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.

iStock.com/LIVINUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts about, and examples of, today’s topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the reappointment of my town’s poorly performing municipal clerk — is here.

Misty the cat says: “I’m perched today next to ‘The Boys from Biloxi.’ I am NOT a boy from Biloxi.” (Photo by me.)

My cat Misty hasn’t hijacked this blog since early 2021, but he’s back on the computer today discussing some of the novels his human (me) has read during the past two-plus years. Has Misty read those books, too? Perhaps, although his Goodreads account lists him as only reading the labels on cat-food cans. Is that great literature?

Anyway, here’s Misty:

“‘Is that great literature?,’ my male human asked. Depends. How do we know that, say, Dostoevsky and George Eliot didn’t write the words on cat-food-can labels? All authors have to start somewhere.

“Anyway, I was thrilled that one of the novels Dave read since early 2021 was Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale! I could practically taste that avian protagonist until I pawed through the book and learned that ‘The Nightingale’ was a nickname for a female HUMAN who did heroic things during World War II. Now I’m itching to start World War III by swiping my food bowl off the table.

“Despite the persona I just put forth, I’m a very nice kitty most of the time. For instance, when Dave read Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, I cried tears of empathy for the homeless animals that novel undoubtedly depicted. But the book turned out to be people-focused. Still, I will always have a soft spot in my feline heart for Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, in which a missionary converts dogs into cats. Religious zeal? You gotta love it.

“Actually, the missionary did NOT convert dogs into cats, so those canines howling in the Pink Floyd song ‘Dogs’ can just shush.

“The barkers in that prog-rock tune have no names, which reminds me of Wilkie Collins’ novel No Name. The title actually make sense once you read the book, as does the title of that author’s The Moonstone — about a member of The Rolling Stones visiting the moon in the 19th century. Yes, Keith Richards looks, and is, that old.

“Now that I’m name-dropping, I read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist assuming it was a fictional work about my friend Al the chemist. It was not. I also thought Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough was about 18th-century character Richard Morgan competing in the Boston Marathon. It was not. Maybe he was actually an 18th-century pickleball player?

“As for Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, the first-floor apartment my humans and I share doesn’t have stairs, so I don’t know how Dave can relate to that book. Still, there are hallway stairs that lead to the second and third floors of our basic, plain-looking rental building. Shirley Jackson authored We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but she needs to speak for herself. There isn’t even a moat around here.

“But there’s an inhaler in my apartment, because I’m an asthmatic cat. Thus I thought Breathing Lessons would be a very valuable instructional read for me and other felines in my situation. Alas, that Anne Tyler novel — like the aforementioned Unsheltered — focused on people. No wonder I can’t get a library card.

“As some of you know, I’m given a leashed walk every morning around my apartment complex. The other day, I saw a puddle of rain from the night before, and was awestruck to realize I was witnessing the very body of water that’s the titular setting for Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Cue the soundtrack for The Bangles’ ‘Walk Like an Egyptian.’

“The title of Song of Solomon also evokes the Mideast, although Toni Morrison’s novel is set in the United States. Did King Solomon rule the U.S. sometime between the presidential terms of FDR and Jimmy Carter? Morrison ignores that question in her book, but everyone knows the Electoral College works in strange ways.

“It’s also strange that Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy isn’t about me being fed five seconds late one day. Instead, it’s about some guy named Michelangelo. Wasn’t he a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?

“More questions: Was Lorna Doone a novel first or a cookie first? R.D. Blackmore wrote the book, but who wrote the list of ingredients on Lorna Doone cookie boxes? Not Dostoevsky or George Eliot, because they were busy writing for cat-food cans.”

Misty the cat will reply to comments between naps.

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 a negative report about my town, among various other topics — is here.

This month, the G20 Summit was held in India, with the U.S. president subsequently visiting Vietnam. Also this month, the leader of North Korea met with the leader of Russia — a country partly in Asia. Next month, my New Jersey town’s “AAPI Montclair” organization representing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will hold several events. Countries such as China and Japan are often in the news, too.

All that is my excuse for writing this week about novels I’ve read by living authors who reside in Asian nations or reside elsewhere but are of Asian or part-Asian descent. I’ll also mention a few Asia-set books by non-Asian writers.

Among the titles that immediately came to mind is The God of Small Things, the 1997 debut novel by author/activist Arundhati Roy of India. It’s a depressingly riveting story featuring fraternal twins and other memorable characters.

I’ve only gotten to one novel so far by Japan’s Haruki Murakami — his intriguing After Dark (2004) that unfolds during a single night. (I’ve also read The Tale of Genji, the 11th-century work by Japan’s Murasaki Shikibu, but she’s not a living author as far as I know. 🙂 )

I recently read (and discussed in last week’s blog post) Nadia Hashimi’s Afghanistan-set The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, an absorbing 2014 debut novel about two women separated by a century. Hashimi’s parents emigrated from Afghanistan a few years before their daughter’s 1977 birth in New York.

Afghanistan-born American author Khaled Hosseini is known for works such as The Kite Runner (2003), also an excellent debut novel — this one set in Afghanistan and California.

Another now-American writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, was born in Vietnam — the partial setting for his intense/tragic/cleverly crafted novels The Sympathizer (2015) and The Committed (2021).

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London to Indian immigrants parents who soon moved to the U.S. I enjoyed her novels The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) as well as her 1999 short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist known for works such as 1989’s The Remains of the Day (which I liked a lot) and 2005’s Never Let Me Go (which I found slow going).

Amy Tan? I’ve read and been impressed with three novels — The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) — by that American author of Chinese descent.

Among the novels that have stuck with me by non-Asian living writers using Asian settings are Adam Johnson’s 2012 The Orphan Master’s Son (set in North Korea) and Lawrence Osborne’s 2020 The Glass Kingdom (set in Thailand). I also loved James Clavell’s 1975 Shogun (set in Japan), but that author is no longer with us.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this week’s theme?

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 cyber attack and more — is here.

Nadia Hashimi

There are several obvious reasons why some of literature’s female characters dress as males.

Males tend to get more respect and “perks” in our sexist, misogynist, patriarchal world. Also, they’re often considered physically stronger, so females might feel safer — from general attack and/or sexual assault — being in male garb. Etc.

Nadia Hashimi’s compelling Afghanistan-set novel The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, which I just finished, gives readers a double dose of cross-dressing. In the 21st century, the girl Rahima becomes known as the boy Rahim. And, in the book’s parallel story unfolding 100 years earlier, her beleaguered great-great-grandmother Shekiba passes as a male, too. Both also appear as the females that they are in parts of the novel, so we get quite a contrast with how differently they’re treated when seen as a person of each gender — especially in a women-oppressing, double-standard-rife country such as Afghanistan with many brutal male leaders. As Shekiba thinks to herself late in the book: “Only a daughter could know what it was to cross that line, to feel the freedom of living as the opposite sex.”

J.R.R. Tolkien’s otherwise superb The Lord of the Rings unfortunately mostly focuses on men, so it’s perhaps no surprise that one of the few women getting some authorial attention is the Eowyn character who eagerly heads off to battle disguised as a man by the name of Dernhelm. But she is a secondary player in Tolkien’s trilogy.

Moving from fantasy fiction to dystopian lit, Lauren Olamina poses as a male to try to be safer in a dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Plus she feels her masculine disguise gives her more gravitas as the leader that she is. All in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

Another brave cross-dressing young woman is Eliza Sommers, who travels from Chile to Gold Rush-era California in Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune.

Set much further back in time, we have the legendary 15th-century teen warrior who dresses as a male in Mark Twain’s historical-fiction novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

I know there are various other works of fiction that include females passing as males; in this post, I’ve just mentioned the ones I’ve read. Your thoughts about, and examples of, this theme?

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 problematic municipal clerk, the first day of school, a large local jazz festival, and more — is here.

Terry Pratchett (photo by Rob Wilkins/Doubleday)

Many avid readers occasionally stray out of their literary comfort zone. I’m one of them. 🙂

Doing that can be interesting, educational, mind-expanding, challenging, rut-avoiding, tolerance-enhancing, and…fun.

The majority of novels I’ve gotten to in recent years are 21st- or 20th-century works of general fiction by authors from the United States or England. (I used to focus a lot on 19th-century literature from those two countries, but after a while one reads most of what one wants to read from that era and the authors are, um, not around anymore to produce new books.)

Also in recent years, I’ve enjoyed quite a few 21st- and 20th-century Canadian novels (Margaret Atwood, L.M. Montgomery, etc.); 20th- and 19th-century French novels (Camus, Colette, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Zola, etc.); and 19th-century Russian novels (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, etc.). So, not really far out of any comfort zone.

A little less often on my list have been novels by authors from Australia (Liane Moriarty and Colleen McCullough!), Brazil (Jorge Amado and Paulo Coelho!), Chile (Isabel Allende!), Colombia (Gabriel Garcia Marquez!), the Czech Republic (Jaroslav Hasek!), Germany (Erich Maria Remarque and Hermann Hesse!), India (Arundhati Roy!), Italy (Elsa Morante and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa!), Japan (Haruki Murakami!), New Zealand (Janet Frame!), Nigeria (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Wole Soyinka!), Scotland (Sir Walter Scott!), South Africa (Nadine Gordimer and Alan Paton!), Sweden (Stieg Larsson and Fredrik Backman!), and Switzerland (Johanna Spyri!), among other places. An incomplete list by me, and some of those authors ended up moving to other countries.

But getting out of one’s comfort zone is not just a geographical thing. For instance, I just read Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel Small Gods despite — with a few exceptions such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — my not being much of a fantasy buff. The weird, satiric, religion-questioning, often-dark, often-funny Small Gods — part of Pratchett’s Discworld series — was quite good, actually, after a slow-ish start.

Also somewhat off the beaten track for me have been long-long-ago novels (such as Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century Don Quixote and Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century The Tale of Genji), experimental/modernist fiction (as in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway), novels in poetic form or with a good chunk of verse (Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire), very lengthy novels (James Clavell’s Shogun, Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, a number of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books), sci-fi (the great Octavia E. Butler, anyone?), young-adult literature (I must revisit the aforementioned L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables in the not-too-distant future), mysteries, etc.

What do you read to vary your fiction focus?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — with more on a developer’s bait-and-switch project — is here.