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.

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.