It’s 2025. Let The Reading Begin

A longish blog about reading and books and authors. It involved a lot of writing and not as much editing. You have been warned….

We kick off 2025 with a stack of maybe 20 unread books on the shelves, each staring at me eagerly, impatiently, ready to leap into action, like they’re kids at Disney World and I’m in charge of the best ride (whatever that is). This is the way with unread books, yes? They have eyes – and those eyes blaze a hole in you, reminding you that they aren’t just there to look pretty and fill your bookshelf.

Well, the blame rests with me. I bought many of these unread books within the last several months, knowing that I already had a long queue of books to get through. But this is the way with readers, yes? We walk into a bookstore or by a book kiosk and even though we have plenty of unread books on our shelves we just can’t help ourselves. We see books we cannot possibly pass by, and we buy them, and onto the shelves they go.

Four of the unread books on my shelves are old Perry Mason mysteries written by Erle Stanley Gardner. I bought my first Perry Mason book in 2020, during a family trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, when we visited a fantabulous bookstore that had a whole truckload of vintage classics – including a bunch of Perry Mason books published by Penguin in the 1940s and 50s, when the first UK versions must have come out. It turns out I really dug the stories, and I’ve been buying them up ever since.

Here are some other books yet to read:

• Emma by Jane Austen (despite graduating with an English degree, I’ve never read this)
• Nerve by Dick Francis
• The Natural by Bernard Malamud (loved the 1984 movie starring Robert Redford and Glenn Close)
• Langston Hughes: A Biography
• The National Baseball Hall of Fame Collection (I recently visited the museum in Cooperstown, New York, for the first time)
• Anxious People by Fredrick Backman
• Dear Life by Alice Munro (she died last year, and her legacy has become soiled by allegations that she ignored signs that her daughter was sexually abused by Munro’s partner. Can you ignore the artist’s sins while appreciating the artist’s art? More later).
• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
• A bunch of dime store Ellery Queen mystery anthologies
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (I finally watched the movie last year. It underwhelmed).

That’s a partial list – and it’s a sure bet that the next time we visit a bookstore, I’ll add more books to it, because this is the way with readers, yes?

Now, more book notes…

Resolutions

I don’t believe I’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution in my life, figuring that if you believe in something enough to want to resolve to do it, you don’t need to wait around for the new year to start. But in 2025, I will make an exception and resolve to read less news/social media and more books.

The books part is no problem. I already read about 30-40 a year. I hope to read about 50 this year, roughly an average of one a week. This might be tough due to the fact that I’m currently re-reading Stephen King’s original version of The Stand, which clocks in at 800-plus pages. That alone might suck up a couple months. But no matter! I’ll zip through the next six in less than a month!

I also resolve to keep a reading log on Goodreads – or try, anyway.

As for reading less news: That’s sort of already started. It began after the 2024 U.S. elections, when I finally decided America has well and truly lost its way (or its mind, or both) by putting a cheap, half-wit con artist back in the White House. A big part of the blame could be laid at the feet of social media and the news media.

I’ve always defended the news media, having earned a living in it for decades. I got to know many talented, honest and admirable reporters along the way. The problem is, reporters have almost no power anymore. All of the media power now rests in the hands of the corporate suits and number crunchers and SEO/algorithm nerds and cowardly lions.

I used to be a regular reader of the New York Times and Washington Post, but no more. They have both become fat, lazy, spineless, and teetering on the edge of irrelevancy. Any news I get now mainly involves scanning the headlines of The Guardian (one of the last decent mainstream media sites) or the Huffington Post (a hilariously tabloidish site that doesn’t pretend to aspire to serious journalism).

Oh, and I also deactivated my Facebook account because Facebook is a disease I really need to be cured of. Maybe I’ll blog about this in the future – including the recent decision by Mark Zuckerberg to end Facebook’s fact-checking program as a way to endear himself to Donald Trump, the thin-skinned little baby who never met a fact he couldn’t dispute or twist to his own benefit.

But for now: Let’s talk books….

Gone With The Wind

A few months ago I blogged about how my fall/winter goal was to read a couple of very famous and very long American novels from the 20th century: The Stand by Stephen King, and Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

I’ve already read The Stand twice – the original 800-page version published in 1978, and the King-approved, 1,200-word uncut edition published a dozen years later. I’m pretty sure I preferred the original version, so I bought another copy of it to make sure. I’m currently reading that one.

As for Gone With The Wind (hereafter referred to as GWTW): This was my first stab at reading it. I finished it last month, and came away with some very, very (very) mixed feelings about it.

Before getting into that, let’s start with this: I’ve seen the classic 1939 GWTW movie about two or three times, so I’m familiar with the story. The last time I saw the movie was during a screening at the student auditorium when I was in college. The story is set during and after the U.S. Civil War, and told from the POV of white characters in the Old South, when elegant and lucrative cotton plantations depended on slave labor to be elegant and lucrative.

From a purely cinematic standpoint, I could see why GWTW created such a sensation, winning a bunch of Academy Awards and earning a kind of legendary status among 20^th century movie fans. Visually, the movie was stunning and decades ahead of its time. I wasn’t crazy about the intertwined love stories, though, and knew as a native Southerner that the screenplay idealized the Old South to a point that bordered on the ridiculous.

As for the book: There are many things to admire and even love about it. The author, Margaret Mitchell, was a very skilled writer with a sharp edge and keen insights, and a prose style that ran laps around many other writers.

From the very first page you knew you were in the hands of a master at her craft. It’s not something you can explain but is something you instantly recognize – a certain confidence, clarity of voice, originality, wit, flow, cadence, dialect, whatever: She had it. That was a relief, because I had a fear that this would be some flowery ode to a bygone age, and thank God it wasn’t.

The story itself manages to maintain a clear focus for hundreds of pages even though it falls into the historical epic genre, which has produced more than a few yawners. I don’t ever remember being bored (although I did shuffle through some of the descriptions of what people wore).

The central character, Scarlett O’Hara, is a true literary pioneer in terms of breaking down gender walls. She is tough and smart and confident, with a keen talent for business who could hold her own and then some in a man’s world. She’s really an amazing character, and should have become a feminist icon.

But…..

She is also an unrepentant racist. So are the men in her life. Just about every white Southern character in the book is racist to the core – even the kind and angelic Melanie Wilkes, who serves as the book’s moral center.

These characters are secure in their belief in white supremacy and convinced that black people are lesser beings, unable to think or do for themselves – and prone to violent crime the second they secure freedom. This kind of bigoted narrative plagues black Americans to this very day. The book is chock full of so much racism and so many mentions of the word “nigger” that you begin to wonder exactly where the author, Margaret Mitchell, stood on all this.

Now, you could give Mitchell the benefit of the doubt and say that she’s simply an honest writer being true to her characters. After all, most white Southern plantation folks during the 19^th century really were racist, and really did believe they belonged to a superior ethnic group.

But to me, the book goes way beyond that. Mitchell seems to go out of her way to drive home the point that blacks were better off as slaves, and their slaveowners did them a world of favors by giving them shacks to live in and scraps to eat.

GWTW has utter contempt for black characters who don’t fit a certain subservient mold, and contempt for the northern Yankee white folks who helped end slavery. You’d think Mitchell would have introduced at least a couple of sympathetic characters who opposed slavery. But no. Didn’t happen.

This brings us back to what I mentioned earlier – can you love the art even though you think the artist might not be on the side of the angels? That’s always a tough call. I really did enjoy reading GWTW. It’s excellent as a piece of writing and storytelling. But I’m not sure how I feel about the author.

Reading About Reading Lolita in Tehran

Another book I recently cracked open is Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, published in 2008. The author is an Iranian-American author and professor who was born in Tehran, moved to England as a teenager, and has lived in the U.S. since 1997.

After returning to Iran in 1979 following that country’s revolution, she held various university and teaching positions. She got flak for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil required of females, and spent part of the mid-1990s hosting meetings at her home where she and several female students chatted about their roles in post-revolutionary Iranian society. Their discussions often involved Western literary works.

One of those works was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the controversial 1955 novel about an educated man/pervert whose sexual fantasies involve prepubescent girls (usually around 12 or so) and who is not shy about fulfilling those fantasies when the opportunity presents itself. Obviously, this is a problematic premise for a novel in 2025 – and even 1955. I doubt it would be published today, knowing what we know about child sexual abuse. Anyway….

Readling Lolita in Tehran is an interesting book because it reveals a lot about how the clashes of cultures – Western/liberal vs. Middle Eastern/conservative – get played out in certain parts of the world. I read the first 30-odd pages and enjoyed it. It shows the lengths some people will go to in order to broaden their horizons artistically and intellectually – even if it means putting themselves at risk.

But then I thought I should maybe read Lolita first, because I never had before. The only Nabokov book I’ve ever read is Pnin, which was assigned in college and which I remember liking well enough.

So, I bought a Kindle copy of Lolita and started reading it. As with GWTW, I’m torn. On the one hand, Nabokov was obviously a major writing talent. Some of his passages had me laughing out loud – the perv character is pretty damn hilarious. But it’s a struggle reading about his sexual obsession with young girls.

I am not opposed to reading uncomfortable material. On the contrary, I think we should. But this is some seriously disturbing subject matter. We’ll see how it goes. I do plan to return to Reading Lolita in Tehran when/if I finish Lolita.

The End of the Tour

Not long ago I was scrolling through the Netflix menu, seeing what looked interesting, and came across a 2015 movie called “The End of the Tour,” which I had never heard of. It stars Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and tells the story of a profile that Rolling Stone magazine did on writer David Foster Wallace in the late 1990s, after Wallace had just published his landmark novel, Infinite Jest, and became the talk of the literary world.

At the time, Wallace was a talented but not exactly well-known author and essayist who was teaching at Illinois State University. Then, all of a sudden, he was a famous writer asked to speak at large literary gatherings and appear on talk shows. I had never heard of him before Infinite Jest, but have a very strong memory of his name bursting into the spotlight around 1997.

The movie focuses on the few days that author/Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky spends with Wallace (aka DFW) in Illinois while researching the story. It’s an unassuming movie that largely borrows from Lipsky’s recorded conversations – no flash, no explosions, no sex or breathless monologues – and I liked it.

But its main allure to me was that it delved into the tortured life of Wallace, a very bright and talented guy who suffered from depression and ended up committing suicide in 2008 at the age of 46.

I finally read Infinite Jest about a decade or so ago. It’s not an easy read at 1,000-plus pages, filled with long, dense passages and not sticking to any kind of conventional plot or narrative. But it’s also one of the most memorable and best books I’ve ever read.

Even before I read Infinite Jest, though, I read several of Wallace’s essays. Some were included in a collection titled Consider the Lobster and others I either downloaded on my phone or found on the internet.

The more of his works I read, the more I became convinced that he’s one of my favorite writers ever. There was a certain quality to his writing that checked all the right boxes for me – a combination of wit, honesty, integrity, insight, intelligence, humility, and a genius with words that didn’t try to be brilliant but was, anyway.

Plus: DFW was a very good athlete who became a competitive junior tennis player in his region – something I’m convinced I could have been if I had focused exclusively on tennis as a youngster instead of splitting it with baseball, football and basketball. But I digress….

Here are some DFW essays I highly recommend if you ever get a chance:

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: In which DFW recounts his Caribbean cruise line experience in an essay that originally appeared in “Harper’s.”
• Roger Federer as Religious Experience. Published in The New York Times.
• Ticket to the Fair: Another Harper’s piece, about DFW’s experience at the Illinois State Fair.

Note: The lousy photo accompanying this blog was taken by me. It’s the small bookshelf in my upstairs office that is partly dedicated to books I need to read. Interesting sidelight: The St. Louis Cardinals piece on the bookshelf is a kind of Russian nesting doll that I bought in Prague, of all places.