Why do I have con artists on my mind? Well, Donald Trump recently wrapped up the 2024 Republican nomination for president, and I just read a novel featuring a character who seemingly has scamming on her mind.

There are a number of fictional people in literature who can be described as grifters, swindlers, carnival barkers, etc. Some are blatant scoundrels, while others are somewhat more nuanced amid their skullduggery. Once in a while, they might not be con artists at all, even if we think they are for much of the book.

If they ARE tricksters, we as readers ask: How clever are they? Will they succeed? When might they get their comeuppance? Just how gullible are their victims? Are we reminded of our own gullibility we may have displayed sometime in the past? Do we think of real-life flimflammers? Such as the aforementioned Trump.

The novel I just read — Joy Fielding’s Whispers and Lies — features twenty-something Alison Simms as the con artist (or not?) and 40-year-old Terry Painter as her “mark” (or not?). The lonely Painter, a nurse at a Florida facility for senior citizens and people with disabilities, rents the cottage behind her home to Alison. Terry finds her tenant charming, even as she’s also wary of her. Some very dramatic stuff ensues, and we get a twist ending few readers would see coming.

Other examples of con artists in literature?

There’s of course the iconic title character in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which inspired an obscure movie you probably never heard of. 🙂 He is pictured above in that film, as played by Frank Morgan.

Nouveau riche millionaire Jay Gatsby, who made his fortune illicitly, is also a snake-oil salesman of sorts — reinventing himself as someone he’s really not in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

While he has some admirable qualities, Tom Sawyer of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels has con-artist tendencies as well — whether it involves getting others to paint a fence in the first book or cruelly messing around with runaway slave Jim’s psyche in the second work. (Huckleberry Finn also features some shady characters in secondary roles.)

Lydia Gwilt possesses a measure of decency amid the unscrupulousness in Wilkie Collins’ novel Armadale. Like some con artists, she might have behaved differently if she hadn’t had such a challenging upbringing.

There is also Savannah, who insinuates herself into the lives of the Delaney family in a way that feels very suspicious in Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall.

I’ve only read one of Patricia Highsmith’s five novels featuring Tom Ripley, but that character is clearly a con artist who mixes criminality, likability, and more.

The last book I’ll mention is The Confidence-Man, but that’s one of the few Herman Melville works I haven’t read so I can’t say anything about it.

In the theatrical realm, we have Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man and its dishonest traveling salesman Harold Hill.

Fictional con artists you’ve known and loathed? Or maybe liked a little bit?

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 whether a local governing body should take a stand on global issues such as the current Mideast carnage — is here.

The vehicle in The Time Machine movie from 1960. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)

I’ve written before about how I love to occasionally read time-travel novels — even mediocre ones. It’s exciting to see how sojourning characters react to the past or future, to see how residents of the past or future react to those travelers, and to think about ourselves leaving the current era. Other reasons to enjoy those novels, too.

But one angle I’ve never focused on is the wide variety of methods authors use to get their characters into another time period. That can be fascinating, and we admire the oft-cleverness of said methods.

I just read the compelling Timeline by Michael Crichton, who transports his late-1990s characters into 14th-century France with the help of computers and quantum physics. People are sent to the past like Star Trek crew members beamed to a planet’s surface, or maybe more like three-dimensional faxes. (It’s hard to explain; you’d have to read the novel. 🙂 )

What are the transporting methods in some of the other time-travel novels I’ve enjoyed?

There are books, of course, that put their characters into the past or future via an actual time machine, as in H.G. Wells’ novel…The Time Machine.

Or characters can be in a seemingly ordinary vehicle that ends up making a temporal journey — as with a railroad train that takes the protagonist of Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back into the past, and a subway train that does the same for the children in Caroline Emerson’s novel The Magic Tunnel.

Hermione in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban uses a small “Time-Turner” device that enables the studious teen not to miss any courses scheduled at the same time. 🙂

An unusual library situated between life and death provides the means to visit various timelines in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series has her characters go through stones to travel from the 20th century to the 18th century and back again.

Drugs? Those, too. The 1960s protagonist of Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand gets to the 1300s that way.

A severe blow to the head also works; that’s how “Camelot” is visited from the 19th century in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Self-hypnosis does the trick in Jack Finney’s Time and Again. Similarly, the lead character in Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward goes to the future via a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep.

The co-star of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is repeatedly pulled from the present because of a genetic disorder.

How some other characters travel through time is kind of mysterious. Octavia Butler’s Kindred protagonist is yanked to the past perhaps by being summoned by an ancestor? The star of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time somehow uses her empathy and perceptiveness to interact with a future being.

Thoughts about and/or 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 my town’s unpopular mayor thankfully not seeking reelection — is here.

In 2018, I wrote about late-career novels. Today, I’m going to tighten that focus to discuss final novels.

There’s something poignant and memorable about an author’s last book — whether it’s good or not-so-good, finished or unfinished, written when the author was aged or relatively young, published in the author’s lifetime or posthumously, etc.

Few final novels are the very best of an author’s canon, given that many soon-to-die people are often not in the very best of health — and/or perhaps not brimming with as many new ideas as when they were in their writing primes. But there can be exceptions or near-exceptions.

A couple of mentions before I begin: I’m focusing on authors with a number of books in their canon, not authors who wrote only one or two novels. And there have been some cases where posthumously published novels were written by the author before other novels by the author, so I’m not considering those to be final books — even if they were the last to be released.

Maybe the most famous last hurrah was The Brothers Karamazov (1880), considered one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s two best novels along with Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky died at age 59, so there might been more stellar works ahead; in fact, the author reportedly envisioned The Brothers Karamazov as the first of a trilogy. But death intervened in early 1881.

George Eliot, who died in 1880 at age 61, saw her final novel Daniel Deronda published in 1876. Not as highly esteemed as Middlemarch, but I found it to be her most emotionally gripping work. Quite a fiction finale, as it turned out.

Ten years later, in 1886, Herman Melville began sporadic work on Billy Budd — not finishing it before he died in 1891 at age 72. It was finally published in 1924, and is in the conversation as possibly the best Melville novel other than Moby-Dick (1851).

Staying with the 19th century, the novel that Charlotte Bronte wrote last was Villette (1853) — which has many good moments but nowhere near the power of the author’s Jane Eyre (1847). With her young novelist sisters Emily and Anne dying in 1848 and in 1849, respectively, Charlotte was understandably depressed during the Villette writing process. She died in 1855 at age 38.

In the 1890s, Robert Louis Stevenson worked on two novels simultaneously — both of which he would not finish before his 1894 death at age 44. One of them, Weir of Hermiston, is a quantum-leap better than his excellent previous fiction.

Unfinished as well was The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald — who also passed at 44, in 1940. Not The Great Gatsby or Tender Is the Night, but very compelling.

John Steinbeck’s final novel (though not his final book) was The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which is very absorbing, even if not in The Grapes of Wrath masterpiece territory. Steinbeck died in 1968 at age 66.

Any final novels 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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a huge unpaid municipal utility bill and more — is here.

Helen Fielding. (Photo by Joel Ryan/AP.)

One of my reading maxims is “Don’t pigeonhole yourself.” That means I, as a male, often read novels by and about females. That means I, as a white person, am interested in books by and about people of color. That means I, as a “straight” person, like to read novels by and about LGBTQIA+ people. That means I, as an older person, enjoy the occasional young-adult novel. That means I, as an American, love many works by and about people from other countries. That means I, as an Earthling, gravitate toward some books by…well, maybe I should stop there.

Why avoid self-pigeonholing in reading? The answers are obvious: You learn more stuff, see things through different eyes, get a chance to empathize with those of diverse backgrounds, don’t get stuck in a reading rut, and so on.

This topic occurred to me as I read Bridget Jones’s Diary, which I’m currently about halfway through. Helen Fielding’s hilarious, at-times-poignant novel gives great insight into the psyches of women — well, particularly the psyche of one smart, funny, neurotic, self-deprecating, somewhat shallow (?), thirty-something woman. Definitely an education of sorts amid the entertainment, and a reminder that any male reading a novel like that will gain a better understanding of a female spouse or partner, and/or his mother, and/or his daughter(s), and/or his sister(s), and/or his women friends, and/or his female boss and co-workers, etc.

Bridget Jones’s Diary has been called “chick lit,” which I find a sexist and derisive way to categorize many wonderful works of fiction. Among my favorite women novelists — whether they lean to the lighter or heavier side in approach — are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Octavia E. Butler, Willa Cather, Colette, George Eliot, Diana Gabaldon, Kristin Hannah, Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, L.M. Montgomery, Liane Moriarty, J.K. Rowling, Mary Shelley, and Edith Wharton, to name a few.

Female authors of color are obviously part of the above list, and just as obviously I have enjoyed novels by male authors of color such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and various others. In our multiracial world, white readers can only benefit from including authors of color in their literature mix.

Young-adult novels give us a sense of what young people are thinking, and, when these books are read as grown-ups, evoke memories of our own youth. Some of the YA books I like best include L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, Louis Sachar’s Holes, and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.

Among the novels with full or partial LGBTQIA+ themes I most like are Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, to name just two.

Favorite fictional works by and about people from countries other than the United States? Way too many to mention, so I won’t — even though I’m a writer of relatively short blog posts who likes to avoid self-pigeonholing by occasionally writing longer blog posts. 🙂

Your thoughts about 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 a rather large proposed office building — is here.

Alexei Navalny

I’ve written before about courageous characters in literature, but I’m going to return to that theme after last week’s tragic death of ultra-brave Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

As most of you undoubtedly know, Navalny was a fierce opponent of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his autocratic, violent, corrupt regime. Navalny was poisoned (many think on Putin’s orders) and nearly died in 2020, but decided to return to Russia after extensive treatment in Germany despite the immense risk. He was quickly imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and died (was murdered?) in a remote Arctic penal colony on February 16.

Courage comes in various forms: physical fearlessness, moral heroism, bucking-of-societal-norms daringness, stoicism in the face of great pain or debilitating disease, etc. Some of fiction’s gutsiest characters?

Among those I mentioned in 2023, 2021, and 2018 posts were Sydney Carton of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Eliza Harris of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Laura Olamina of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ayla of Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels, the World War I spy ring of women in Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, the sisters fighting a Dominican Republic dictatorship in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, and the women and men engaged in the desperate Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis in Leon Uris’ Mila 18.

Today, I’ll mention several more courageous characters.

One of them is Robert Jordan, an American bravely fighting in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco’s fascist forces in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

John Ridd of R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone displays courage in standing up to members of the villainous Doone clan and by staying loyal to the woman he loves (Lorna) despite the danger from that clan.

Bilbo Baggins of The Hobbit and Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee of The Lord of the Rings trilogy are among the characters that stand out for their mettle in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels. Small in size, those hobbits are big in bravery as they participate in adventures ranging from epic (Bilbo) to try-to-save-the-world epic (Frodo and Samwise).

Speaking of trilogies, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games features a teen protagonist (Katniss Everdeen) who is courageous in all kinds of ways — including volunteering to take the place of her younger sister (Primrose) in the brutal games.

In Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen Graham flees her immoral alcoholic husband with her young son and then makes ends meet as an artist — gutsy actions very rare for women of her 19th-century time.

White attorney Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird displays a huge amount of ethical valor when agreeing to represent a Black man (Tom Robinson) falsely accused of raping a white woman in racist 1930s Alabama.

Thoughts about this post? Any courageous characters 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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — which includes more about a contentious Township Council and a controversial high school baseball field — is here.

Misty asks: “Did I write this blog post, or did I dream I did during my just-ended nap?” (Photo by Dave.)

I, Misty the cat, last blogged on November 26, 2023 — not that long ago. But I had to return today for several reasons. Yes, Tracy Chapman sang “Give Me One Reason,” but I’m going to over-perform in that area.

First of all, February 11 is the 1847 birth date of Thomas Edison, who invented or helped invent the light bulb, the phonograph, movies, cats, whiskers, and enticing alleys with smelly garbage pails.

In the book world, February 11 is the date in 2006 when Peter Benchley unfortunately died. He of course authored the 1974 novel Jaws — which, along with the blockbuster 1975 film, made cats feel inferior because our strong mandibles seem puny compared to the mandibles of massive sharks. A discrepancy not the subject of (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s novel The Mandibles, but it should have been. Also not the subject of Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, which was about dentists roaming the Earth to patch potholes with fillings after giving streets a local anesthetic. All streets are local to someone.

Anyway, my human Dave is currently reading his ninth Kristin Hannah novel since January 2023, which seems excessive even though I appreciate the reminder that cats have nine lives. Ms. Hannah’s compelling-as-always book — about three sisters, something that comes between two of them, their problematic widowed father, and more — is titled True Colors. My true colors: gray and white. My false colors: xtgfqmr and kfvwpjb. Don’t ask me to show you a color chart because this blog only includes one image: an embarrassing photo of me. Thanks for nothing, Dave.

Ms. Hannah’s books tend to start a bit slow and clunkily — sort of like the way I act immediately after waking from a nap — but quickly get into gear to become riveting page-turners. She has written two-dozen or so novels since 1991, which means there are many more to read in the future. I’m told the future is different than the past, but who the heck knows? I’m a cat.

Which leads me to note that time-travel novels are usually compelling, and sometimes include felines! One of them is Adso the cat in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books. Adso is often upstaged by Rollo the dog, but I think that’s more about Rollo having a better publicist than about charisma.

Moving to cats in non-time-travel books, there’s Tao of Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey — a novel I once thought chronicled my five-second journey from the living room to my litter box. Then I learned otherwise. Perhaps if I walked a little slower?

I’ll also mention The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, whose kitty protagonist is so slim he obviously avoids eating green eggs and ham. That rabble-rousing puss probably also swiped a Peloton bike at some point.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget the full-of-felines fantasy novel Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams, not to be confused with baseball great Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox. What color sox do Red Sox players wear? Who the heck knows? I’m a cat.

Getting back to Tracy Chapman, wasn’t that a memorable Grammy Awards duet with Luke Combs on her 1988 “Fast Car” song covered by Combs in 2023? After seeing a clip of that transcendent February 4 performance on CatTube, I immediately thought of novels in which cars and/or car trips are prominent: Stephen King’s Christine and From a Buick 8, Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Parking Garage…

When I take my daily leashed walk, I often see cars motoring down the streets abutting my apartment complex. I shy away from those vehicles, not only because their size and speed scare me, but because my driver’s license has expired. Which explains why I, Misty the cat, don’t drive to the local library. Not sure they’d let me in, anyway, because I batted my library card under the sofa months ago.

Cats also like to knock things off tables and counters. In my apartment, I once swatted to the floor Marcel Proust’s entire 4,215-page In Search of Lost Time opus — quite a feat given that said opus has never been in my apartment.

Comments under this post will not be swatted to non-WordPress blog platforms.

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 town’s need for more weekend train service and about Black History Month — is here.

I’ve previously done posts featuring YouTube clips of past and present novelists, but it’s been a few years now so it’s time to do another. I’m only including short clips — all under 10 minutes and many much less. 🙂

It’s interesting to see authors in a speaking setting. Some talk as well as they write; some don’t. But we do get an additional sense of their personalities, and learn more about their work.

Barbara Kingsolver discusses Charles Dickens’ influence on her latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead; going back home; and more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TwYw0cjxlw

Toni Morrison (pictured above in a screen shot) talks about survival and the weighty questions of good and evil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xvJYrSsXPA

Daphne du Maurier is interviewed by a semi-obnoxious guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9JvTUjCd0s

A rare recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6PuI

John Grisham answers questions on The View TV show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iUhIuVsr3c

Stephen King speaks with Stephen Colbert about his difficulty finishing The Stand and lists his own works that are his personal favorites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoejU-tf4xI

Kristin Hannah (The Nightingale, The Four Winds, The Great Alone, etc.) summarizes what she focuses on in her fiction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaAmehxDdSQ

Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) talks about writing and activism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2h5AlqYwVU

Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance) discusses coming to writing later than many authors, education, and more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqw3Csbmnhg

Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) on English queen Anne Boleyn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohx2Lec6dko

This previous post from 2020 includes clips of Herman Wouk, Liane Moriarty, Alice Walker, Isabel Allende, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Lee Child, Donna Tartt, George R.R. Martin, Stephen King, Kate Quinn, James Baldwin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, and Leo Tolstoy:

https://daveastoronliterature.com/2020/05/24/author-clips-on-youtube/

Another 2020 post features clips of Fannie Flagg, Rita Mae Brown, Terry McMillan, Khaled Hosseini, Kazuo Ishiguro, Walter Mosley, Harper Lee, Octavia Butler, W. Somerset Maugham, Ray Bradbury, Sue Grafton, Buchi Emecheta, H.G. Wells, and Boris Pasternak:

https://daveastoronliterature.com/2020/05/31/author-clips-on-youtube-the-sequel/

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 town’s mayor “taking the fifth,” and more — is here.

An internment camp in Idaho for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

It’s quite intense when fictional characters who are in love disappear from each other’s lives. So many questions evoked: Why did they get separated? How long will they be apart? Will they ever get back together? If so, how will that come about? If not, why not? All this can make for page-turning, emotionally wrenching novels.

I experienced this again last week when reading Jamie Ford’s heartwarming/heartbreaking 2009 novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which focuses on Chinese-American preteen boy Henry Lee and Japanese-American preteen girl Keiko Okabe in the months after they meet in Seattle in 1942. They develop a charming relationship amid anti-Asian prejudice that’s especially virulent against Japanese-Americans at a time when the U.S. and Japan were on opposing sides during World War II.

Then, Keiko and her family are forced to move, along with other innocent Japanese-Americans, to a bleak internment camp in Idaho. She and Henry manage to stay in touch for a while until their relationship is sabotaged (we learn how that happened late in the book) and the two go on to have totally divergent lives with no contact at all. Then Henry, who married someone else, becomes a widower in the mid-1980s. Will he and Keiko find each other again? (During a time when the Internet, and its search-for-people possibilities, was not a general-public thing.)

Through these two characters, author Ford (who is partly of Chinese descent) makes us deeply feel the injustice of what was done to loyal Japanese-American citizens during WWII. And I couldn’t help thinking of the blatant racism that spared most (not all) white German-Americans and white Italian-Americans from also being wrongly put in custody, even though the countries of their ancestry were at war with the U.S., too.

Speaking of white Europeans, we have the English characters Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. They’re engaged until things get broken when the young, not-yet-mature Anne is persuaded by interfering family and friends that Wentworth doesn’t have high enough social status. Eight years later, the two meet again. Will things work out this time? My favorite Austen novel.

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre classic published three decades later, we have the famous rupturing of the Jane/Edward Rochester relationship. They are subsequently apart for about 10 months (a 10 months in which a LOT happens) until…

A novel written in the 20th century but set in the 19th features an unconsummated “affair” between Newland Archer and the free-spirited Ellen Olenska even as Newland is engaged and then married to the conventional May Welland. This is in Edith Wharton’s memorable The Age of Innocence. After May’s death nearly three decades later, Newland has the chance to see Ellen again. The ending surprised me.

Circling back to World War II, a key relationship in Herman Wouk’s gripping War and Remembrance is between Byron and his Jewish wife Natalie. The two are parted as Byron serves in the U.S. Navy, and further parted when Natalie — through a series of events too complicated to summarize here — ends up in a Nazi concentration camp despite being an American. Will she survive?

Reunions don’t always occur, or, when they do, don’t always result in “happily ever after” endings. While I don’t want to give specific spoilers, not every situation I discussed above concluded as pleasingly as readers might have hoped. But others finished in a more upbeat way.

Examples fitting the theme of this post?

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 an unfortunate intra-town lawsuit and a great cat cafe — is here.

Josephine Tey (credit: Sasha/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

One of the many reasons we read literature is to get a sense of the past. Some fictional characters are quite interested in the past as well.

I just finished Josephine Tey’s intriguing 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, which features a hospitalized 20th-century Scotland Yard inspector who’s ultra-bored as he recovers from a badly broken leg and other injuries. Alan Grant eventually gets immersed in the late 1400s — specifically in sleuthing (via old documents brought to him) whether or not King Richard III was a murderer. Fascinating to try to solve a mystery involving people dead for hundreds of years, and Tey also has lots to say about historical-writing bias that reflects the perspective of “the winners.”

There’s an even bigger time gap in Daphne du Maurier’s haunting 1969 novel The House on the Strand, in which 20th-century guy Dick Young takes a drug to repeatedly go back to the 1300s — becoming engrossed in the goings-on of that period (to the detriment of his life in modern times).

Visiting the past is also a thing in Octavia E. Butler’s powerful 1979 novel Kindred, in which 20th-century Black writer Dana Franklin is involuntarily thrust back in time to America’s slave-holding South. There the young Californian meets her ancestors, Black and white, and one of the plot points involves Dana trying to ensure that she’ll end up eventually being born and existing in her own time. Butler of course has plenty to say about racism, too.

One of the highlights of another time-travel work — Diana Gabaldon’s page-turning, still-ongoing Outlander series — involves 20th-century physician Claire Randall doing research as she considers a return to 18th-century Scotland. That’s where Claire met and married Jamie Fraser before she had to return to the 1900s, pregnant with their child. Claire, assisted by her now-grown daughter and future son-in-law, uses historical records to try to determine whether Jamie is still alive at a certain point of the 1700s and, if so, where in Scotland he might be.

A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession, which I recently discussed in another blog post, features two 20th-century academics studying two 19th-century poets (a woman and a man) and whether they had a romantic relationship. The academics don’t physically go back in time, but their minds are certainly focused there for much of the book.

The nameless narrator of Henry James’ absorbing 1888 novel The Aspern Papers is also interested in a dead 19th-century poet (Jeffrey Aspern) as he uses subterfuge to try to get access to Aspern’s old papers from the late poet’s now-aged lover.

Fiction you’ve liked in which the characters are very interested in the past?

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 welcome reelection bid, a squandered hate-crime grant, a great high school concert, and more — is here.

Sometimes, the subject matter of a novel is almost too painful to read. But if the book is good, we read it nonetheless.

Why? We might admire the storytelling, like the author’s writing style, relate to the characters, learn a lot, think about our own lives and the lives of people we know, and get a needed reminder of how much sadness and inhumanity there is in the world — which exercises our empathy muscles. Also, a painful novel might offer a bit of hope and inspiration, via some silver linings in the plot and/or the courage and resilience of certain characters. Plus some truly nasty characters might get their comeuppance. (Or might not.)

My latest experience with a gut-wrenching work of fiction came last week when I read John Grisham’s riveting 2010 novel The Confession, which tells the ultra-depressing tale of a Black teen put on Death Row in Texas after being framed by law enforcement for a murder a white man committed. Such an agonizing scenario that I almost put down the novel in despair, especially when I sensed that the pulls-no-punches Grisham was going to again give his readers a sad or mixed ending. But I kept on — admiring Grisham’s suspenseful writing and his fury at the injustice rampant in America’s legal system…and his fury at spineless, amoral politicians.

I had a similar reaction a few years ago to Angie Thomas’ excellent The Hate U Give — a novel I’ve discussed here before that focuses on the plucked-from-the-headlines killing of a young Black man by a trigger-happy white cop, and the reaction to his death by his (female) friend and the community at large.

More recently, I read and wrote about Rohinton Mistry’s India-set A Fine Balance, which had many excruciating moments of the powerful making life miserable for the powerless but was crafted so well I had no thought of stopping.

Of course, novels about war, genocide, slavery, a pandemic, and so on will make readers despondent but glued to the pages if the books are good enough. I’m thinking of titles such as Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Albert Camus’ The Plague, to name just four novels among many.

And, yes, dystopian works like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy are simultaneously hellish and very compelling.

In an ideal world, we would hope that enough people perusing painful books might help (through reader change of heart, activism, etc.) lead to a society where fewer painful things happen. Perhaps wishful thinking, but…

Your thoughts about this topic, and any examples you might have of distressing novels you’ve read or tried to read?

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 welcome mayoral candidate, no teacher layoffs, an overpaid township manager, and more — is here.