed along research; I perused books, looked at newspapers on “microfiche,” etc.

After graduating from Medill, I moved to New York City and spent the next 15 years there — first in Manhattan, then Brooklyn, then Queens. So I got to know and enjoy several of NYC’s relatively “petite” branch libraries. Plus the occasional visits to the majestic 1911-opened Beaux-Arts flagship library at Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The one flanked by those two famous large marble lions — who, like the Detroit Lions, have never been to a Super Bowl.

Then I moved to Montclair, New Jersey, a suburb which has two libraries — the 1955-opened main one and a smaller 1914 Carnegie branch. I have taken out more novels from the main facility than I can count, including most of the ones I read to feed this blog each week. 🙂

A final note: When I travel in the U.S. or abroad, I occasionally visit libraries to look at their outsides and/or go in. A particularly fond memory is seeing the eye-catching one in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2007; the building’s architecture actually includes huge facsimiles of books — including The Stranger and The Little Prince.

Libraries you have known?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about what a controversial interim township manager did before he unexpectedly died this month — is here.

Readers seeking perfection can…look up “perfection” in a dictionary. Because they’re not going to get it from even the best authors.

Yes, once in a while the best authors are going to produce, say, B+ or B- novels instead of A+ or A- ones. That’s okay, and human. Maybe the novelists had stress in their personal lives when writing the less-than-fantastic books — including being ill or ultra-busy. Maybe the authors tackled a different genre or overdid the experimenting and things didn’t work as well as they had hoped. Maybe the authors were writing sequels and became a bit bored with the same characters they had depicted before. Maybe all the conditions were right, but great authors are not machines churning out one masterpiece after another without exception.

I thought about all this last week while reading Kristin’s Hannah’s Fly Away, the sequel to her novel Firefly Lane — which I had read the previous week. I was prepared to be wowed again after the brilliance of Firefly Lane and three other Hannah efforts I had read this year: The Nightingale, Home Front, and The Great Alone.

But Fly Away turned out to be good not great. I found it overly dramatic and super-depressing for the most part, and also felt it jumped around in time too much and featured several major characters who did obviously dumb things despite being smart people. Partly explained by the grief they were feeling after the death of the co-protagonist in Firefly Lane, but it seemed their behavior was more about getting some plot gears going.

Still, the book did have some powerfully affecting moments, and we learned how the mother of one of the main characters — a mother who was not there for her young daughter in Firefly Lane — became so emotionally damaged.

Now that I’m done with Fly Away, I’m still a big fan of Hannah and will be reading more of her other novels in the future — because, again, no writer is perfect. (Well, maybe late Fleetwood Mac songwriter Christine McVie was perfect, given that her maiden name was…Perfect.)

Sometimes, lesser efforts can be attributed to novels being earlier-in-career works written before the authors’ writing fully matured. For instance, after rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s iconic Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov a few years ago, I tried his novel The Insulted and the Injured. Quite good, but nowhere near the same level.

The flip side of that can be late-career or even final novels written when the authors’ abilities are past their peak, their health might be failing, and/or they’re almost out of interesting ideas. I love or like virtually all of Willa Cather’s work — including My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop — but her last book Sapphira and the Slavegirl was cringe. Jack Finney’s final novel — a sequel to the transcendent Time and Again — was the mediocre From Time to Time.

I give John Steinbeck props for the high quirkiness quotient in Burning Bright, but it was hard to read compared to his top-notch novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.

Among the major or relative disappointments by other authors I like a lot? A Daughter of the Snows by Jack London, Cell by Stephen King, Chances Are… by Richard Russo, and The Siberian Dilemma by Martin Cruz Smith.

Your thoughts on, and examples of, this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about a controversial township manager situation and more — is here.