J.R.R. Tolkien

The Return of the Educators

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On the way to Boston this past Friday, May 8, from New Jersey. (Photo by me.) Unsurprisingly, we were behind a car with Massachusetts plates…I think.

My wife Laurel and I were in Boston the past couple days picking up our younger daughter Maria from her first year of college, meaning I didn’t have a lot of time to write. Because of that, I figured I’d rerun a post…and it seemed appropriate to have that literature piece be about educators — whether professors or teachers of younger students. But I’ve done several posts over the years featuring fictional (and actual) educators, so I decided to reference all of them.

In 2023, I discussed real-life authors who also are or were professors.

“And why not?,” I wrote back then. “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.”

I added, “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.”

The living and deceased authors/professors I named in that 2023 post included Jhumpa Lahiri (Barnard College); Toni Morrison (Princeton University, Rutgers University, etc.); Joyce Carol Oates (Princeton, University of California, Berkeley); Jeffrey Eugenides (Princeton, New York University); Zadie Smith (also NYU); Viet Thanh Nguyen (University of Southern California); Junot Diaz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Kent Haruf (Nebraska Wesleyan University); Vladimir Nabokov (Wellesley College, Cornell University); and J.R.R. Tolkien (University of Oxford).

In 2021, 2015, and 2012 posts (the earliest one for The Huffington Post two years before this blog’s 2014 launch), I discussed fictional educators. Many who are as smart, hardworking, and compassionate as some of our favorite real-life teachers we might fondly recall when reading about fictional ones.

Literature’s memorable educators include — among others — Anne Shirley in Anne of Avonlea, the first sequel to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables; Charles Chipping of James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Ricky Braithwaite of E.R. Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel To Sir, With Love; Dan Needham of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany; and Jane Eyre, briefly a teacher in Charlotte Bronte’s novel after that character spent a longer time as a teacher of another sort: being a governess.

Children’s fiction also has some great teachers — with one I mentioned in a previous post being Ms. Frizzle of The Magic School Bus books written by Joanna Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen.

Of course, not all teachers are terrific and/or admirable. In past posts I cited the bumbling Gilderoy Lockhart of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series; the charismatic but fascist-leaning title character in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; the means-well-but-overwhelmed Ida Ramundo of Elsa Morante’s novel History; and the comedic-but-a-bit-irresponsible Aimee Lanthenay of Colette’s Claudine at School.

When previously naming fictional professors, I noted that a number of them are quirky — which obviously can make for interesting reading. I added: “There can be drama in their interactions with students, in their competitive relationships with fellow profs, in their sometimes-fraught encounters with university administrators, in their quests for tenure, and in the whole publish-or-perish thing. All that makes up for the fact they are (usually) not the heroic, adventurous sorts who can make readers turn pages faster than tuition payments drain a bank account.”

Among literature’s other fictional profs are Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty; Gauri Mitra of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland; William Stoner of John Williams’ Stoner; Virginia “Vinnie” Miner and Fred Turner of Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs; Tony Fremont (a woman) of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride; Humphrey Clark of Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady; Grady Tripp of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys; and Godfrey St. Peter of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House.

I asked this before in previous posts on this topic, but you’re welcome to again name some of your favorite fictional educators.

Happy Mother’s Day to my wife Laurel, who is…a professor. 🙂 This photo of her was taken last month in New York City.

Misty the cat says: “My teen human is home from college, so I sleep extra in celebration.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

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

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 discusses my town’s grim school budget and more — is here.

1930s Novels Remind Us of Today

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From The Grapes of Wrath movie. (20th Century Fox/Getty Images.)

After mentioning Daphne du Maurier’s great 1938 novel Rebecca in last week’s post about Gothic fiction, I thought of other books from that decade and how those years were a significant time in literature as well as quite relevant to the 2020s. After all, both decades had/have war, a rise in authoritarianism, major economic problems, and more.

So, I’m going to discuss a number of novels I’ve read, and a few I haven’t, that were published in the 1930s.

One that immediately came to mind is John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrath, which focused on the Joad family but also took a wider look at the impact of The Great Depression bedeviling the U.S (and most of the world) that decade.

Steinbeck also wrote other notable 1930s novels — including Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), and Of Mice and Men (1937) — that reflected social conditions. In Dubious Battle focused on a strike, fitting for a decade when labor flexed its muscles.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is a dystopian Sinclair Lewis novel imagining the rise of fascism in the U.S. — making it almost a primer for current dictator wannabe Donald Trump. (Although Trump is notoriously known for not reading books.)

War? Two of Erich Maria Remarque’s lesser-known novels: The Road Back (1931) and Three Comrades (1936) — have World War I elements. (The Road Back was a sequel of sorts to Remarque’s 1929-published All Quiet on the Western Front.) The American Civil War is a backdrop to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). And Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939) makes a powerful antiwar statement.

The 1930s were also significant writing years for William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying (1930), about a family and its journey to bury their matriarch; Light in August (1932), whose characters include a multiracial (?) drifter; and other works.

Then there was the 1934 publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s perhaps second-best novel, the semi-autobiographical Tender Is the Night.

Three years later, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) featured the memorable experiences of protagonist Janie Crawford.

That decade’s other notable book releases included — to name just a few — Mildred Benson’s The Secret of the Old Clock (1930), the first Nancy Drew mystery; Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), featuring private investigator Sam Spade; Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison (1930), with mystery writer Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey; Pearl S. Buck’s China-set classic The Good Earth (1931); Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic Brave New World (1932); and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932).

Also: James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), set in a mythical paradise; Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936), which was also mentioned in last week’s blog post about Gothic fiction; Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937), starring a fishing captain; J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), the fantasy novel that became the prequel to the 1950s-published The Lord of the Rings trilogy; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling (1938), about a boy and his fawn; Agatha Christie’s mystery And Then There Were None (1939); and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), starring sleuth Philip Marlowe.

While writing this, I remembered that I had done a 2023 piece focusing on novels published in 1937. But the other years in that decade were not included in that post. 🙂

My list of 1930s novels is of course incomplete. Your favorites from that decade, whether mentioned by me or not?

Misty the cat says: “I own all this land, but where did I put the deed?”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

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

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 has a literature theme connected to local news in my town — is here.

Lit With Wit That Might Side-Split

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On March 8, I marked International Women’s Day with a post about memorable women characters in fiction. On March 15, I marked The Ides of March (when Julius Caesar was killed) with a post about memorable murders in fiction. So, what holiday can I mark today? I did an online search, and discovered that March 22 is National Goof Off Day! Meaning I could write a post about some of the funnier novels I’ve read.

But a search showed I wrote a post like that back in this blog’s first year: 2014. Hmm…guess I’ll rerun that piece today (many of you had yet to become readers here 12 years ago). Then, I’ll add some humorous or part-humorous novels I’ve read since 2014 — or read before that but forgot to mention in my previous Obama-era post.

Here’s the 2014 piece, with a new first paragraph and some other editing:

Some novels are quite funny, in a satirical or just plain silly way. They include books that range from mostly comedic to those that are serious and/or dramatic and/or poignant but contain one or more hilarious scenes — such as Ishmael and Queequeg, pre-ship voyage, in the inn bedroom in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

For instance, there’s Charles Dickens’ laugh-out-loud first novel: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which features the fabulously funny Sam Weller. That book launched Dickens into a popularity stratosphere he never left — even as his increasingly ambitious novels were never quite that humorous again. Was Bleak House a jest-fest? Don’t think so.

Colette had a similar career arc, entering the novel-writing realm with the sidesplitting Claudine at School before moving on to weightier (yet still engaging) works. The title character in Colette’s late-career Gigi wouldn’t last a minute in a battle of witticisms with the rambunctious Claudine.

Speaking of first novels, the seriocomic Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has more laughs per square page than any of the six subsequent novels in J.K. Rowling’s series.

Also hilarious is Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, in which the “thing” that hits an incandescent bulb is not a light-dazzled moth.

Then there’s Jeeves in the Offing, or almost any other P.G. Wodehouse novel or story starring the brilliant British valet and his rather clueless “master” Bertie Wooster. Wodehouse could make a shopping list funny.

In a very different milieu, novels don’t get much more amusing (or ribald) than Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. Delightful “southern humor” can also be found in Charles Portis’ Norwood and The Dog of the South, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle novel and Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries, and Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Mixed with the laughs in those books are serious themes such as poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Academia can also be a great source of humor and satire, as evidenced by novels such as Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, and Adam Langer’s Ellington Boulevard.

Returning to older novels, we see Mark Twain mixing strong antiwar satire with goofy humor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Henry Fielding even naming a character “Lady Booby” (for her personality) in his uproarious Joseph Andrews, and Miguel de Cervantes being much funnier than one expects in Don Quixote.

More hilarity? Valancy Stirling dramatically parts with her oppressively conventional mother and other relations in L.M. Montgomery’s moving/inspiring The Blue Castle, but the conversations the newly confident Valancy has with her family are as funny as the funniest sitcom.

Italo Calvino is very droll in his short-story-collection-as-novella Marcovaldo. John Steinbeck, so earnest in The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, will crack you up in Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday. And you don’t need an explanation from me about how dizzyingly comedic are Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Now, as I write in 2026, here are some funny or part-funny (in certain cases darkly so) novels I’ve read since the above 2014 post — or read before that but didn’t mention back then. A number of those books of course have many serious moments, too. Alphabetical by author:

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Frances Burney’s Evelina, Charles Dickinson’s The Widows’ Adventure, Stanley Elkin’s The Rabbi of Lud, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket, Jonas Jonasson’s The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company, Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Voltaire’s Candide, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, to name a few.

And while Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is mostly dead serious, it does have one uproarious scene.

Novels you consider very funny — overall or in part?

Misty the cat says: “Odd that one of those cars looks like a dumpster.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

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

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 close school budget vote, a delayed decision on a huge redevelopment project, a student anti-ICE march, and more; all threaded with a weird Tom Hanks movie theme 🙂 — is here.

Moving from Incompetent to Competent Characters

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Sue Grafton

Last week, I wrote about incompetent characters in literature. So, naturally I’ll write this week about…Valentine’s Day yesterday. Oops, just kidding; I’m going to discuss competent characters in literature.

That can mean smart people, handy people, socially adept people, etc. They might be skilled in many areas, or skilled in some ways and not in others.

Obviously, detectives are among the protagonists who come to mind, although many of them are more competent in their work than in their personal lives. For instance, Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant sleuth with loner and eccentric traits in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and stories. Val McDermid’s Karen Pirie is also highly intelligent and driven in her cold-case work while not being as successful in off-duty life. Sue Grafton’s self-deprecating Kinsey Millhone is a brainy, brave, dogged, and witty private investigator who had two failed marriages, eats too much junk food, etc.

I’m currently working my way through — and loving — the Millhone-starring “alphabet mysteries” (now reading M is for Malice).

Other memorably competent characters? Hermione Granger is as book-smart as they come, and also has plenty of common sense in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Those books’ wizards — including Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall — are obviously quite capable, too, as is another wizard: Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In Stieg Larsson’s trilogy that starts with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, abuse survivor Lisbeth Salander is a determined genius with computers.

Preteen-then-teen Francie Nolan is wise beyond her years — both academically and as a navigator of difficult family dynamics — in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

When one thinks of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre character, competent is one of the first adjectives that comes to mind. Whatever she does — whether being a governess, a teacher, or generally maneuvering through the difficulties of her oft-challenging life — she does well.

Also quite skilled — and with a strong sense of morality — is attorney Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Another classic, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, features a title character (Antonia Shimerda) who’s a very competent farm spouse and parent.

In the sci-fi area, we have protagonists like Mark Watney, who has to be unusually clever and innovative to survive when stranded on Mars in Andy Weir’s The Martian. Twentieth-century Black woman Dana Franklin also has to be really skilled to deal with and survive involuntary time travel to and from the slave-holding American South in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, competent characters in fiction?

Misty the cat says: “This must be one of Norman Rockwell’s larger paintings.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

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

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 congressional candidate’s welcome win and various weird maps — is here.

A Kitty Tries to Be Witty

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“Perhaps I should wake up and write a blog post,” says Misty. (Photo by Maria.)

I, Misty the cat, guest-blog for Dave every two months. I last did this on April 13 and today is June 8, so that’s…hmm…actually not quite two months. Reminds me of when Dave returned some novels to the library five days before their due date, and the indignant book drop expelled said novels with such force that they traveled back in time and landed on the heads of the three Karamazov brothers. Fortunately, each of the books was under 400 pages.

But Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 824-page The Brothers Karamazov is even longer than my average nap, during which I experience “Dreams” more often than Fleetwood Mac did at their 1977 concerts. And Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel might have been the first volume of an even longer work if the Russian author hadn’t died in early 1881. Perhaps a trilogy of sorts — like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (about me nudging my cat-food bowl so that each serving lands in the exact center) and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (about my epic quest to be a male feline version of the Ernestine telephone operator played by Lily Tomlin).

I recommend shopping at Pop Culture R Us for all your celebrity-name-dropping needs.

Speaking of decades-ago entertainment, do you remember the 1978 movie Same Time, Next Year about a married woman and a married man who have a multi-year annual affair? That film partly inspired the long-term romance of Mallory Blessing and Jake McCloud in Elin Hilderbrand’s 2020 novel 28 Summers, which I read last week and found to be a wonderful, poignant book. It’s 422 pages in hardcover, which explains why various other 19th-century Russian fictional characters are donning helmets to avoid concussions. Helmets with stickers saying “Please Don’t Name Your Cat Anna Karenina.”

I’ll add that 28 Summers has an alternate-history element, with Jake’s wife Ursula DeGournsey running for President of the United States in 2020. Reminds me that my aforementioned cat-food bowl is shaped sort of like the Oval Office, and even has a tiny edible desk.

Other novels featuring politicians? Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, Fannie Flagg’s Standing in the Rainbow, and Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, to name a few. When my cat-food bowl was empty for five seconds, you know what I screamed? Yes, I screamed “It can’t happen here!!!”

A century ago, Lewis had quite a run of notable novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929). It Can’t Happen Here was published in 1935, eight decades before my 2015 birth year — which means that in 2025 I’m now…furry.

I’m sometimes asked how I, the kitty Misty, consume literature. Smeared with tasty cat food, of course. But, seriously, I read novels in the traditional print-book format rather than via eBook or audiobook. I guess I’m “old school,” like the 1636-founded Harvard University. I expect only a few members of The Class of 1640 to be at Harvard’s 2040 alumni reunion; they’re the ones who reside with cats, who help humans live longer.

Long-lived humans in literature? The over-2,000-year-old Lazarus Long of five Robert Heinlein novels; Ayesha, who also clocks in at about two millennia in H. Rider Haggard’s She; the 250-year-old High Lama of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon; etc. I assume they had well-funded retirement accounts.

One of the oldest of my fellow cats is Garfield, who has starred in Jim Davis’ 1978-founded comic strip for 47 years! Which reminds me that my next guest blog post will appear in 47 years — minus 46 years and 10 months. So, August 2025. That’s also when my teen human Maria is starting college, which means her bedroom will be…mine!

Dave will reply to any comments because I, Misty the cat, am busy consulting with an interior decorator about changes in Maria’s room (where you see me in the photo atop this post). A kitty can’t have enough scratching posts, treat dispensers, and paintings of hairballs playing poker.

Misty the cat says: “That railing’s shadow means 4,378 more days of spring.”

Dave’s 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 Dave’s book features a talking cat: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about New Jersey’s upcoming primary election and much more — is here.

At This Thematic Stop, We Hop on ‘Pop’

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Alexander McCall Smith. (Photo by Chris Watt.)

Being an accomplished author doesn’t mean that every character she or he creates will “pop.”

Novelists are not machines; they don’t operate at 100% capacity with every word. Also, they might be more interested in certain characters than in other ones, perhaps because some characters have elements that are more quirky, unusual, etc. Authors might even make some characters deliberately boring because some people are boring and it might work for the story. And then of course there’s the matter of villains often having a level of charisma that nicer characters might not possess.

A great way to observe this phenomenon is with a novel featuring an ensemble cast in which no one is really the sole star. Such is 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith, who populates his first-in-a-series 2005 book with residents of an apartment building (located at the Edinburgh address of the title) and with several other people who are friends or co-workers of said residents.

The “fulcrum” of 44 Scotland Street is probably Pat, a 20-year-old woman who opens the novel visiting the titular address in which she’ll soon share a multi-person apartment. But Pat is not that fascinating a person — partly because of her young age and relatively small amount of life experience. On the other hand, 60-something building resident Domenica is quite memorable, as is her 50-something artist friend — soon also Pat’s friend — Angus. Pat’s narcissistic apartment-mate Bruce is more annoying than interesting.

Of course, someone quite young can also be compelling. In McCall Smith’s novel, that would be five-year-old Bertie — a very precocious kid buckling under the pressure of a “helicopter” mom-from-hell forcing him to learn Italian and play a saxophone almost as big as he is.

Now I’ll fit three classics into this theme, although there are of course many other novels that could also be included.

The “hero” of Wilkie Collins’ 1860 mystery/adventure The Woman in White is the brave and devoted Walter Hartright, who has “the right heart” but doesn’t really “pop” into three-dimensionality. The characters who stand out include the deliciously wicked Count Fosco and the resourceful, not conventionally attractive, possibly lesbian (?) Marian Halcombe.

In Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, protagonist Newland Archer is mildly interesting while his fiancee and subsequently wife May Welland is rather bland and conventional. The character who really “pops” is free-spirited bohemian Ellen Olenska — to whom Newland becomes attracted. This is clearly intentional on Wharton’s part as she sets up Newland’s internal struggle between what he wants and his societal “obligations” as a young man from an upper-class family.

Frodo Baggins might be “first among equals” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (published 1954-55). He’s admirable and courageous, but the low-key, earnest hobbit doesn’t “pop” like some other characters such as Frodo’s equally courageous but more spirited and quick-witted “servant” companion Samwise Gamgee and the anguished, part-villainous/part-sympathetic Gollum.

As I’ve written in a couple of past posts, supporting characters can frequently be more interesting than the so-called leads they might bounce off of in novels.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “My wagon flipped, so I’m walking the rest of the way to Mars.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jNRBuJU6YFI

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: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my town’s newly appointed schools superintendent — is here.

‘A Game of Thrones’ vs. ‘The Lord of the Rings’

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It took me a long time to get to it, but I finally read A Game of Thrones after commenters here recommended it.

The first volume of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” epic fantasy series clocks in at nearly 700 large-size, small-print pages. I almost abandoned the novel after a few chapters, because the author kept jumping to so many different characters that it was hard to get absorbed. But I finally did, and found the book really compelling from then on.

Rather than write a straightforward review of A Game of Thrones — which, along with its sequels, inspired the hit TV series — I thought I’d compare it to the other epic fantasy tour de force read by many people (like me) who usually don’t read fantasy. I’m of course referring to J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, and its prequel The Hobbit.

Overall, Tolkien’s wonderful classic is more of a page-turner — the storytelling is mostly linear, and the quest to destroy that titular ring is riveting. Martin’s most noticeable plot line — various families striving for power — is also exciting but a bit more diffuse. Yet A Game of Thrones (I haven’t read the sequels) surpasses The Lord of the Rings in certain ways.

Both epics have great writing, memorable characters, and excellent humor (though Tolkien is somewhat funnier — at least in The Hobbit). Each also features all kinds of death and war, but Martin’s depiction of violence is much more graphic and realistic. Perhaps partly a product of our current time.

Martin expertly juggles a somewhat larger cast of principal players, and, to his credit, has far more female protagonists in major roles. That might also be partly a product of a later era, but, heck, plenty of novels in Tolkien’s heyday had prominent female characters.

Perhaps most importantly, Martin’s characters are more three-dimensional than the vast majority of those in Tolkien’s cast. Few of the Game of Thrones denizens are all good or all bad — and that kind of moral ambiguity makes things very interesting.

Another interesting difference between the Martin and Tolkien works is that A Game of Thrones is mostly populated by humans, while The Lord of the Rings features a variety of bipeds: humans, hobbits, wizards, elves, orcs, etc.

Also, both series are set in long-ago, pre-modern-technology times. Martin does a better job of depicting the squalor and difficulties of living in such an era; things are more sanitized in The Lord of the Rings.

Will I read more of “A Song of Ice and Fire”? Not sure. A Game of Thrones was a large investment of time (about two weeks), and I’m not a fantasy buff. But I might. The novel ended on a very intriguing note, and I’m curious about what will happen to such characters as Daenerys Targaryen, the timid teen girl who turns into a ruthless dynamo; Arya Stark, the resourceful “tomboy”; Jon Snow, the outcast “bastard” son who makes something of his life; Joffrey Baratheon, the appalling young prince-turned-king; and Tyrion Lannister, the witty/crafty dwarf with perhaps the biggest personality in the book. (Tyrion, as played by Peter Dinklage in the HBO series, is pictured above.)

If you’ve read them, any thoughts on George R.R. Martin’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous creations? (For those counting, that’s four “R” initials you just saw. 🙂 ) What other fantasy works have you enjoyed?

My 2017 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 award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about climate change, a Board of Education resignation, and a school stairway collapse — is here.