Who IS this guy? You’ll find out near the end of the post. 🙂

It’s 2024, and time for me to again mention novels reaching significant anniversaries in a new year. I’ll discuss books I’ve read, and also list some of the ones I haven’t read. Let’s start with fiction published in 1999 — a quarter century ago.

That year saw the eagerly awaited arrival of the third installment of J.K. Rowling’s mega-popular Harry Potter series. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is considered by many to be the first- or second-best book in the seven-book series, and I feel the same way.

Also released in 1999 were Kent Haruf’s poignant Plainsong, Andre Dubus III’s intense House of Sand and Fog, Stephen King’s suspenseful The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, John Grisham’s compelling The Testament, Ha Jin’s affecting Waiting, Nicholas Sparks’ heartbreaking A Walk to Remember, Susan Vreeland’s engrossing Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s absorbing Pulitzer-winning story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

Among the notable ’99 novels I haven’t read are Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Joanne Harris’ Chocolat (I did see the delightful movie version of the latter book).

Moving on to 1974 — a half-century ago! Published that year were Elsa Morante’s amazing novel History, the aforementioned Stephen King’s eye-opening debut Carrie, Peter Benchley’s “biting” Jaws (I seem to remember a certain blockbuster film it inspired), and Thomas Tryon’s underrated Lady.

Some of the notable ’74-released books I haven’t gotten to include James Michener’s Centennial, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, John Nichols’ The Milagro Beanfield War, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, and John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

I should also mention a couple of iconic 1974 nonfiction books I read: Robert Caro’s jaw-dropping tome The Power Broker, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s political classic All the President’s Men.

Now, let’s go back a century. Perhaps the most famous 1924-released novels are E.M. Forster’s culturally complex A Passage to India and Herman Melville’s posthumously published stunner Billy Budd, both of which I’ve read.

Among the 100-years-ago books I haven’t gotten to are Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, and Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy.

In 1874, 150 years ago, we had Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, among other novels.

Two centuries ago? The only 1824 novel I could find that’s somewhat remembered today is one of Walter Scott’s lesser-known titles: Redgauntlet.

Two-hundred-fifty years ago saw the publication of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famous The Sorrows of Young Werther. The author (pictured atop this page) was just in his mid-20s in 1774!

Your thoughts about this post? Also, I’m sure I missed some books, so please name any you’d like. 🙂

One last thing: Below is a screen grab from the back end of my blog showing some stats from 2023. Thanks so much to everyone who read my weekly posts and commented under them! I loved the conversations. 🙂

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 — a lament about my community’s Township Council — is here.

Abraham Lincoln and his son Willie.

I’ve read 46 novels this year. A bit under my annual goal of one a week, but I certainly met my annual goal of experiencing all kinds of emotions through literature. Here’s what I call my “-est list” for 2023:

Weirdest book I read: George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which I finished a few days ago. Written more like a play than a novel, it features a chorus of ghosts stuck in purgatory as President Lincoln’s deceased 11-year-old son Willie arrives among them in 1862. Original, moving, darkly humorous, choppy, repetitive, and many other adjectives. Plus some impressive invented language.

Saddest book focusing on many characters: Leon Uris’ Mila 18, the historical-fiction novel about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto — and the Nazi crushing of that doomed uprising after some early against-all-odds success. Heartbreaking.

Saddest book focusing on a small number of characters: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Such a downer of a novel but so well-written. Some warm moments amid the inhumanity, with much of that inhumanity “courtesy” of the vile powerful against the powerless.

Funniest book: Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, which includes plenty of satirical commentary about religion and more.

Most escapest…oops…escapist book: John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza. Football in Italy! Where a disgraced NFL quarterback goes to play when no other QB job is available. (Football as in American football, not soccer.)

Dual-timeline-iest book: Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, by the brilliant author who hasn’t lost a step in 35 years of novel writing. Unsheltered focuses on two sets of characters living in the same place, more than a century apart. One of my favorite books read this year.

Sympathize-with-the-protagonist-the-mostest book: Several Kristin Hannah titles were in the running for this, but I’ll go with The Four Winds and its beleaguered Elsa Martinelli as she lives “the life of Joad.” (The novel’s story line has some deliberate similarities to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.)

Subtlest book: Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night. A low-key but never boring work about a woman and man who briefly find happiness together late in life. Haruf’s Plainsong, which focuses on a wider, intergenerational array of characters, was a close second in poignancy.

Don’t-bring-this-to-a-block-party-iest book: Joy Fielding’s compelling Cul-de-Sac, about harrowing stuff that happens in and between the families on one suburban Florida street.

Clunkiest book: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Liked the intricate plot. Didn’t like the often-awkward writing.

Longest book: J.K. Rowling’s The Ink Black Heart, the sixth installment of the series starring private investigators Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) rambles on for more than 1,000 pages but I mostly loved it — as I also loved the first five novels in a series that skillfully combines mystery/thriller elements and interpersonal dynamics.

Newest book: Lee Child and Andrew Child’s Jack Reacher-starring The Secret — which I just read, two months after it was published in October 2023. Few mystery/thriller books ratchet up the tension like those in the Reacher series do, and the latest novel (number 28) is excellent.

Oldest books: Georgette Heyer’s 1925 Simon the Coldheart and Vicki Baum’s 1929 Grand Hotel. Reminds me that I should have gotten to some novels from the 1800s last year, or did I read most of the 19th-century ones I’m going to read in the decades before 2023 rolled around? 🤔 Nah, this year was just a blip… 🙂

Novels you read in 2023 that left the most impression on you? And…Happy New Year!

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 — a 2023 year in review about a very newsworthy 12 months in my town — is here.

Joy Fielding

I’ve focused on novels with unlikable main characters before, but I’d “like” to return to that subject I last addressed in 2022 and 2017.

I just read Puppet by Canadian author Joy Fielding, and her protagonist Amanda Travis is…annoying. Selfish, impatient, sleeps with married men — and is an attorney with few qualms about representing criminal lowlifes. Also, she’s twice-divorced at age 28, with her being the cause of both relationships ending.

Yet I enjoyed Puppet, racing through it in two days. Why does one like any novel featuring a protagonist who gets on one’s nerves? Well, when it has various other things going for it…

In the case of Puppet, it offers a propulsive plot often focusing on why Amanda’s mother killed a man for apparently no reason. It also has some likable supporting characters, including Amanda’s first ex-husband.

And Amanda is not all bad. She’s self-critical, and smart, funny, hard-working, and determined. Plus one understands that her at-times-abrasive personality was shaped by growing up in an unloving household.

Last but not least, author Fielding’s writing is excellent. Oh, and we get plenty of Florida and Toronto atmosphere: Amanda lives in The Sunshine State after having grown up in Canada; she travels north after learning about the murder charge her mother is facing.

Two other not-that-likable people starring in novels I’ve enjoyed in recent years?

One is the title character in Alexander Pushkin’s 19th-century Eugene Onegin — a cynical, arrogant “dandy.” But he’s interesting in his way, plus there are sympathetic supporting characters in the book along with a good amount of story-line tension. Still, what makes Pushkin’s novel-in-prose an absolute classic is that it’s exquisitely written.

Then, in William Kennedy’s melancholy Ironweed, there’s Francis Phelan — basically an irresponsible drunk who abandoned his family. But the haunted Francis does have somewhat of a conscience, and at least part of the reason for his life going downhill stems from a horrible tragedy. In addition, Kennedy’s writing is skillful and atmospheric.

In previous posts, compelling novels with unlikable protagonists I’ve mentioned included Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog, Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin, John Grisham’s The Brethren, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, among others.

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 nationally known athletes who lived in my town — is here.

Vicki Baum (dpa Picture-Alliance)

Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Grand Hotel is well-known for spawning 1932’s Academy Award-winning Grand Hotel movie. But did you know that the Austria-born Baum (actual first name: Hedwig) was not only a prolific novelist but a screenwriter as well? She co-wrote the screenplay for the Grand Hotel film, and also helped script various other movies — which led me to think about how a number of novelists have doubled as screenwriters for financial reasons and/or for a creative change-of-pace and/or to mingle with celebrities and/or for other reasons.

Before I get into that, here are my brief thoughts about the Grand Hotel book, which I read for the first time last week. A very compelling novel about a group of Berlin hotel guests — including an aging ballerina, a charismatic con man with some conscience, a disfigured World War I veteran, an unsavory businessman, a timid clerk who might be dying, and a beautiful/good-natured stenographer — whose lives end up intersecting in quite dramatic ways. A bonus is that Baum gives the hotel’s staffers some page time and personality, too.

Many readers are aware that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a couple of sojourns in Hollywood. His movie-writing output and credits were not much to speak of, but The Great Gatsby author’s time in California had a big impact on his novels: a young actress (Lois Moran) he met influenced his Rosemary Hoyt character in Tender Is the Night, and the protagonist in Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon was based on film executive Irving Thalberg.

Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Point Counter Point, etc.) was also a Hollywood screenwriter for a number of years — even helping to work on the 1940s movie versions of two all-time novels: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

William Faulkner, too, co-scripted 1940s movies based on novels: Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. This was after Faulkner authored several of his most famous books, including The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.

John Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden fame wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! and was earlier involved in co-penning Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.

Speaking of boats, Ray Bradbury co-wrote the screenplay for the 1956 movie version of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Rather than novels, Dorothy Parker penned short stories, clever verse, criticism…and movie scripts — including co-writing the 1937 version of A Star Is Born as well as Hitchcock’s Saboteur.

Among other novelists who worked on film scripts: James Agee, Michael Chabon, the aforementioned Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Michael Crichton, Dave Eggers, William Goldman, Larry McMurtry, and Mario Puzo, to name a few.

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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — about legal challenges to a massive development and a closed train station waiting room — is here.

A 1935 Texas dust storm like those in Kristin Hannah’s novel The Four Winds.

Today’s topic evokes a topic I’ve previously written about — novels that evoke previous novels.

This doesn’t mean the evoking book is plagiaristic. Often, the novel is quite original and excellent (like the one I’m about to discuss), even as the author deliberately or subconsciously makes references to previous literature. Heck, there are only so many plots, ideas, scenarios, character types, etc. No novel is completely unique.

As alluded to, I’m going to discuss this concept via a novel I recently read — Kristin Hannah’s propulsive, page-turning, heartbreaking The Four Winds.

Among the characters its Elsa protagonist evokes is Jane Eyre. Both are plain-looking and had difficult childhoods almost totally devoid of love, yet they are “survivors” possessing a good measure of resilience. Perhaps not a coincidence that among Elsa’s favorite novels in The Four Winds is…Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

Elsa — whose low self-esteem is eventually helped somewhat by becoming a hard-working farm woman and mother, and by growing close to the two loving parents of her problematic husband — also made me think of Valancy Stirling of L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle. Valancy, too, had to deal with horrible, judgmental parenting and other challenges such as (alleged) ill health, even as she would find the strength and independence to try to better her life.

But the novel that The Four Winds most evokes is The Grapes of Wrath. Most of Hannah’s book is set in the 1930s — the Depression-era decade in which John Steinbeck’s 1939-published classic also unfolds. Elsa (along with her two children) flee drought-stricken “Dust Bowl” Texas to seek a better life in California, only to face huge difficulties and vicious anti-poor/anti-newcomer sentiment from landowners, the police, and many other residents in “The Golden State” — challenges previously faced by Steinbeck’s Joad family, who drove to California from Oklahoma. Elsa’s personality feels like a mix of the fierce, compassionate Ma Joad and her stoic, admirable son Tom Joad.

Meanwhile, communist union organizer Jack in The Four Winds is reminiscent of lapsed preacher Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath…and also makes one think of lawyer Max in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Those three characters are sympathetic and non-stereotypical — not always the case with depictions of “reds” or other leftists in literature.

Finally, Elsa’s strong-willed, gutsy, dissatisfied, rebellious, ultimately loving daughter Loreda evokes too many other fictional teens to name, yet she is a very distinct character in her own right. Which helped remind me once again that Kristin Hannah is one of my favorite living novelists.

Your thoughts on 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 rent-gouging, speed-limit reductions, and more — is here.

A photo I took this past Friday during a walk in a local park.

As someone who takes a long stroll almost every day, I like to see walking in literature.

Of course, memorable walks in fiction are usually not just for relaxation or exercise. They need to have some drama attached — whether positive drama, such as when romantic couples amble along, or mixed or negative drama like much of the rest of this blog post will show.

So, let’s begin trekking down the path of examples…

The first novel that came to mind was Walter Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818). In it, working-class protagonist Jeanie Deans trudges about 400 miles/644 kilometers from Edinburgh to London to seek a royal pardon sparing her sister Effie from a death sentence. It’s my favorite of Scott’s many great novels.

As I stay with 19th-century literature for a minute, I’ll mention that memorable walks can occasionally occur indoors, too. One of the most vivid parts of Emile Zola’s 1877 novel The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir) is when Gervaise and Coupeau and their wedding party trudge through the Louvre — a joyful, tense, chaotic scene that presages a union that will be happy and then disastrous.

Walking is also involved in escapes (as is running). I thought of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Eliza frantically tries to flee slavery on foot with her young son in her arms. Also, Louis L’Amour’s 1987 novel Last of the Breed has Native-American protagonist Joseph Makatozi make a break from Soviet imprisonment and then walk hundreds of miles across Siberia trying to elude his would-be captors.

In Jean M. Auel’s The Plains of Passage (1990), the fourth installment of the Earth’s Children series that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear, prehistoric couple Ayla and Jondalar hike the enormous distance from what is now Ukraine to what is now France.

There’s also lots of wearisome walking during the epic journey of the “good guy” characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954) — as there is with the father and son in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road (2006).

I haven’t read The Long Walk (1979) by Stephen King or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (2012), but know each novel has much moving of feet.

Animals in fiction can tread huge distances, too, as exemplified by Luath and Bodger the dogs and Tao the cat traveling approximately 300 miles/483 kilometers through the Canadian wilderness to try to return home in Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel The Incredible Journey.

I’ll conclude with Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember, which the title of this blog post referenced. If I’m remembering correctly, the title of that moving 1999 novel refers to a wedding-day walk down the aisle of young characters Landon and the terminally ill (?) Jamie. Not a long walk, but a very important one.

Thoughts about, and examples of, this topic? And a relevant video:

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 being the parent of a student athlete — is here.

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.