The fall color in Massachusetts was much nicer than our hotel. (Photo by me, taken from our car on October 21.)

When my wife Laurel and I traveled from New Jersey to the Boston area last weekend to watch our daughter Maria and other members of her Montclair High School crew team race on the Charles River, the highlight wasn’t our hotel.

Maria was chosen late to participate in the “Head of the Charles” regatta that draws thousands of competitors and spectators, so hotel rooms in the region were scarce. We eventually found a Bedford, Mass., motel with a single vacancy, and considered ourselves lucky despite the price-gouging cost of $260 for one night. But we did NOT get what we paid for.

The room was small, reeked of cigarette smoke, had flies flitting around, no clothes hangers in the closet, pathetic wi-fi, etc. Outside, very tight parking for our car. The topper was getting woken up at 3:30 a.m. by several minutes of insistent knocking on the door. A robber? Someone locked out of their room but choosing the wrong one to try entering? Needless to say, we didn’t open the door.

Anyway, the one positive about the experience was getting the idea to write about hotels in literature. Bad ones, good ones…

Yes, hotels can be interesting places in both real life and fiction. A varied group of strangers under one roof — often on vacation. Or business colleagues attending a conference. Or family and friends gathered for a joyful wedding. Most guests stay in hotels for a short time, but some for longer.

Real-life and fictional hotels are also places to overhear things. Or to meet one’s lover when having an affair. Or to hide if you’re running from the law. And so on.

The first novel that came to mind was Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, one of my very favorite books of the past few years. Its protagonist is under house arrest for decades in a fancy Soviet hotel, and, while it’s hardly an ideal situation, he lives a fairly full life within its walls. But there are some dangers and complications.

Then there’s of course Stephen King’s The Shining, starring a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic with anger issues who’s hired as an off-season caretaker at a Colorado hotel. Things don’t go well, and it doesn’t help the characters that some supernatural elements are involved.

Things most definitely don’t go well at the Bates Motel in Robert Bloch’s Psycho novel, which is less famous than the iconic Alfred Hitchcock movie it inspired. I’ve seen the gut-wrenching film but haven’t read the book.

There’s also mayhem in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, in which 10 people are invited to (if memory serves) an island guest house. They were not glad they came.

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series features motels in almost every book, given that Reacher is by choice a homeless wanderer who visits various places — always to find adventure and intrigue. In those motels, romance, danger, and other scenarios often play out for Jack. Not to mention the getting of some sleep; it can be exhausting dealing with the bad guys. 🙂

One of the lighter moments in Herman Melville’s intense Moby-Dick happens at the inn in which Ishmael and Queequeg inadvertently find themselves roommates prior to their ill-fated voyage under Captain Ahab’s command. A very funny bedroom scene.

Resorts are hotels of a kind, too, including the one in Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers. There’s also the resort-ish sanitarium in T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville. Both novels have a (supposed) health subtext, and both mix downbeat elements with some upbeat ones.

I’ll end by mentioning Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, and John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire.

Your thoughts about, 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 every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — about an upcoming Board of Education election, civility, apologies, traffic safety, and more — is here.

My daughter’s boat, left, racing on the Charles River earlier today. (Photo by me.)

This week’s blog post is late because my wife Laurel and I took a car trip from New Jersey to the Boston area to see our teen daughter Maria compete with her Montclair High School crew team in the huge “Head of the Charles” regatta on October 22.

So, naturally I thought about fiction I’ve read set in New England — a beautiful area of the United States with a long history as well as interesting cities and towns.

The work of Nathaniel Hawthorne immediately came to mind. Until his Italy-placed final novel The Marble Faun, most of that author’s books and short stories featured New England milieus. The best-known, of course, being The Scarlet Letter — the classic that unfolds in 17th-century Massachusetts. His novels The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance are also set in The Bay State.

Hawthorne’s friend Herman Melville had the Pequod ship in Moby-Dick sail from Nantucket, Mass., after some pre-sea chapters on land. Melville wrote his masterpiece in Pittsfield, Mass., where a mountain (Mount Greylock) seen from his desk has sort of a whale shape. I looked out that window myself during a visit to Melville’s house nearly 20 years ago.

Another renowned 19th-century author, Louisa May Alcott, made the March family in Little Women residents of Concord, Mass.

Before going any further, I have to mention that Stephen King places a LOT of his page-turning fiction in Maine. Too many novels to list. 🙂

One of King’s influences, Shirley Jackson, put her chilling short story “The Lottery” in Vermont, where her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle is also set. And the dwelling that dominates her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, might be in New England — though that’s not specified.

John Irving’s canon also often has a New England flair — with, for instance, The Cider House Rules set in Maine, A Prayer for Owen Meany set in New Hampshire, and The Hotel New Hampshire set in…well, I’ll let you figure that out. 🙂

Edith Wharton placed several of her best-known novels in high-society locales in and near New York City, but a notable exception was Ethan Frome, which has a Massachusetts milieu.

Then there’s Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, though most of that novel goes way back in the past to England. (Twain lived much of his adult life in Connecticut.) Another late-19th-century-written time-travel classic, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, is set in Boston in both the 1800s and the year 2000.

Boston is also the city for Esther Forbes’ young-adult novel Johnny Tremain, starring a 1770s teen in American Revolution times.

And…ahem…The Bostonians by Henry James.

Other works set or partly set in New England? Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water, Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, Erich Segal’s Love Story, and Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, to name a few.

Any fiction with New England settings you’d like to mention?

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 every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a high-profile councilor who resigned and the contentious vote for his replacement — is here.

As the cycle of tragedy in the Mideast continues — decades of vicious oppression of Palestinians by Israel, vicious attacks on Israel by Hamas, all the deaths, etc. — among the words that describe the ghastly situation is: disaster. And since this is a book blog, I’m going to write about disaster in literature.

There are of course novels about devastating wars, novels about the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust, and so on, but I’ve covered those topics before. This post will be mostly about one-off disasters happening within a relatively small window of time.

As we read about these situations — fictional but reminiscent of, and sometimes based on, real disasters — there is of course much drama amid the dread. Instances of courage, instances of cowardice, wondering if the characters will survive, etc.

Before I knew last week that I would write this post, I happened to be reading Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s compelling novel One Amazing Thing — about nine people in an unnamed American city trapped in a passport/visa office when a major earthquake hits. The interpersonal dynamics among this multiracial group are fascinating as they try to control their fear while thinking of ways to escape or at least survive until possible rescue. Meanwhile, they pass some of the agonizing hours telling at-times-enthralling tales to each other about their lives — making the novel almost a short-story collection of sorts.

I also thought of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, about attendees at a posh party in a South American country who are taken hostage. In this novel, the interaction is not only between the party guests but also between the guests and the attackers during what turns out to be a four-month standoff. Good vs. evil? It’s more complicated than that.

Paul Gallico’s The Poseidon Adventure? A tidal wave turns a cruise ship upside down. Not ideal. But quite riveting as the surviving passengers try to save themselves.

In Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, a museum bombing is the focus only of the first part of the novel, but that bombing sets off a series of consequences, actions, and events that drive the rest of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work.

What will happen at the end of the book hangs over Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. Nuclear war has devastated much of the Earth, a massive radioactive cloud is heading toward Australia, and the novel’s characters in and near Melbourne know it’s coming.

Your thoughts about, 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 every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the split-vote approval of a controversial redevelopment in my town — is here.

This is the beginning of a blog post about the endings of books.

We’ve all read excellent novels in which the latter parts/conclusions were at least somewhat unsatisfying. Among those that come to mind for me are Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Louis de Bernieres’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

But I’m going to flip that and discuss novels with endings every bit as good as what came before. In some cases, the conclusion is the highlight.

There are of course a small number of works with iconic final lines or passages; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities are prime examples. There are also books that, while not having boffo last words, end with great plot developments, incredibly poignant situations, etc.

That was the case with a novel I read last week — Kristin Hannah’s Winter Garden (2010), about two very different adult daughters and their cold, unloving mother who had escaped besieged Leningrad under tragic circumstances during World War II. For much of the 2000/2001-set book, I thought what I was reading was good not great — interesting and intense at times, but repetitive and forced at other times. Then came the ending, which, while requiring a major suspension of belief, was extremely moving and powerful.

Another 2010 novel, (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That, is terrific throughout as it takes a scalpel to America’s very problematic health-care system via the experiences of its main characters. Then the book goes into an even higher gear with a conclusion that combines some sobering stuff with wonderful wish fulfillment.

There’s also John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which ends with a scene that mixes despair, desperation, hope, and human decency. I’ve read that Steinbeck came up with that seldom-duplicated conclusion before starting the novel, and wrote toward that pre-planned finale.

The conclusion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is quite melancholy, but beautifully written and the perfect capstone to what was an instant classic.

I’ve loved every George Eliot novel I’ve read, but the one with the most satisfying ending for me was Daniel Deronda, with its fulfillment of destiny for several characters and the sadness/bravery of another character facing unrequited love.

Other excellent novels whose latter parts/conclusions — whether upbeat or downbeat, surprising or not, annoying or not, etc. — I thought were knocked out of the park include James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thriller 61 Hours, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Lisa Genova’s Still Alice, John Grisham’s The Racketeer, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (third book: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), Jack London’s Martin Eden, Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, to name a few.

Any novels with especially memorable endings you’d like to mention?

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 every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — which comments on the resignation of an unregistered financial consultant and more — is here.

iStock.com/LIVINUS

Among the poignant and dramatic story lines in literature is seeing friends or siblings who were close as children diverge in their life paths and feelings toward each other as they grow older. Sometimes things get better after that rupture, but in many cases they don’t.

Containing a strong example of divergence is John Grisham’s The Boys from Biloxi, which I finished this past week. In it, Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco are close friends and fellow baseball stars as Mississippi kids, but things take a different trajectory by the time they become adults. Keith follows his father in becoming a prominent attorney, while Hugh follows his father into mob-world territory. No surprise to say the two young men will eventually meet on different sides of the court system in this riveting novel.

As the above paragraph indicates, parental influence can be a big factor in determining the future turns children take. Look at siblings Maggie and Tom Tulliver in George Eliot’s masterful The Mill on the Floss. As was often the case in the 19th century, Tom is treated better by his parents (and society) as a male, which helps drive a wedge between him and his sister Maggie — a much nicer and smarter person. Not that the two were ever super-close in the first place, but things definitely got worse for many years until a shocking turn at book’s end.

In Toni Morrison’s absorbing early novel Sula, the protagonists Sula Peace and Nel Wright are close childhood friends. But a tragedy, different personalities (Nel is much more conventional), and a betrayal yank them apart as they grow older.

The conventional/less-conventional divide is also a factor in Kristin Hannah’s page-turning Firefly Lane, in which Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey are extraordinarily close pals in childhood and into adulthood. But the ambitious, driven Tully becomes a famous TV host who remains single while Kate marries and becomes a stay-at-home mother — so they obviously live much different lives. Plus there’s a betrayal here, too, as well as the tension of Kate wondering if her husband Johnny loves Tully more than her.

The siblings in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion? Too complicated to summarize the machinations and drama here, but all four of those novels are very compelling reads.

There are of course many marriages in literature that start off wonderfully before later disintegrating, but that’s a somewhat different theme that I blogged about in 2014.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, 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 every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the reappointment of my town’s poorly performing municipal clerk — is here.