Misty when his harness and leash were well-red.

I know it’s been only two months since I guest-blogged here, but, I, Misty the cat who lives with Dave, need to opine again. Why?

First of all, it’s Thanksgiving weekend in the United States, and an American cat can bat around cranberries for only so long before getting bored. Also, Dave was reading and really liking Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance, so I had to read it, too. Especially because the India-born Canadian author has almost the same name as me, and the book’s title reminds all felines that we have “a fine balance” when walking atop fences, windowsills, the backs of chairs, and humans’ Mohawk haircuts.

The India-set A Fine Balance is quite a book. Published in 1995 — when Janis Ian should’ve re-released her song “At Seventeen” to mark the birthday of 1978-born cartoon kitty Garfield — it’s one of those sweeping novels that combine a focus on very interesting characters with a focus on often-fraught societal and/or sociopolitical matters.

Other novels with that kind of mix? George Eliot’s Middlemarch, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, to name a few. Oh, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Cat Food With Added Nutrients.

Also intriguing about A Fine Balance is the way it first introduces its four main characters in the book’s present before diving deeply into the fascinating, at-times-tragic back stories of each of them. In other words, it wasn’t totally chronological like my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, 11th, 12th, and 13th naps this morning. Yes, I, Misty the cat, need to eventually read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep to make my snoozing less fragmented.

Detective novels — you gotta love ’em. Reminds me of the sleuthing I sometimes do during my daily leashed walks. Earlier this month, I investigated why my apartment complex looked the same despite the clocks changing the night before. Actually, Daylight Saving Time means nothing to me because I don’t make bank deposits during business hours.

Say, was Sherlock Holmes married to Katie Holmes or was that Tom Cruise?

Of course, Cruise played Jack Reacher in two movies before Alan Ritchson spectacularly took on that role in the TV series. Dave and I are looking forward to reading the latest Reacher book published last month. It’s The Secret by Lee Child and Andrew Child, and it’s the 28th novel in the page-turning Reacher series. My favorite of that bunch? 61 Hours, which chronicled how long it took me to keyboard this blog post without opposable thumbs.

Dave and I also want to read the September 2023-published The Running Grave, the seventh installment of the excellent series starring private investigators Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. It’s by J.K. Rowling (writing under the Robert Galbraith name), who’s obviously best known for her seven Harry Potter books that were made into eight movies. And they say cats are bad at math…

But what about long-ago novels? You can’t get much longer-ago than Murasaki Shikibu’s 1,000-year-old The Tale of Genji, which I ordered online when it first came out. Surprisingly strong WiFi signal for the 11th century.

Then there was Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century classic Don Quixote, whose title character rode a horse rather than a cat when tilting at windmills. Sancho Panza was his sidekick, which reminds me that Nikki Haley is known for saying “I don’t kick sideways” as she and most other Republican presidential candidates mostly avoid criticizing Donald Trump — who’s leading the GOP field despite ranking 8,000,000,001th on a list of the best people on 8,000,000,000-population Earth. The justice-dodging Trump is notorious for not reading books but does like the abridged version of Crime and Punishment. The one titled Crime.

I’ll conclude by noting that if one holds Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in one hand and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in the other hand, it’s not “a fine balance” because the latter novel is heavier. Something to do with having more pages.

All comments will be answered in English or with a lot of meowing.

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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a school-district forum and a controversial baseball-field decision — is here.

A.S. Byatt accepting the Booker Prize for her masterful 1990 novel Possession. (Screen shot by me from a video.)

The death this past Thursday of A.S. Byatt, 87, reminded me that her 1990 book Possession is one of my very favorite novels. It also reminded me that we lost several great authors in 2023, as is the case during most years.

Possession is a dual-timeline story about two 20th-century academics investigating a secret romance between two 19th-century poets — poets who are fictional but partly based on Christina Rossetti and a mix of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Byatt even wrote the poems in the book, and they’re memorable — as are the four major characters and plot. The novel is an intellectual page-turner.

Byatt — the sister of another well-known British author, Margaret Drabble — wrote about a dozen novels as well as non-Possession poetry, short stories, biographies, essays, and more.

Other major novelists I’ve read who died in 2023 include Cormac McCarthy, Fay Weldon, and Russell Banks.

I did a posthumous appreciation of McCarthy for this blog in June, so I won’t repeat much here. He is most famous for The Road and No Country for Old Men, and also wrote other acclaimed novels such as Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses.

Fay Weldon, a strong feminist best known for The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, authored about 30 novels. I enjoyed her 2000 book The Bulgari Connection, which focuses on a woman who had been jailed for trying to run over her husband’s mistress. The novel raised some eyebrows when it was learned that Weldon was paid to mention Bulgari jewelry multiple times in it. Movie-like product placement!

Russell Banks’ most-remembered novel is Continental Drift, which I haven’t read. I did read 1995’s Rule of the Bone — a compelling, gritty look at a teenage drug dealer fleeing an abusive family situation for a rather problematic different life. Banks wrote a dozen other novels as well as short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

While not a novelist, an honorable mention goes to 2023-deceased nonfiction author Harold Kushner, who penned the comforting 1981 mega-seller When Bad Things Happen to Good People. A pretty decent book.

Your thoughts on this week’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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my local Township Council making a good decision (to lower speed limits) and a bad decision (not pushing a developer to build additional affordable housing) — is here.

Photo credit: Christine Suewon Lee.

Call them what you will: complex, difficult, intricate, nonlinear, etc. — some novels are not easy reads. They may ultimately be satisfying, or you might want to fling them across the room. I’ll discuss some of these challenging books today.

I just finished reading Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain. Despite being only a mid-length 357 pages, it took me nearly a month to finish. That’s because I would read maybe a chapter and then just couldn’t go on for a while.

Actually, I liked the novel; it features interesting people, graceful writing, reflections on life, sociopolitical elements, laments about inhumanity, and more. But its frequent switching from character to character and jumping around in time — with the only link seemingly the city of Bangkok itself — made for whatever the opposite of a page-turner is. Still, the individual sections are almost all quite readable.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is also a handful — in the case of that novel, keeping track of many characters and the story’s sweep can be a bit arduous. But the book is pretty much riveting throughout.

Moby-Dick is compelling, too, for most of its pages. What slows the novel down at times is Herman Melville’s periodic straying from the epic plot to discuss all things whale. But Melville’s rich prose and slow march toward tragedy win the day.

Among the many other novels that are not-always-easy reads but VERY rewarding are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the fantasy fiction realm, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

The prose in Henry James’ The Ambassadors is also rich — maybe too rich. As defense attorneys might beseech a judge, “Shorten the sentences!” Still, a subtle novel worth reading.

Marcel Proust was of course another prose master with his multi-volume In Search of Lost Time. But it’s almost too much of a word feast; I only read the first volume (Swann’s Way), and opted not to continue.

Other challenging novels have also been problematic for me. I found Umberto Eco’s convoluted Foucault’s Pendulum annoying but struggled my way to complete it because I had loved Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is an astonishing, labyrinthian creation mixing poetry and prose, even as its total lack of warmth makes the book a trial to finish. I did finish it, however.

But some challenging novels can cause some readers to give up before completion. A couple of examples for me were William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.

James Joyce? I haven’t attempted his Ulysses or Finnegans Wake — those two novels are on my reading list for the 25th century 🙂 — though I did enjoy Joyce’s relatively straightforward Dubliners collection of stories, especially “The Dead.”

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 every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about Election Day and more — is here.

Jhumpa Lahiri (in the green). Photo credit: Barnard College.

I’m on the email list of Barnard College because my older daughter Maggie graduated from there. This past Thursday, a message went out that Barnard alum Jhumpa Lahiri is now at the New York City-based college as professor of English and director of creative writing.

That evoked memories of reading Lahiri’s excellent fiction, including The Namesake and The Lowland novels, and also “provoked” a blog idea: novelists who double(d) as professors for at least part of their careers.

And why not? Teaching uses different creative muscles, is a source of additional income (not all well-known novelists are rich), gets authors away from their solitary writing desks into some semblance of the real world, enables them to help budding writers, gives them insight into what young people are thinking, etc. Perhaps their teaching also indirectly infuses their own writing, or even directly if a book they pen has an academic setting.

On the other hand, teaching time does take away from writing time.

In some cases, dual-duty authors were professors who later became novelists. But perhaps in more cases, they first gained some renown as novelists — after which universities came a-calling.

I immediately thought of Toni Morrison, who, in addition to writing acclaimed novels such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, taught at various institutions of higher education — topped off by 17 years at Princeton University, which would later name a building after her. Before Princeton, Morrison imparted her knowledge to students at Rutgers University (one of my alma maters), the State University of New York, and Bard College.

Speaking of Princeton, the prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates taught for a whopping 36 years there, and more recently has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Jeffrey Eugenides (author of Middlesex, etc.) also taught at Princeton before moving on to New York University — where Zadie Smith (White Teeth, etc.) has also taught.

Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer, etc.) is a professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Junot Diaz? The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao author has been a creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Vladimir Nabokov (of Lolita, etc., fame) taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University.

Underrated author Kent Haruf — whose novels include Plainsong and Our Souls at Night — was a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

This post has been United States-centric, but I’ll name one author who taught in Europe: J.R.R. Tolkien spent decades at England’s University of Oxford — during which time he also wrote a novel and a trilogy you may have heard of: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Your thoughts on this topic? Past or present author/professors and professor/authors you’d like to mention? Including some teaching outside of the U.S., please. 🙂

I don’t usually draw extra attention to the weekly humor column I mention in a bold-faced paragraph under every blog post, but this past Thursday’s piece was the 1,000th installment of my “Montclairvoyant” feature! The headline: “1,000 Columns, But None Ionic or Corinthian.” Link is below.

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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — my 1,000th!!! — is here.