A petrifying poltergeist protagonist. (Getty Images.)

Halloween is still six weeks away, but I wanted to discuss novels and short stories that include ghosts (after having written somewhat-similar posts in 2016 and 2021).

Why? I recently finished Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket, and while that compulsively readable 2022 novel includes many compelling characters and plot lines, the highlight might be the presence of a 1922-murdered ghost still floating around the book’s Massachusetts hotel in the 2020s. That specter is 19-year-old Grace Hadley, who is bitter, funny, mischievous, and good-hearted. She keeps up on 21st-century trends, too.

A brief interlude: Three more wonderful reviews of my Misty the Cat…Unleashed book have appeared! 🙂 Author/blogger Carolyn Haynes wrote one of them on September 8, “Purrs of Wisdom” blogger Ingrid King wrote another last month that I saw belatedly, and Geri Rombach wrote still another review for the current issue of Pet Scene magazine. Links near the end of this post. Thank you very much, Carolyn, Ingrid, and Geri! 🙂

Late last year, I read George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo — populated almost exclusively by ghosts stuck in purgatory, including President Lincoln’s recently deceased son Willie. An odd novel that’s not exactly a page-turner, but haunting.

Also a ghost of sorts hovering between life and death is Nora Seed of Matt Haig’s intriguing The Midnight Library, which I read in 2022. While in the cosmic library of the novel’s title, Nora experiences various personal timelines that might have been.

I read Toni Morrison’s famed modern classic Beloved a number of years ago, but somehow neglected to include it in my aforementioned 2016 and 2021 posts. The formerly enslaved Sethe believes there is a spirit named Beloved who is the deceased daughter she killed to prevent her from becoming a slave.

Novels and stories with ghosts mentioned in my 2016 and 2021 posts include — among others — Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (whose supernatural characters include the hilarious Peeves the Poltergeist), Edith Wharton’s many excellent ghost stories, Oscar Wilde’s humorous tale “The Canterville Ghost,” Graham Greene’s short shocker “Proof Positive,” and Dickens’ story “The Signal-Man.”

Ghosts in literature definitely give authors a chance to use their imagination, scare their readers, create dark humor, and more.

Any fiction with ghosts you’d like to discuss? And I should mention that ghosts rhyme with (blog) posts. 🙂

Carolyn Haynes’ review of Misty the Cat…Unleashed: 🙂

Ingrid King’s review: 🙂

Geri Rombach’s review: 🙂 It appears on page 35.

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which includes a weird take on a valuable baseball card, a welcome change in gas station ownership, a too-big townhouse proposal, and more — is here.

The career trajectories of novelists can be very different — depending on how many good ideas are in their brains, how prolific these writers are, their health, their lifespans, sales, critical acceptance, whether the authors do series or stand-alone books or both, etc.

A brief interlude to say that Rebecca Budd — the wonderfully skilled Canadian podcaster and blogger who often comments here and who many of you know — interviewed me about my 2024 Misty the Cat…Unleashed book. You can click on the link near the end of this blog post to listen to the conversation.

Back to this week’s trajectories theme…

There are of course “one-hit wonders” — with a single published novel during an author’s lifetime — such as Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights), Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), and (if one considers Go Set a Watchman an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird) Harper Lee.

Then there are authors whose first or first few books are excellent and/or very successful before things either level off or go somewhat downhill. For instance, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s and Joseph Heller’s best books were their debut novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Catch-22, respectively.

Conversely, there are authors who start with so-so (at best) novelistic efforts and then quickly or more gradually hit their masterful strides. Examples of wordsmiths who took the fast-improvement route after mediocre debut books include Edith Wharton and Jack London (never thought I’d put those two in the same sentence 🙂 ). Those who did a slower build include Cormac McCarthy and Rosamunde Pilcher; actually, it wasn’t until she was in her 60s and had written more than 20 novels that Pilcher made a spectacular leap from good to great with The Shell Seekers.

Fyodor Dostoevsky started good (Poor Folk) and ended spectacularly (The Brothers Karamazov), with the amazing Crime and Punishment written in mid-career. George Orwell’s authorial career concluded with his two best novels: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of course, Dostoevsky and Orwell died before becoming “senior citizens,” so they might have penned some lesser works if they had lived longer.

Authors who started strong, continued strong through mid-career, and then did less well or didn’t publish as much in their later years? Mark Twain is among those who come to mind.

I’m leaving out some “categories,” but I’ll end by mentioning a number of authors who started out fairly or very strong and then sustained or are continuing to sustain that skill level for virtually their entire careers. Charles Dickens and George Eliot are past novelists among that group.

Living writers who’ve been churning out one excellent novel after another for decades include — among various others — Joy Fielding, Kristin Hannah, Barbara Kingsolver, Walter Mosley, Outlander series author Diana Gabaldon, and Jack Reacher series author Lee Child (who is gradually turning over his thriller franchise to younger brother Andrew).

If anything, several of the authors listed in my previous paragraph are doing some of their best work during the past few years. For instance, the 1955-born Kingsolver’s latest book (Demon Copperhead) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and her previous novel (2018’s Unsheltered) was terrific. I haven’t yet read the 1960-born Hannah’s latest novel (The Women) but her three releases before that (2021’s The Four Winds, 2018’s The Great Alone, and 2015’s The Nightingale) were among her very best. And the 1945-born Fielding hit home runs with Cul-de-sac (2021) and The Housekeeper (2022). I just read The Housekeeper, about a too-good-to-be-true aide who moves into the home of a gravely ill woman, and it’s a top-notch suspense thriller with a couple of knock-out surprises.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Rebecca Budd’s podcast: 🙂

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

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 the start of the school year and another too-pricey new residential building in my town — is here.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. (Photo: Google Arts & Culture.)

Museums are interesting places, educational places, entertaining places, sometimes mysterious places, and sometimes intimidating places, so why not include them in some fiction?

I just read Metropolitan Stories, a group-of-short-tales-as-novel set in New York City’s renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the intriguing wrinkles in Christine Coulson’s 2019 book are the presence of some ghosts and the fact that paintings and sculpture in the Met’s massive collection can experience emotions, have memories, etc. There’s even a chapter that would have worked as a Twilight Zone episode. But Coulson also focuses on various flesh-and-blood museum staffers — some rather eccentric.

Also set at the Met is The Goldfinch, at least in the first part of Donna Tartt’s novel — when a tragic gallery bombing gets the sprawling, dynamic plot rolling. The 2013 book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The American Museum of Natural History in NYC is the setting for The Night at the Museum. While I haven’t read Milan Trenc’s 1993 children’s book, I did see the popular 2006 movie version in which we got to visualize the museum’s exhibits come to life after sunset. I think some of us have fantasized about that. 🙂

Getting out of NYC, among the Chicago locations where the two protagonists in Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife find themselves are the Art Institute and the Field Museum. Being in places like that can telegraph things like a character’s education level and cultural awareness.

But not always. The working-class members of the wedding party in Emile Zola’s 1877 novel The Drinking Den feel out of place when they roam The Louvre in Paris, though of course there are plenty of working-class people who are avid museum-goers.

The Louvre is more prominent in Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code; for instance, that museum is where a certain curator (who’s also a leader of a secret society) meets his fate.

I know there are various other novels with at least partial museum settings. Any you’d like to name? Any thoughts on this topic?

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

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 restaurants and other places no longer in my town, and the sad demise of a 250-year-old tree after a recent storm — is here.

From the 1988 movie version of The Milagro Beanfield War novel.

When I read The Milagro Beanfield War last week, I thought about several things: the socially conscious and frequently comedic nature of John Nichols’ impressive 1974 novel, the skill in which he depicted his quirky/decidedly un-affluent characters, the book’s great sense of place, the wordy novel being longer than it needed to be (it could have lost about 100 of its 445 small-print pages), the unfortunate fates of too many animals in the book, and…”cultural appropriation.”

That’s because Nichols was a white “Anglo” author writing about a (fictional) New Mexican rural community in which most of the residents are Hispanic.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. Obviously, Hispanic writers writing about Hispanic characters and culture is often the ideal; I’m certainly a big fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. Same for Black writers writing about Black characters and culture — whether the compelling storyteller is Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Buchi Emecheta, Terry McMillan, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Walter Mosley, Wole Soyinka, or Chinua Achebe…etc. (At least a couple of these authors are biracial.)

But skilled white writers can — though of course not always — make the imaginative leap into the psyches of characters with different ethnic and racial backgrounds, just as skilled writers of color can do the opposite. The same for women writing about men and vice versa. It takes care, sensitivity, some lived experience, research, a thirst for not stereotyping, and more. (It helped that the California-born John Nichols lived in Spain and Guatemala, among other places, and then moved to New Mexico — where he remained for more than 50 years.)

John Steinbeck was another white writer pretty adept at depicting Hispanic culture — mostly notably in the at-times-quite-comic Tortilla Flat, but in other novels, too. He also did a darn good job with the Chinese-American character Lee in East of Eden.

Which reminds me that contemporary Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen created some believable white characters amid the indelible Vietnamese characters in The Sympathizer and The Committed.

While Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of the title character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin has drawn very mixed reactions the past 172 years (I don’t think Tom was as stereotypical as some say), there’s little to criticize about Stowe’s excellent treatment of the prominent Black characters Eliza and George in her famous 1852 anti-slavery novel.

On the flip side, the biracial French author Alexandre Dumas created scintillating portrayals of white characters in The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and various other works — while also doing a great job with his one novel (Georges) starring a Black protagonist.

I’ll add that white author John Grisham is very adroit at giving his readers three-dimensional Black protagonists in novels such as The Racketeer and The Judge’s List.

And the aforementioned James Baldwin expertly depicted the all-white cast of characters in Giovanni’s Room, one of the earlier novels with a gay theme.

Your thoughts about this topic?

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

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 topics such as my local library temporarily closing after its aged air-conditioning failed — is here.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. (Reuters photo.)

With the August 19-22 Democratic National Convention starting tomorrow, there’s a memorable duo atop the party’s 2024 ticket: presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her vice presidential running mate Tim Walz. Harris is of course the current veep who’d be the first female commander-in-chief in U.S. history (as well as the second person of color ever to lead the country) and Walz is a populist with “everyman” charisma and a record of getting people-friendly policies passed as governor of Minnesota.

There have also been many memorable duos in literature — whether they’re friends, work partners, or in other human configurations. (I’m mostly omitting lovers, spouses, siblings, and the like from this post because I’ve focused on those kinds of characters before.) It can be fascinating to see how each member of a fictional duo interacts with the other, whether the two people are somewhat alike or “odd couple” different, whether the whole of the pairing is greater than the sum of its parts, etc.

Duos that immediately came to my mind include teen Huck Finn and runaway slave Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trying-to-save-their-world hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, spacey Don Quixote and his more practical sidekick Sancho Panza in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, 19th-century friends Eliza Sommers (a traveler to the U.S. from Chile) and Tao Chi’en (a cook and physician) in Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, farm woman Dellarobia Turnbow and professor/scientist Ovid Byron in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, pals-from-childhood Tully Hart (a TV journalist) and Kate Mularkey (a stay-at-home mom) in Kristin Hannah’s Firefly Lane, and the two Superman-creator-like cartoonists in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to name a few.

Of course, there are also plenty of dynamic duos in mystery/detective/thriller fiction. Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott of J.K. Rowling’s crime novels (written under the alias Robert Galbraith), Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey of various Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries, Joe King Oliver and Melquarth Frost of two Walter Mosley mysteries, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (first book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings, and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Frances Neagley, among others.

In addition, I’ve enjoyed human/animal duos such as Ayla and the horse Whinney in Jean M. Auel’s prehistoric book series that begins with The Clan of the Cave Bear, and Link Ferris and the collie Chum in Albert Payson Terhune’s His Dog, to cite just two pairings.

There’s also Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But they’re actually one person, so that doesn’t quite count. 🙂

I’ll conclude by mentioning one quite nasty real-life duo: Kamala Harris’ and Tim Walz’s Republican presidential and vice presidential opponents Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde. Oops…Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

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 yet another lawsuit in my town and more — is here.

An animal writing about books without a book in sight? “Sue me,” says Misty the cat. (Photo by teen human Maria.)

Hi! Misty the cat here returning for one of my periodic guest blog posts, after I filed a lawsuit against the English language for not spelling periodic “purriodic.” A legal action that promises to last even longer than the endless case in Bleak House by Charles Dickens, who also wrote The Cricket on the Hearth until I chased away that cricket. Second edition: The Cricket No Longer on the Hearth.

Anyway, my blog theme will be novels told from an unusual point of view, and I don’t mean narrating an audiobook from atop the Empire State Building. Today’s topic (along with some novelistic examples of it) was suggested by Robert Berardi, a teacher/artist/songwriter who reads this blog each week — whether the posts are written by Dave, Misty the cat (me), or a bunch of elephants slapping their trunks against a computer keyboard.

One example of a book that unspools from an unusual angle is Dave’s part-fictional Misty the Cat…Unleashed, the 2024-published work told from a feline point of view (mine). Most books aren’t in the “voice” of animals, for the simple reason that animals have trouble obtaining ISBN numbers.

Then there are novels told from a doggy perspective. (Wait…not “purrspective”? Another lawsuit coming.) Prominent examples include The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London, an author who got into the canine mindset by observing Snoopy in the 1950-launched “Peanuts” comic strip. Wait…you’re saying London died in 1916 and thus couldn’t be aware of Snoopy? Nyah-nyah, I have my paws over my ears and can’t hear you.

I’ll also mention Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself in a desperate plight: the “y” is missing from the end of his first name. (I, Misty, don’t have that problem.) Actually, Gregor-not-Gregory wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect and proceeds to express his understandably depressed thoughts about that situation. The huge spiders in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series have a different back story.

Other novels told through a critter lens include Richard Adams’ Watership Down, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, to name a few.

Of course literature’s animals are often at least partly anthropomorphized, which is defined as…a word too challenging for me, Misty the cat, to have any idea what it means. Actually, anthropomorphized means the critters have some human traits and emotions, according to Dave, who didn’t tell me that until I untied him. Why did I tie him up in the first place? How do you think I got to do today’s blog post?

Just kidding. Dave is happy that I sub for him once in a while. He suggested I do so every few months; I suggested I do so every few weeks. We compromised on every few weeks. Quite fair, no?

Novels told from an unusual point of view can obviously also star humans. Take Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones…on second thought, don’t take it…borrow it from a library instead…or buy it at a bookstore…or order it online…or find camp counselors who read it out loud alongside a roaring fire…while toasting s’mores…and flicking ashes off their clothes…and wondering why they mistook toothpaste for sunscreen…and also wondering why the small, placid lake at the camp contains a ravenous 500-foot-long shark. Anyway, The Lovely Bones has an unusual, emotionally wrenching point of view because we experience things through the eyes of a teen girl AFTER she is murdered.

Heck, some novels even contain storytelling by inanimate objects! Are those objects catnip-filled? Rarely. That’s a problem.

Your thoughts on today’s topic? Examples of today’s topic? Do you have any cat treats for me, even if those tasty morsels are off-topic?

The very talented authors/bloggers/etc. Robbie Cheadle and D.L. Finn recently posted wonderful reviews of Misty the Cat…Unleashed. The latter post also includes reviews of books by four other authors, all excellent. Links below. Thanks so much, Robbie and Denise!

https://robbiesinspiration.wordpress.com/2024/08/07/robbies-inspiration-book-review-misty-the-cat-unleashed-the-spirited-adventures-and-amusing-antics-of-an-asthmatic-feline-on-the-loose-by-dave-astor-humour-bookreview/

https://dlfinnauthor.com/2024/08/06/93871/

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

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 — containing my odd take on delayed tax bills — is here.

Whale sighting! (Photo by me.)

While vacationing in Massachusetts last week, my family and I visited Provincetown on August 1 to go whale-watching. We saw…whales…and I also saw the possibility of writing a blog post about an author who had a strong association with those mighty aquatic mammals.

That author of course is Herman Melville, who sailed the sea quite a bit as a young man before starting to write novels — some semi-autobiographical. He began as basically an adventure writer before getting much deeper with his fiction, even as his prose was rich yet readable from the start.

Oddly, Melville’s 1846 debut novel Typee — a partly fictional chronicle of his time in Polynesia — would be his best-selling work during his lifetime. It was followed by the pretty similar Omoo (1847) before Melville started to write in a more challenging way with Mardi. That 1849 novel had its moments, philosophical and otherwise, but overall was on the boring side.

Then came Redburn (also 1849) and White-Jacket (1850), two very good but not great sea sagas.

A ship in Provincetown. (Photo by me.)

The 1819-born Melville’s creative breakthrough was Moby-Dick (1851), about another epic sea voyage — this time loaded with symbolic/allegorical elements. That, along with the book’s scintillating writing and ultra-memorable characters, made for what is now considered one of the great American novels. But Moby-Dick sold poorly when published and was also unpopular with many critics — only becoming truly famous and appreciated decades after Melville’s 1891 death.

That was around the time of the posthumous 1924 publication of Melville’s final novel, the excellent Billy Budd.

At least Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne liked Moby-Dick, published a year after Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter — which received a much better contemporary response from readers and critics.

Melville’s bitterness over Moby-Dick‘s unenthusiastic reception was quite obvious in his 1852 novel Pierre, a land-set book (no ocean voyage) whose cast of characters includes…a bitter writer. That and the strong hints of incest in the story resulted in another sales and critical disaster for Melville, whose writing career mostly tanked at that point. Interestingly, many modern-day readers (including myself) find Pierre really compelling and way ahead of its time.

I haven’t read Melville’s novels Israel Potter (1855) or The Confidence Man (1857).

With proceeds from his writing scarce, a very unhappy Melville worked as a customs inspector in New York City from 1866 to 1885, while doing some (not exactly stellar) poetry on the side. In that inspector job, the author was known as a rare honest man in a corrupt institution.

I should also mention Melville’s 17 short stories. “I and My Chimney” is an example of how the writer was very funny when he wanted to be — as is also the case with his inn bedroom scene featuring Ishmael and harpooner Queequeg in the early land-based section of Moby-Dick.

There’s also “Benito Cereno,” a riveting sea tale (of almost novella length) about a slave revolt. Melville was rare among 19th-century authors in portraying characters of color (including the above-mentioned Queequeg) somewhat three-dimensionally.

(Speaking of Moby-Dick characters, first mate Starbuck inspired the name of a certain coffee chain.)

Perhaps Melville’s most memorable short story is the mesmerizing “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are few tales like it.

As I’ve mentioned before, nearly 20 years ago I visited the Pittsfield, Mass., house where Melville lived from 1850 to 1863. The window above the desk on which the author finished writing Moby-Dick has a view of a mountain that’s shaped sort of like a whale.

Any thoughts on this post, Herman Melville, and/or his writing?

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about an affordable-housing discussion and more — is here.

Credit: Sphere/David Levenson/Getty

In 2017, I wrote a post titled “Perceiving the Personal in the Pages We Peruse.” That piece was about how some novels we read remind us strongly of events, places, and other things in our present or past lives. Now, after lengthy penance for using too much alliteration in that post’s title, I’m back with another reminder-themed piece — this time featuring novels I’ve read during the past seven years or, if I read them earlier, hadn’t mentioned in that earlier post.

One relevant novel, which I finished last week, is Val McDermid’s 1979 — a compelling crime thriller starring a young female newspaper reporter in Scotland. I was a young male newspaper reporter in the U.S. around that time, so my experiences were obviously different, but I certainly recognized the McDermid-depicted newsroom back then that was filled with typewriters instead of computers, copy-editing done on paper, journalists smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot, unfortunately rampant sexism, and more.

It was that same year of 1979 when I visited Rome, and one of the sights I saw was The Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. Memories of that came back when I recently read Irving Stone’s historical novel The Agony and the Ecstasy about the life of Michelangelo — who famously painted that iconic chapel’s ceiling.

I was living in New York City back then (from 1978 to 1993), and worked in NYC (from 1978 to 2008), so of course novels set in The Big Apple evoke personal memories of Manhattan and other boroughs — even if the books were set before my lifetime. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel Gone Tomorrow, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Pete Hamill’s Forever, Adam Langer’s Ellington Boulevard, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, etc.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay had the double familiarity for me of starring cartoonists, which reminded me of when I covered those creators for a magazine. I had even met some of the real-life cartoonists Michael Chabon mentioned in passing — among them the friendly and masterful “Terry and the Pirates”/”Steve Canyon” comic strip creator Milton Caniff (1907-1988).

Now I live in Montclair — a New Jersey suburb big enough and interesting enough to occasional pop up in novels, including Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. The character from Montclair wasn’t super-appealing, and the Swiss author didn’t really capture the feel of my burg, but…

Modern-day Paris? One of the novels that got my recollections rolling was Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris, published two years after my last visit (in 2018) to The City of Light.

Whenever I read a novel (such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things) in which police behave badly, I think of my much-more-minor experiences of being profiled by law enforcement. (My hair used to be longer than it is now.) One time, while working as a reporter, I drove into the parking lot of my newspaper’s office. A police car pulled in behind me, lights flashing, after which the officer approached my car window and asked rather menacingly what I was doing there. I took out my press card, and enjoyed seeing the policeman’s embarrassment. One of my “beats” was covering that officer’s department. 🙂

Novels that have sparked personal memories for you?

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work “Misty the Cat…Unleashed” — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about an upcoming township manager search and more — is here.

Photos courtesy of Sony; Nina Subin

I’ve written before about the unexpected in literature, but I’m going to take a partly different angle this time. It involves readers’ expectations of certain authors and novels, and how those readers can be surprised.

For instance, as I prepared to read Elin Hilderbrand for the first time last week, I expected her to be an (excellent) escapist writer. Heck, her fiction is often set on the idyllic (?) island vacation destination of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and a blurb on the back of the Summer of ’69 novel I chose said “Hilderbrand’s books are…perfect beach reads.”

Well, Summer of ’69 was certainly entertaining (and excellent), but hardly 100% escapist as it focused on a multi-generational family. There were various plot strands referencing racism, sexism, class divisions, adultery, suicide, the Vietnam War, etc. I’m glad all that was there — it made the novel more compelling — but those things weren’t on my Hilderbrand bingo card. Obviously, I hadn’t done enough pre-reading homework!

Another example of a novel that surprised me was from the summer of ’61 — 1861, that is, though I don’t know if Silas Marner was published in the summer. I opened the pages of George Eliot’s classic a decade or so ago with the expectation that it would be a dry work that many students famously disliked when it was assigned to them in high school. But it turned out to be a poignant, heartbreaking, heartwarming novel about a man who goes through some life-changing tragedies and triumphs. I loved it.

Going back another two centuries-plus, I thought Don Quixote would be entertaining but perhaps, because of its 1605-1615 publication period, not super-readable for modern eyes. But Miguel de Cervantes’ novel WAS super-readable in the 21st century.

Yes, some long-ago books are much more enjoyable than one might expect. Among those that come to mind are Voltaire’s Candide, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and Fanny Burney’s Evelina — all written in the 18th century.

Getting more recent again, a John Steinbeck reader who starts with The Grapes of Wrath might not be ready for just how humorous that author can be when he puts his mind to it. I had no idea how much I would laugh when I polished off Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday (even as those novels also contained plenty of social commentary). Then, Steinbeck’s epic East of Eden wiped the smile off my face.

Not much humor, either, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but that novel surprised me. I thought it would be an earnest anti-slavery work that was sort of an obligation to read. But the story line is quite skillful and compelling, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s title character is a more nuanced, more admirable person than what some critics have stereotyped him as.

Another 19th-century novel — by Stowe’s Hartford, Connecticut, neighbor Mark Twain — surprised me in being almost completely serious. That was Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which also had the unusual distinction for the usually humorous or seriocomic author of featuring a female title character.

J.K. Rowling turned heads, too, when writing the deadly serious, non-wizard novel The Casual Vacancy after her blockbuster Harry Potter series that had plenty of humor amid the intense drama. Surprising, yes, but not a surprise for me and other readers who saw all kinds of reviews of, and articles about, The Casual Vacancy before reading that change-of-pace novel.

Yes, doing some homework about a novel or an author can prevent surprises, but then we might lose the fun of being startled. 🙂

Novels and authors you’ve read that were different than you expected?

My comedic new 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

The 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

Today is the exact 10th anniversary of this weekly literature blog! To mark that birthday, below is a rerun of my very first post here on July 14, 2014:

Some real-life servants are treated badly by their rich employers, but many fictional servants are treated nicely by their authors. A small, wish-fulfilling solace for readers in this time of soaring economic inequality.

Literature’s servants and other “hired help” are often smarter, funnier, and more compassionate than their “betters.” Perhaps that’s partly because they have to work hard for a living, while some of the wealthy get their money the old-fashioned way — inheriting it. Ah yes, the merit system…

Servants in literature also help us judge their masters. You can tell a lot about an affluent person’s decency (or lack of) by how they treat their so-called “inferiors.”

Some stand-out servants in fiction? Jeeves, of course, in the engaging and hilarious works of P.G. Wodehouse. That valet is incredibly bright and well-spoken, and helps his congenial but somewhat dim “master” Bertie Wooster out of many a scrape.

Another famous servant character is Nelly Dean, who’s the pragmatic voice of reason in a Wuthering Heights novel filled with hyper-passionate and/or weak-minded people. Nelly grounds Emily Bronte’s superb book, and helps make the hard-to-believe events in it seem believable. Of course, another servant in that novel is boorish religious fanatic Joseph, but we won’t talk about him… 🙂

Nineteenth-century English literature also offers us Nanny from the longish short story “The Sad Fortunes of Reverend Amos Barton” in the Scenes of Clerical Life collection George Eliot wrote before embarking on her astonishing career as a novelist. Nanny is the servant who memorably denounces a freeloading countess who overstays her welcome in the Bartons’ struggling household and even endangers the health of Amos’ kindhearted wife Milly.

How about Lee in John Steinbeck’s gripping East of Eden? That servant is an intellectual guy who cleverly deals with anti-Asian prejudice in the American West of the late 1800s/early 1900s and serves as a surrogate father to the Trask sons when biological father Adam is traumatized by a disastrous marriage.

Then there are the underlings/sidekicks such as Sancho Panza in Miguel Cervantes’ iconic Don Quixote and Samwise Gamgee in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In the former book, squire Sancho is a humorous/competent companion to the less-than-practical Quixote. In the latter work, gardener Samwise becomes an invaluable friend to Frodo Baggins — who, while admirable and brave, would have been in dire straits without Sam’s help during the Tolkien trilogy’s epic quest.

Speaking of funny characters, and characters named Sam, it’s hard to beat Sam Weller of Charles Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club when it comes to literature’s all-time underlings.

There’s also Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in which loyal butler Stevens comes to regret a major missed opportunity in his life.

Last but by no means least, we can’t forget the many fictional African-American characters forced into servant work or outright slavery — whether it be in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Alex Haley’s Roots, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and many other novels. “Uncle Tom” became a derogatory term, but Tom in the book is quite courageous in his turn-the-other-cheek way — and is clearly the moral center of Stowe’s story.

James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Rita Mae Brown’s Murder at Monticello are among the numerous other novels that have interesting references to the horrific institution of slavery — the ultimate servanthood.

What are your favorite literary works featuring servants, butlers, maids, valets, and others of that station in life?

My comedic new 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

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 local U.S. congresswoman rightly calling for President Biden not to seek reelection, retaliation against employees who filed lawsuits, and various other topics — is here.