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.

Oh, what the heck, a screen shot I grabbed off YouTube of Taylor Swift singin’ in the rain.

Sometimes, bloggers have no idea what to write for their next post. Such was the case with me this past Friday, trying to think of a topic as the rain poured down.

I looked out the window and decided to write about…rain. In literature. Fiction’s precipitation can be quite atmospheric, set a mood, reflect a character’s state of mind, be a plot element, portend nature’s growth, and more.

There’s an evocative scene or two of rain in A Gentleman in Moscow author Amor Towles’ debut novel Rules of Civility, which I had finished the previous night. Set mostly in 1938 New York City, the 2011 book stars a young, plucky, literature-loving ( 🙂 ) career woman named Katey Kontent (!) and is full of elegant writing such as these damp-weather words: “Come September, despite the waning hours, despite the leaves succumbing to the weight of autumnal rains, there is a certain relief to having the long days of summer behind us; and there’s a paradoxical sense of rejuvenation in the air.” Not a bad passage to read when it’s almost September.

Published in 1939 — a year after Rules of Civility is set — The Grapes of Wrath features days of torrential rain near book’s end. Sometimes a downpour is just a downpour, as the 1939-deceased Sigmund Freud might have said, but the rain in John Steinbeck’s classic novel also symbolizes the gloom and despair of the ever-more-impoverished Joad family as they struggle to survive after economic conditions forced them to migrate to California.

Rain and other bad weather is of course potentially even more catastrophic for homeless characters, as the Joads became.

Another example of relentless, dramatic rain near the end of a masterful novel is in the unforgettable scene that concludes George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.

There’s also the symbolic four-plus years of rain after the brutal massacre in still another classic novel — Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s as if the sky is mourning the many murdered workers.

On a more personal scale, Jane Eyre‘s memorable storm and lightning-split tree at a moment of great happiness for Ms. Eyre and Edward Rochester foreshadows that the star and co-star of Charlotte Bronte’s novel will soon be experiencing rough times.

In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the exhausted Hagar character being soaked by rain when returning home from a shopping trip is among the novel’s pivotal scenes.

Some novels of course literally have a certain weather event in the title, with Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain one example.

There’s also significant rain in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and many other fiction books.

Including this passage from William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying: “It begins to rain. The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense. They are as big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun; they sweep across the lantern in a vicious hissing…”

Examples of, and thoughts about, 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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about a mayoral withdrawal, a developer’s bait-and-switch, quarterback Aaron Rodgers moving close to my town, and more — is here.

My town’s Montclair Book Center, August 19, 2023. (Photo by me.)

Last week, I discussed some libraries in my life. This week, I’m following that up by focusing on some bookstores in said life.

I’ll start with my New Jersey town of Montclair, which has two independent bookstores — unusual for a suburb of about 40,000 people.

One of those retailers is Montclair Book Center, which opened in 1984 (thanks, George Orwell 🙂 ) but appealingly feels much older. Rather scruffy-looking, but filled with a ton of new and used titles in its crowded aisles. I can’t count the number of book (and calendar) gifts I’ve purchased there over the years.

The second Montclair literary haven is the less quirky but quite nice Watchung Booksellers, a mere five-minute walk from my apartment.

In nearby New York City, where I lived and worked for many years, perhaps the most memorable bookstore is the renowned Strand — which has 2.5 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books. Formerly also very convenient, given that the Manhattan-based magazine for which I used to write was only two blocks down Broadway in the East Village.

Among my memories of shopping at the Strand, from when I was in my mid-20s, was surprising a woman I was dating at the time with a present of a very hard-to-find book she said she’d been seeking for years. The Strand had it in stock during those pre-Amazon days. But the woman was rather blasé about the gift, and we didn’t date much longer. 🙂

Further afield in the United States, I have fond memories of visiting famous bookstores such as City Lights in San Francisco and Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. And a not-so-famous one in Tennessee whose name I can’t remember — but I recall several other things about that 1991 experience.

I was in Memphis to cover the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention for a magazine when a free afternoon allowed me to walk around the city with Jerry Robinson, whose many accomplishments in cartooning included creating the iconic character of The Joker (and naming sidekick Robin) while working on the Batman comic books as a pre-World War II teen. Anyway, we found a great shop with comic books and other cartoon items — and Jerry, who was 69 at the time, was like a kid in a candy store. Needless to say, he made several purchases.

While I prefer independent bookstores to chain ones (especially indies with cats 🙂 ), I’ve certainly frequented some nice Barnes & Noble outlets. The now-defunct Borders, too; I even visited its flagship store in Ann Arbor with my wife Laurel — who spent the majority of her childhood in that Michigan city.

Airport bookstores? Usually pretty basic, but they’ve come in handy at times.

After flying to Paris, one has to at least browse the many outdoor book kiosks near the Seine — as I’ve done several times. And I found a bookstore in Moscow many years ago that featured some English-language offerings among its Russian-language titles. I still have Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered from that visit.

Bookstores you have known?

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 — about an “emergency” meeting that wasn’t an emergency, and more — is here.

The library in Chatham on Cape Cod, August 10, 2023. (Photo by me.)

When my family and I enjoyed a Cape Cod vacation again this past week, we again passed the small, old, lovely library in downtown Chatham. That Massachusetts sight made me think of libraries I have known during my life. A very good feeling.

I’ve only been inside Chatham’s 1896-built Eldredge Public Library once — during a very rainy day several years ago. (When I go away, I bring books from my hometown Montclair, New Jersey, library; this time the quietly eloquent author Kent Haruf’s poignant Eventide and Benediction sequels to his poignant Plainsong novel.) But that one look inside Eldredge was quite nice — and the Chatham facility even allows vacationers to borrow books they can return before their Cape Cod stay ends.

My first library memory was of the one in Teaneck, New Jersey, where my parents moved from the Bronx, New York, when I was a toddler. Befitting the importance of libraries, the 1927 brick building was part of the township complex along with the municipal building and more. My parents didn’t read many books, but my mother did thankfully bring me to this library whenever I wanted.

I first borrowed children’s books, of course, and then went on to kid-friendly biographies of historical figures and baseball players. Not too much fiction back then (what was I thinking? 🙂 ), but I did take a liking to the “Danny Dunn” sci-fi/adventure books for young readers.

Finally, as a teen, I got interested in more-mature novels and borrowed many. If I loved a book we were assigned and given a copy of in my high school English class, I’d later borrow the same novel from the library to reread. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Richard Wright’s Native Son? I’m thinking of you.

Then came Rutgers College, where the 1956-opened Alexander Library was utilitarian-looking but large. A great place to study when one wanted to get away from the noisy dorms, and also the place where I took out a ton of novels in addition to the ones that English majors purchased at the campus bookstore for their courses. Among the many books I borrowed from Alexander to read for the first time was The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre (not Alexander 🙂 ) Dumas.

After getting an English degree from the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Rutgers, I remained in that city for a year sharing an apartment with a good friend while working as a reporter at a daily newspaper about 30 miles away. The New Brunswick library was a Carnegie one that opened in 1903.

Returning to the academic life to earn a master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, I got a job in…a library! Specifically, Medill’s library, to help make ends meet. Basically one large room, with me sitting at the front desk checking out books and other materials for students long before you could do that on self-service machines.

Northwestern’s main library complex consisted of two linked 1933 and 1970 buildings — the older of which was rather ornate inside. I spent a lot of time there working on a thesis about how the media covered South Africa’s appalling system of apartheid, which was still formally in existence back then. No Internet or Google to speed along research; I perused books, looked at newspapers on “microfiche,” etc.

After graduating from Medill, I moved to New York City and spent the next 15 years there — first in Manhattan, then Brooklyn, then Queens. So I got to know and enjoy several of NYC’s relatively “petite” branch libraries. Plus the occasional visits to the majestic 1911-opened Beaux-Arts flagship library at Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The one flanked by those two famous large marble lions — who, like the Detroit Lions, have never been to a Super Bowl.

Then I moved to Montclair, New Jersey, a suburb which has two libraries — the 1955-opened main one and a smaller 1914 Carnegie branch. I have taken out more novels from the main facility than I can count, including most of the ones I read to feed this blog each week. 🙂

A final note: When I travel in the U.S. or abroad, I occasionally visit libraries to look at their outsides and/or go in. A particularly fond memory is seeing the eye-catching one in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2007; the building’s architecture actually includes huge facsimiles of books — including The Stranger and The Little Prince.

Libraries you have known?

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 — about what a controversial interim township manager did before he unexpectedly died this month — is here.

Readers seeking perfection can…look up “perfection” in a dictionary. Because they’re not going to get it from even the best authors.

Yes, once in a while the best authors are going to produce, say, B+ or B- novels instead of A+ or A- ones. That’s okay, and human. Maybe the novelists had stress in their personal lives when writing the less-than-fantastic books — including being ill or ultra-busy. Maybe the authors tackled a different genre or overdid the experimenting and things didn’t work as well as they had hoped. Maybe the authors were writing sequels and became a bit bored with the same characters they had depicted before. Maybe all the conditions were right, but great authors are not machines churning out one masterpiece after another without exception.

I thought about all this last week while reading Kristin’s Hannah’s Fly Away, the sequel to her novel Firefly Lane — which I had read the previous week. I was prepared to be wowed again after the brilliance of Firefly Lane and three other Hannah efforts I had read this year: The Nightingale, Home Front, and The Great Alone.

But Fly Away turned out to be good not great. I found it overly dramatic and super-depressing for the most part, and also felt it jumped around in time too much and featured several major characters who did obviously dumb things despite being smart people. Partly explained by the grief they were feeling after the death of the co-protagonist in Firefly Lane, but it seemed their behavior was more about getting some plot gears going.

Still, the book did have some powerfully affecting moments, and we learned how the mother of one of the main characters — a mother who was not there for her young daughter in Firefly Lane — became so emotionally damaged.

Now that I’m done with Fly Away, I’m still a big fan of Hannah and will be reading more of her other novels in the future — because, again, no writer is perfect. (Well, maybe late Fleetwood Mac songwriter Christine McVie was perfect, given that her maiden name was…Perfect.)

Sometimes, lesser efforts can be attributed to novels being earlier-in-career works written before the authors’ writing fully matured. For instance, after rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s iconic Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov a few years ago, I tried his novel The Insulted and the Injured. Quite good, but nowhere near the same level.

The flip side of that can be late-career or even final novels written when the authors’ abilities are past their peak, their health might be failing, and/or they’re almost out of interesting ideas. I love or like virtually all of Willa Cather’s work — including My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop — but her last book Sapphira and the Slavegirl was cringe. Jack Finney’s final novel — a sequel to the transcendent Time and Again — was the mediocre From Time to Time.

I give John Steinbeck props for the high quirkiness quotient in Burning Bright, but it was hard to read compared to his top-notch novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.

Among the major or relative disappointments by other authors I like a lot? A Daughter of the Snows by Jack London, Cell by Stephen King, Chances Are… by Richard Russo, and The Siberian Dilemma by Martin Cruz Smith.

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about a controversial township manager situation and more — is here.

From the Firefly Lane series on Netflix.

Nine years ago, I wrote a post about friends in literature. Here’s an expanded and revised version of that piece that includes several novels I’ve read since 2014.

Perhaps we remember the great romances more, but fiction’s great friendships also provide us with many pleasurable reading experiences. Those friendships — which are often more enduring than romances — can teach us, touch us, and remind us of our own longtime pals. And if some of literature’s buddies have difficulties or even a falling out, the silver lining for readers is plenty of dramatic tension.

I was reminded of all that when I read Kristin Hannah’s superb Firefly Lane last week (as in late July 2023). The 2008 novel stars Kate and Tully, who meet as unhappy teens in the 1970s and forge a fierce friendship that lasts decades despite the very different paths their lives take. Kate opts to become a stay-at-home mom in a happy marriage, while the hyper-ambitious Tully remains single as she becomes a nationally known TV host. Their relationship is loving, complicated, and marked by occasional mutual jealousy before some huge bumps in the road happen.

Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, which I also read post-2014, focuses on friends Nel and Sula — the former fairly conventional, the latter extremely unconventional. They’re pals during childhood and adolescence, but a shared secret of a tragedy and a later betrayal eventually pull them apart. One appeal of the book is that while Nel is the “good” person and Sula the “bad” person, things are actually more nuanced than that.

Fredrik Backman’s Sweden-set 2012 novel A Man Called Ove — another post-2014 read for me — features an unlikely friendship between the grumpy, tries-to-keep-to-himself white widower Ove and Parvaneh, his younger, warm, outgoing female neighbor of Iranian descent.

I like friendships of all types in literature, but some of my favorites are the ones that cross the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and/or class — as is the case with A Man Called Ove. Those different-background relationships can sometimes be tricky in real life, so it’s nice when they succeed in fiction.

One obvious multicultural pairing is Mark Twain’s Huck and Jim — a white boy and a slavery-escaping Black man who gradually become close. Heck, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could have been called The Friendship of Huckleberry Finn — and we’re not talking about Huck’s interactions with the annoying Tom Sawyer.

There are also the unshakable comrades Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s five “Leatherstocking” novels. The final Last of the Mohicans scene between the Native-American chief and the white hunter is a very touching depiction of friendship.

Or how about Uncle Tom and young Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Two admirable people who become interracial and intergenerational friends before circumstances turn tragic for each.

Another great example of friendship across age and class lines — this time with both characters white — is that of the working-class Mary and the older, more-moneyed Elizabeth in Tracy Chevalier’s historical novel Remarkable Creatures. Fossil hunting brings them together.

Mixed-gender friends? They include Jim and Antonia in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, and of course Harry Potter and Hermione Granger in J.K. Rowling’s mega-popular series.

Other memorable friendships in literature? “Kindred spirits” Anne and Diana in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables; Jane Eyre and the sickly, warmhearted Helen Burns (when both are kids) in Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel; Dmitri and angst-ridden murderer Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment; hobbits Frodo and Sam in J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic Lord of the Rings trilogy; and the prison pairing of Edmond Dantes and Abbe Farina in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo — with the latter character doubling as a mentor, as can be the case with some friendships.

In novels of more recent vintage, Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale features four friends (Savannah, Bernadine, Robin, and Gloria); John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany depicts a fascinating friendship between John and the very original Owen; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior includes the fun, satisfying friendship between Dellarobia and Dovey; and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride chronicles the many-year relationship between Roz, Charis, and Tony — all three of whom share an enemy.

I haven’t even gotten into friendships between humans and animals in novels such as Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang, Albert Payson Terhune’s poignant His Dog, William H. Armstrong’s also-poignant Sounder, Elsa Morante’s History, and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series.

Your thoughts on this topic? Memorable friendships in literature 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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about an embarrassing municipal typo and more — is here.

Sometimes readers just want to escape with an adventure novel.

The book might also contain literary flourishes and/or social commentary and/or other bonuses, but a page-turning plot is key. Plus of course protagonists to root for and villains to root against. Are the heroes facing danger voluntarily or involuntarily? What are the chances of survival? Is there some kind of quest involved? Etc.

Last week I read Louis L’Amour for the first time — specifically his late-career novel Last of the Breed. A riveting book that relates the saga of Joseph “Joe Mack” Makatozi, a U.S. Air Force pilot of Native-American descent whose plane is forced down in the Soviet Union during the 1980s. He escapes prison and embarks on an incredible journey across the bitterly cold Siberian wilderness under hot pursuit.

Jack London is known for his adventure novels set in Canada’s frigid Yukon — including his gripping canine classics The Call of the Wild and White Fang. But also taking readers for quite an adventure ride is London’s sea thriller The Sea-Wolf.

Very exciting as well is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Much of Herman Melville’s work is too deep to fit solely in the adventure category, but some of his novels — such as Typee — are more adventure-focused than literary/philosophical.

Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo? One of the most exciting sagas in fiction, with an amazing escape and a huge revenge element.

Among the other memorable adventure novels I’ve read are H. Rider Haggard’s She, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, Kate Quinn’s The Huntress, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Richard Matheson’s Hunted Past Reason, Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare, Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, Zane Grey’s Boulder Dam, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and several very famous titles from Jules Verne.

Obviously, novels can cross categories. For instance, Verne’s work is mostly considered sci-fi, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are fantasy fiction, but all also offer breathless adventure.

Your thoughts on adventure novels — including those you’ve read?

Earlier this week, the great podcaster/blogger Rebecca Budd posted another of her wonderful audio interviews — this time with me. 🙂 We discussed blogging, other kinds of writing, the “memoir” that will star my charismatic cat Misty, and more. Rebecca’s questions stimulated a very nice conversation. 🙂

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 — about a welcome measure to ban gas-powered leaf blowers and a NOT-welcome other decision — is here.

It can be easier to read (and write) a novel that continually concentrates on one or a small number of characters without leaving them for a while to rotate through other people.

Think Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment, to name two books. The unbroken focus is on Jane and Raskolnikov, even as there are important supporting players in the mix.

Then there are novels that shift the focus to different people — whether every chapter or every few chapters. These books can be a bit more challenging, and even frustrating at times. We get accustomed to a character and then — boom — they disappear for a while. A certain rhythm is broken.

Yet this approach can also be satisfying as we get to know another character, and another character, and another… We see things from different perspectives, get all kinds of variety, etc. Then, in many cases, the characters — who might be family members, friends, or strangers — end up interacting with each other as the threads of the story come together. A thing of beauty when handled skillfully, whether the result is happy, tragic, or somewhere in between.

I happened to experience a rotating-character approach twice in a row last week with Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Joy Fielding’s Cul-de-Sac.

Haruf’s exquisite novel tells the story of several residents in/near a small Colorado town — a pregnant teen, two teachers, the two young sons of one of the teachers, two elderly farmer brothers, a lonely old woman in ill health, a sadistic teen boy and his nasty parents, etc. We move from character(s) to character(s) as the chapters go on, gradually seeing the connections between many of them and the parallels between some of them as the multiple plots advance. Haruf’s spare, subtle writing is off-the-charts good.

Fielding’s Cul-de-Sac focuses on five families of different configurations who live on the same…cul-de-sac. As they gradually get to know each other, we see that a number of these neighbors have some major issues — one’s a prominent oncologist who sickeningly beats his dentist wife, another’s an infuriatingly meddlesome mother-in-law, etc. Plus some of these Floridians own guns in the weapon-saturated “Sunshine State.” We know from the start that someone’s going to be shot dead; the question is who will be the murderer and who will be the victim. There were certainly several people with enough anger and/or reason to kill in this very suspenseful novel.

In books that rotate characters, there often isn’t any one person who’s clearly more prominent than another; instead, there are roughly equal “co-stars.” But of course there can at times be “firsts among equals.” In Fielding’s novel, that would be Maggie McKay, a woman separated from her husband who tries to do the right thing and help others, sometimes at risk to herself. She also has the biggest arc in terms of maturing and changing her behavior.

Among the many other novels that very effectively switch from character to character are William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers, and George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, to name just five.

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about my town’s firefighters voting “no confidence” in their chief — is here.

Credit: Freepik

I like bwat — books with a twist. And short stories with unexpected endings. The element of surprise is a great thing, plus it’s fun to think back to the start and middle of the novel or briefer tale to see what might have telegraphed the twist.

Some VERY famous short stories with shockingly not-foreseen conclusions? Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (first published in The New Yorker just over 75 years ago), Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek,” and of course various O. Henry tales — including “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Last Leaf.”

Many mystery novels obviously also have unpredictable endings, as the authors use misdirection and red herrings to try to make you think someone other than the actual culprit did the murder(s). Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, anyone?

And then there are novels in other genres, as well as more general fiction, that fit this category. One master at the surprise ending is John Grisham, as I experienced again this month with his novel The Reckoning. A thought-dead-for-three-years World War II hero comes home and shoots his town’s minister. Why? What was the minister guilty of, if anything? I didn’t see the conclusion coming — a conclusion that had a lot to do with race relations at that 1940s time and place (Mississippi).

Grisham’s The Racketeer also threw me for a VERY cleverly engineered loop.

Moving to other novelists, (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s Big Brother had a near-the-end-of-the-book twist that few readers would have predicted after many chapters of a sister trying to help her obese sibling lose weight. Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall, about a missing woman, gives us a brilliantly unexpected finish I’m glad I didn’t make a bet on. I would have lost.

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about awful U.S. Supreme Court decisions and how they contrast with my town — is here.

Parts of some novels make you cry. It could be tears of sorrow when a character (human or animal) dies or gets severely injured or there’s an unrequited-love situation, tears of happiness when there’s a long-delayed reunion or a character gets long-delayed justice or appreciation, etc.

If the author handles such scenes right, reader weeping is often a good thing. Our emotions have been engaged — to the max. One of the reasons why we love literature.

I thought about this last week while blubbering through the final chapters of Kristin Hannah’s superb 2018 novel The Great Alone, about a family that moves to a remote section of Alaska in the 1970s as the father tries to deal with trauma from being a prisoner of war in Vietnam — only to continue traumatizing his wife and teen daughter with physical and mental abuse. The whole book is emotionally intense, but the wrap-ups of two major story lines in the last few dozen pages are even more so.

The death of a major, kind-as-could-be supporting character in Anne of Green Gables? Devastating for Anne and others in L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 classic, and for readers. Montgomery later said she regretted having that death happen, but, as in many other novels, a demise does have importance for the plot and for the subsequent lives of the survivors.

Also emotionally intense is George Eliot’s outstanding 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, in which the title character goes through some major things, we see a drowning and a near-drowning, and there’s an agonizing case of unrequited love. More tears in this novel than in the four other Eliot novels I’ve read — and that’s saying something, because the author can definitely evoke VERY strong feelings.

The choice in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice? That would bring any reader to tears (and fury). Not to mention the aftermath of that choice. Of course, the atrocities that marked so much of World War II mean heartbreak in various novels — including Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die, about a new couple who have only a short time to experience happiness.

A novel of course doesn’t have to be exceptionally literary to cause a reader to cry. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, about the romance of two teens with major health issues? Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember, featuring a terminally ill teen? Get the tissue boxes ready.

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about Juneteenth, July 4th, and more — is here.