Now that the 10th-anniversary year of this blog has come and gone, I want to offer my VERY grateful thanks to all visitors and commenters. I love the conversations! 🙂
Last year, 2024, saw “Dave Astor on Literature” get by far its most annual views (56,862) and visitors (39,689). Also, the 52 posts (one every Sunday!) elicited 5,702 comments — averaging about 110 a week.
The “lucky 13” posts with the most comments last year:
1. “Faking a Look at a Presidential Book,” November 10, 185 comments.
2. “When Genres Are Happy Together,” November 24, 179 comments.
3. “Batman and Robin Aren’t the Only Dynamic Duo,” August 18, 167 comments.
4. “Expecting an A, Getting a B,” September 29, 150 comments.
5, “Gaslighting, Gaza, and Genocide,” May 5, 145 comments.
6. “Book Titles Get a New Look Thanks to Trump the Crook,” June 2, 140 comments.
7. “Misty the Cat…Unleashed Is Unleashed into the Book World,” June 16, 139 comments.
8. “Prose and Politics,” March 24, 137 comments.
9. “The Art of the Con,” March 17, 134 comments.
10. “Reading Painful Novels Can Be Worth the Pain,” January 14, 129 comments.
11. “From Russia With…Courage,” February 18, 127 comments.
12. “More Than One Ghost in This Post,” September 14, 124 comments.
13. “The Art of Depicting Large Families in Novels,” May 12, 123 comments.
My most-read post of 2024 was actually one I published in 2018: “Strong Female Characters in 19th-Century Fiction.” Not only the most-read piece in 2018 but in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, too. Keeps popping up in online searches, I guess. 🙂
The countries that accounted for the most views of my blog in 2024? See the statistical image below. Readership came from 182 of the world’s 195 countries!
One final number: I read 54 novels last year.
Thank you all again! And back to actually discussing literature next week. 🙂
Misty the cat says: “Marcel Proust wrote In Search of Lost Car.”
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 calls for a cursing councilor to resign, and more — is here.
Misty the cat thinks these books have a BACK story. (Photo by me.)
It’s early winter in part of the world, so thoughts turn to novels with…the word “Winter” in the title. Okay, maybe most readers’ thoughts don’t turn to that, but I needed a blog topic this week. 🙂
I just finished reading Winter Street, the first of a four-book Elin Hilderbrand series that continues with Winter Stroll, Winter Storms, and Winter Solstice. The mostly Nantucket, Massachusetts-set Winter Street focuses on the Quinn family as it goes through a dramatic Christmas week that includes a marital separation, other relationship issues, an engagement, no word from a son fighting in Afghanistan, another son facing an insider-trading charge, etc. Yes, Christmas time is not always a 100% happy time. The book obviously deals with some heavy issues, yet often retains a light touch.
Another accomplished contemporary author, Kristin Hannah, wrote Winter Garden. Not on the level of her best novels such as The Nightingale, The Great Alone, The Four Winds, and Firefly Lane, but still pretty good. Winter Garden is about two very different sisters and their cold, mysterious mother — who’s originally from snowy Russia during the period of Stalin’s iron rule.
The late Rosamunde Pilcher’s final novel, Winter Solstice, is I think the second best of her many books — behind only her terrific The Shell Seekers. Winter Solstice (published before Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name) unfolds amid a cold-weather gathering of people from various generations.
Of course, there’s John Steinbeck’s also-final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, which has the overarching theme of trying to maintain integrity in a corrupt society. It’s one of Steinbeck’s deeper books, though not as compelling as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.
Among the “Winter”-titled novels I haven’t read are Isabel Allende’s In the Midst of Winter and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter (part of The Little House on the Prairie series). I should also mention George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter — the lengthy, long-delayed, not-yet-finished sixth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series that started with A Game of Thrones.
Then there are plays such as Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter.
Any thoughts about, and/or examples of, this theme?
On yet another rainy winter morning, Misty the cat says: “I’d build an ark, but the lumber yard’s closed.”
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 discusses an “F-bomb” controversy and much more via a poem co-starring Santa Claus — is here.
J.K. Rowling with the screen versions of her Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Cormoran Strike, and Robin Ellacott characters (Everett/Getty/BBC).
It’s impressive enough when a novelist creates one successful series — as, say, Lee Child did with his Jack Reacher books and Sue Grafton did with her alphabet mysteries. But an author who creates two or more successful series? Wow!
Some writers produce multiple series consecutively — finishing one series before starting another. Other writers tack back and forth between different series. Either way, it takes some impressive and wide-ranging creative talent, and helps “serial” novelists stay fresh. Those authors can also feel good about readers staying with them as they offer something new.
Among the queens and kings of multiple series is J.K. Rowling. She of course penned the seven mega-popular Harry Potter books. Then, after writing The Casual Vacancy standalone novel, Rowling as “Robert Galbraith” launched her crime series starring private investigators Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. I’m currently close to finishing the seventh installment — The Running Grave, in which Robin goes undercover to infiltrate a very problematic cult — and its 945 pages are full of the thrills, humor, suspense, poignancy, complications, excellent prose, and believable dialog Rowling always provides.
Walter Mosley is best-known for his detective series starring Easy Rawlins, who has now starred in 16 novels. But the author has interspersed those books with smaller series such as the King Oliver books and the Socrates Fortlow books. Mosley is always a great read, no matter who the protagonist is.
Val McDermid has gone the several-series route, too, including a compelling saga starring inspector Karen Pirie and another featuring journalist Allie Burns. Also not a clunker in the installments I’ve read.
Leaving contemporary fiction for a minute, L.M. Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables and its many sequels while also penning the semi-autobiographical Emily trilogy. (I consider a trilogy to be a series of sorts.)
Returning to a living author, Diana Gabaldon has gone the “sub-series” route by writing nine main Outlander novels (so far) and a number of offshoot books starring the Lord John character who’s a supporting player in the main novels.
Your thoughts about, and examples of, this theme?
Misty the cat says: “Snow means ‘Middlemarch’ author George Eliot wrote ‘Middledecember,’ too.”
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 discusses what’s happening with my town’s animal shelter and much more — is here.
After Brian Thompson was shot and killed in New York City this month, millions of Americans from all parts of the ideological spectrum flooded social media to express little sympathy for him. That’s because he was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the massive company known for denying a huge number of legitimate medical-insurance claims in order to maximize its profits.
The result of those denials? Anguish for millions of patients and death for thousands of patients who (either individually or via employer plans) pay large monthly premiums for medical coverage — even as residents of every other developed country enjoy some form of much-more-humane national health insurance. And doctors with years of medical training and experience get their requests for needed tests and treatment for their patients denied by insurance bureaucrats with little or no medical expertise.
Meanwhile, Thompson — who was specifically targeted for assassination (the arrested suspect is Luigi Mangione) — raked in yearly compensation of $10.2 million.
Obviously, murder shouldn’t be celebrated, and this was an awful tragedy for Thompson and his family. But he and other execs at UnitedHealthcare and other private insurance providers are guilty of indirectly/continually causing tragic deaths — only their method is shooting down claims rather than shooting a gun.
As with many other situations, I was reminded of certain books I’ve read. There have been numerous nonfiction titles covering the cruel, pricey, unequal, inefficient U.S. medical system — which only works very well for the wealthy — but I’m a literature blogger and will thus focus on fiction in the remainder of this post. To me, the novel I’ve read that best expresses the fury “inspired” by the U.S. medical system is Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That. I highly recommend her 2010 book, despite much of it being a painful read. Somehow, Shriver manages to often make things entertaining, too.
And I thought of novels that have strong elements of vigilantism, which of course involves seeking justice by “illegal” means when such justice might not be achieved through “legal” channels. In the U.S., there have been various efforts by Senator Bernie Sanders and others urging “Medicare for All” to give Americans the type of health-insurance system every other “first world” nation has. But those efforts have been thwarted by a political class (virtually every Republican and most Democrats) as well as a mainstream media mostly bought off by campaign contributions and ad dollars from the profit-swollen companies (also including “Big Pharma”) benefiting from a privatized medical system. So, what are beleaguered citizens to do?
Among the novels with characters who take the law into their own hands for the “right” reasons (not necessarily medical-related reasons) are Louis Sachar’s Holes, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, and Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano featuring the protagonist who would also become the title character in Isabel Allende’s later Zorro. For those who haven’t read those novels, I’ll refrain from giving specifics in order not to spoil things.
As we know, there are also strains of vigilantism in many western novels (like Owen Wister’s The Virginian) and in comic books starring superheroes such as Batman.
Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?
As Christmas nears, Misty the cat says: “Ho Ho Ho means Harness off Harness off Harness off.”
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 discusses a Mideast-related yet local police chaplain controversy — is here.
The Sun Also Rises on my kitty self. (Photo by Dave the biped.)
I, Misty the cat, have returned to write another guest post about “books, books, books.” Which sounds like a chicken saying “buk, buk, buk.” Why did the chicken cross The Road? To get to the other side of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel.
Not funny was last month’s news that the late McCarthy had a relationship with a girl that started when she was 16 and he was 42. That’s sleazy Lolita territory, which reminds me that Vladimir Nabokov also authored Pale Fire about a blaze slathered with enough sunscreen to prevent it from getting burned. Not exactly an Elin Hilderbrand “beach read.” Nor was Andre Dubus III’s novel House of Sand and Fog, which I could’ve pierced with a beach umbrella if I had it in paperback rather than hardcover. I, the feline writing this post, live in the House of Broadband Blog. Actually an apartment, but the wifi is decent.
Late autumn isn’t swimming weather, but November 30 was the 150th anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s birth. She of course wrote the iconic Anne of Green Gables, an exceptional YA novel. YA means Young Adult as well as Yowling Adult, which describes Dave after I grabbed his laptop to write this post. He’ll get over it, especially when I give him a newfangled quill pen and parchment paper to scribble this week’s shopping list. First seven items: cat food, cat chow, cat cuisine, cat edibles, cat victuals, cat nourishment, and cat sustenance.
Moving to my book list, I recently read Nelson DeMille for the first time — his novel The Quest. Quite exciting once I got over my first disappointment about the book’s tired trope of focusing on white visitors to a “third world” country — and my second disappointment that the quest was for a holy relic rather than a cat treat at peak freshness. A good chunk of DeMille’s story takes place in Ethiopia, where injera is a food staple. That pancake-like bread is slightly spongy, so a big-enough piece would make for an excellent cat bed. But my local pet store only sells cat beds with inedible cushioning; Goodnight Moon will never be the same.
Speaking of children’s books, The Cat in the Hat‘s title character is a rather slim kitty — certainly slimmer than me, a feline who starts his midnight snacking at noon. I’ve read that Dr. Seuss based his tall feline’s look on the Uncle Sam he had previously drawn in his political cartoons, which reminds me that I’m weighing a presidential run in 2028. To practice for my future time in the Oval Office, I occasionally walk in circles.
My favorite novels with at least some political themes, schemes, dreams, teams, screams, and memes? Among them are Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Trumpote, co-starring Donald Trump’s loyal squire JD Vanza. Cervantes lived in Spain during the same circa-1600 era that James Clavell’s Japan-set novel Shogun unfolded. Little-known fact: Spain and Japan are walking distance from each other despite being 6,600 miles apart. Admittedly, the walk would take a year or two, even for a fast cat like me. The Inedible Journey without an injera cat bed.
Anyway, this month begins The Incredible Journey known as the march to the holiday season, meaning I might reread A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, who invented the CD when he initialed a document. There’s also Fannie Flagg’s excellent A Redbird Christmas, John Grisham’s so-so Skipping Christmas, and the classic song “I’m Dreaming of a White Pearl Harbor Day” — which you can hear on a CD player that Dickens also invented.
Yesterday, December 7, was Pearl Harbor Day. Today, December 8, is the seventh anniversary of when I was adopted into my current home! That was in 2017, the year Aaron Judge hit 52 home runs as a rookie. Or was it 52 apartment runs as a rookie? No idea what his living arrangements were back then, or why Edith Wharton wrote The House of Mirth rather than The Yurt of Mirth. Maybe because her protagonist Lily Bart didn’t live in Mongolia?
Getting back to the festive season, my Misty the Cat…Unleashed book would make a great holiday gift this month for the kitty lovers in your life. I co-wrote it with my human peep Dave, sort of like how Woodward and Bernstein co-wrote All the President’s Cats about the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon, and his 1974 resignation — with no mention of cats. Surprisingly, Nixon didn’t blog about any of this at the time.
Dave will reply to comments, because I’m in serious pre-winter training to vigorously shred the wrapping paper on holiday gifts.
Misty the cat says: “Today’s my 7th adoption anniversary. I appreciate the celebratory lights.”
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 I, Misty, say Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )
This 90-second promo video for Dave’s book features a talking cat: 🙂
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 — which includes a “Twelve Days of Christmas” theme — is here.
Some literature offers readers content spanning at least two genres. Bonus!
It’s a blend that can make fiction richer and more interesting. Perhaps more challenging, too, but potentially very satisfying. All requiring some serious authorial skill and imagination, obviously. I’ll give some examples of this approach via multi-genre novels I’ve read.
My most recent experience was with Val McDermid’s The Skeleton Road, which combines a compelling murder mystery with well-researched historical fiction about the oft-brutal Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
Another example is Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, a novel that mixes a feminist/social-justice perspective with science fiction. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin also unites a realistic story with sci-fi, and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred melds an anti-racism theme with time travel.
H. Rider Haggard’s novel She is squarely in the adventure genre yet contains a major fantasy element: Title character Ayesha is more than 2,000 years old — perhaps a bit longer than the usual human life span. 🙂
Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour straddles the fantasy and supernatural horror genres.
Fiction that includes ghosts usually has those ghosts interacting in some way with the real world, making for two genres of a sort. Among the novels in this realm are Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, and Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket, to name a few.
Museum objects and exhibits come alive in Gore Vidal’s The Smithsonian Institution and Christine Coulson’s Metropolitan Stories — even as life is also depicted normally. So, fantasy and realism co-exist.
Then there are books that genre-blend in a different way; for instance, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is part-novel and part-poem, while J.K. Rowling’s The Ink Black Heart mixes traditional prose with a blitz of chat conversations. Actually, chat conversations are not exactly a literary genre. 🙂
Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?
Misty the cat says: “The driver of that ‘On the Road’ car must be Jack Kerouac.”
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 — featuring a pre-election theme and more — is here.
Who are some living authors with the longest novel-writing careers, dating back to the 1970s or earlier?
I contemplated that this past week as I read In One Person, John Irving’s quirky and compelling 2012 book about sexual identity (among other things). It was his 13th novel since his first, Setting Free the Bears, was published a whopping 51 years ago — in 1968.
Starting her novel career around the same time was the now-as-popular-as-ever Margaret Atwood, whose initial fiction book (The Edible Woman) was released exactly a half-century ago — in 1969. The Handmaid’s Tale and many other novels followed.
A year later, The Color Purple author Alice Walker came out with her first novel: The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Also in 1970, Beloved writer Toni Morrison entered the novel realm with The Bluest Eye. And in 1971, Underworld author Don DeLillo’s first novel (Americana) appeared.
Stephen King? His debut novel Carrie was published in 1974, the same year A Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin produced his first novel: A Song for Lya. Salman Rushdie of Midnight’s Children fame and Russell Banks of Continental Drift fame? Their respective debut novels Grimus and Family Life were published in 1975. Anne Rice? She started big with 1976’s Interview with the Vampire. And Atonement author Ian McEwan? His debut novel The Cement Garden arrived in 1978.
Going back further, Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry earned his first novel credit in 1961 with Horseman, Pass By. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter author Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel (The Time of the Hero) reached print in 1963 — the same year Joan Didion and Margaret Drabble entered the novel realm with Run, River and A Summer Bird-Cage, respectively. Drabble’s sister, Possession writer A.S. Byatt, saw her first novel The Shadow of the Sun released in 1964 — the same year as Joyce Carol Oates’ With Shuddering Fall debut. Cormac McCarthy started walking “The Road” of novel-writing in 1965, courtesy of The Orchard Keeper.
Who are your favorite living authors with long novel careers?
In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which has a Revolutionary War airports theme 🙂 — is here.
Among the Trump administration’s many, many horrible aspects is the blatant nepotism of incompetent daughter Ivanka and incompetent son-in-law Jared Kushner “serving” in major positions.
So, how about nepotism in literature? The beneficiaries are often also not deserving of their positions, which makes them easy for readers to root against — though there are occasional examples of those characters having some talent. Increasing the un-sympathy factor is that nepotism beneficiaries frequently aren’t nice, frequently act entitled, and frequently are quite flush with unearned family money.
Novels — historical fiction or otherwise — with royal characters of course often feature such people. For instance, in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, there’s the weak-willed Louis XIII who obviously had a bunch of other Louis guys come before him. One of them, Louis XI, is in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Quentin Durward.
Then there’s Rufus Weylin, the son of a slaveholder in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. He’s somewhat needy and unsure of himself as a boy, but grows into a mostly brutal and not especially smart master when he takes over the family plantation from his merciless father Tom.
Or how about the scenario in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel Worth Dying For? In that book, Seth Duncan works for a Mafia-connected Nebraska trucking company run by his father and uncles that ruthlessly extorts business from surrounding farms and engages in human trafficking. The vile Seth continues his family’s low ethical standards by also abusing his wife.
Of course, participating in or taking over the family “business” doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. While there are plenty of differing views on nihilism and such in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, it seems okay that Arkady eventually assumes the management of his father’s modest Russian estate.
Another positive nepotism example is in One for the Money, the first of Janet Evanovich’s seriocomic Stephanie Plum crime novels. Stephanie gets a bounty-hunting job via her bail-bondsman cousin Vinnie, and ends up being quite good at that work (in One and the many subsequent Plum novels) despite some periodic bumbling.
Then there’s the complicated would-be nepotism situation in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son. The wealthy Paul Dombey is so focused on his son, and the hope that the boy will eventually take over his shipping company, that he almost totally rejects/neglects his daughter Florence.
Before ending this post, I’ll add that in real life there are plenty of children and other relatives of novelists who became novelists themselves. But that’s another topic — discussed in this piece I wrote in 2011.
Examples of nepotistic characters you’ve found memorable?
In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which has a July 4th theme — is here.
There are many great fiction authors and many great nonfiction authors, but obviously a smaller number of authors who’ve written excellent books in both categories.
The skill sets for each category are similar in certain ways and different in others. Many novels contain at least some of the level of research we often find in nonfiction books, and obviously it helps any type of book to be well-written and interesting. But not every author can capably create fictional characters and fictional dialogue, or have the qualities (such as scholarly chops) to create top-notch nonfiction.
One who did excel in both categories was John Hersey, whose Hiroshima nonfiction book — originally a very long article in The New Yorker magazine — takes a riveting look at six survivors of the devastating atomic bomb unleashed on Japan by the U.S. in 1945. I finally got a chance to also read one of Hersey’s novels, and found A Single Pebble to be really compelling after thinking it started rather slowly. The book is about a young American engineer’s river voyage on a junk in China, and it has a lot to say about cultural differences, cultural misunderstandings, the “old ways” vs. the new, and more. (Hersey’s most famous novel is the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bell for Adano, which I haven’t read.)
More recently, we have Barbara Kingsolver — who has written many a memorable novel (including The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, The Lacuna, and Flight Behavior) but has also penned absorbing nonfiction books such as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life.
Another living author who has ably spanned the fiction and nonfiction worlds is Stephen King, who’s of course famous for dozens of best-selling novels but is admired by fellow wordsmiths for the advice in the partly autobiographical On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Alice Walker has penned an almost equal number of novels and short-story collections (13, including The Color Purple) as nonfiction books (12, including Go Girl! The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure).
Zadie Smith has produced several novels, such as White Teeth, as well as essay collections, such as Feel Free.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction includes The Namesake novel, and she turned to nonfiction with works such as In Other Words — about her immersion in Italy and the Italian language.
Some deceased authors in addition to Hersey? Moving backward chronologically from the writers’ birth years:
James Baldwin toggled between categories with novels such as Go Tell It On the Mountain and nonfiction such as The Fire Next Time.
As did Richard Wright with works like the novel Native Son and the memoir Black Boy. (Wright is pictured at the top of this blog post with Zora Neale Hurston, who’s mentioned a few paragraphs below.)
John Steinbeck is famous for novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, but Travels With Charley — his uneven but great-in-spots chronicle of a cross-country road trip with his dog — is pretty well known, too.
George Orwell wrote three nonfiction books (with Down and Out in Paris and London having the highest profile) and six novels (of course including Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four).
Aldous Huxley? We have novels such as Brave New World and Point Counter Point, and nonfiction such as The Doors of Perception. (Yes, The Doors rock group named itself after that Huxley book, which in turn was named after a William Blake line.)
Dorothy L. Sayers is best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mysteries such as Gaudy Night, while also producing plenty of nonfiction — including the Christian theological book The Mind of the Maker.
Zora Neale Hurston is most remembered for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, but the author/anthropologist wrote nonfiction books such as Mules and Men, too.
Readers admire Edith Wharton for fiction classics such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, but she also penned popular nonfiction books such as Fighting France (a contemporary look at World War I) and The Decoration of Houses.
Mark Twain of course penned novels like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn while also writing nonfiction classics like The Innocents Abroad and Life on the Mississippi.
And Elizabeth Gaskell authored Cranford and other novels even as she was perhaps best known for her biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte.
I’ll end by saying (as a Facebook comment I just saw from Brian Bess noted) that some nonfiction books can have a lot of made-up elements — just as novels (and not just historical fiction) can include plenty of facts.
Which authors do you feel have written novels AND nonfiction books really well?
In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which discusses everything from the future reopening of an old movie theater to a cruel jail for immigrants near my town — is here.
White House occupant Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of a perfectly good nuclear agreement with Iran — an agreement Iran was honoring — and followed that up with intense economic pressure and military threats. So naturally Iran started to push back, though the almost-always-lying Trump administration is surely exaggerating the extent of that.
This reminded me of a number of scenarios in literature where a character is unfairly provoked to the point of she or he retaliating. Sometimes the retaliation is effective (providing readers with satisfying wish fulfillment); other times the retaliating party suffers (which frustrates readers even as that suffering scenario can often be more realistic).
One of the most famous provoked-to-retaliate novels is Billy Budd, in which the popular-among-his-fellow-sailors protagonist is badgered by the envious, nasty John Claggart. After Claggart falsely accuses Herman Melville’s kindly title character of trying to incite mutiny, a shocked Billy strikes John with no premeditation and accidentally kills him. But we don’t get a happy ending after that. (A photo from the Billy Budd movie is above.)
In modern fiction, we have Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Wrongly declared legally incompetent as a child, her appointed guardian Nils Bjurman sexually abuses her. Eventually, Lisbeth ruthlessly revenges herself on the sadistic Bjurman without killing him but in a way that deservedly ruins his life.
Sometimes in literature, abusive or otherwise despicable men ARE justly killed. That’s the case with the Karamazov father in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Ruth’s husband Frank Bennett in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. (If you feel it’s weird to put those two novels in the same sentence, Flagg’s sprawling book is quite deep amid its entertaining aspects.)
Perhaps the greatest revenge novel of all is Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, in which a false accusation puts young Edmond Dantes into a remote island prison for many years. After escaping, he dedicates his life to some epic payback.
Then there’s Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, in which Jessie Burlingame is treated shabbily by her husband before and during a sexual game he wants to play more than she does. Jessie, partly spurred by subconscious memories of also being abused by her father, kicks Gerald away and inadvertently gives him a fatal heart attack. The ensuing problem? Jessie is handcuffed to the bed, now alone in a remote lakeside house.
And various scenarios in various Jack Reacher novels have Jack minding his own business before being surrounded by a group of bad guys who feel they greatly outnumber Lee Child’s protagonist enough to give him a pounding. Reacher, who almost always welcomes the challenge, invariably wins convincingly.
Your favorite novels that fit this topic?
One final note: Iran is hardly an exemplary democracy, but neither is the U.S. under Trump and his cynical enablers in the Republican-controlled Senate, right-wing media, conservative corporate circles, and right-wing religious circles.
In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which discusses a middle-school controversy and an endangered 1890s mansion — is here.
Dave Astor on Literature 