More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

by Nancy Pearl

  In The Singular Mark Twain, Fred Kaplan describes the life and development of a complex writer whose work includes some of the most popular (and controversial) books in the American canon, including, of course, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

  Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F.Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1951, was the first, and remains the best, biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a self-destructive but extremely talented writer who died at a ridiculously young age while hard at work on what probably would have been his best novel, The Last Tycoon.

  LITERARY LIVES: THE BRITS

  Here are some gems of British literary biography, excellent reading whether or not you subscribe to the heresy that it’s often more interesting to read about an author’s life than to read what he or she wrote.

  The romantic lives (and early deaths, each before the age of forty) of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë have certainly affected the way we think about their literary output. Two good antidotes to any of those misconceptions are Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. Barker also edited The Brontës: A Life in Letters, which makes a good companion read to her biography.

  According to one of his contemporaries, the nineteenth-century poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge “did everything he shouldn’t and nothing that he should.” You can read all about him in Richard Holmes’s excellent two-volume survey, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804 and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834. Holmes also wrote about the wild life and beautiful writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Shelley: The Pursuit.

  One of the great “better than fiction” love stories of the nineteenth century is that of the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Margaret Forster in Elizabeth Barrett Browning tells their whole romantic story—tyrannical father, lifelong illness, passionate love affair—with gusto and grace.

  Lord Byron, who was described by his contemporary Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” had a life defined by his omnivorous sexuality. Needless to say, then, Benita Eisler’s Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame limns a life that far surpassed anything Byron could (legally) say in print.

  The writing lives of a mother and daughter also make for fascinating reading. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the influential feminist essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was resolutely opposed to the institution of marriage, and made a career for herself as a journalist until she died shortly after giving birth to her daughter. Janet Todd reveals all in Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. Her daughter, who would become the author of Frankenstein, lived an equally unconventional life, movingly told in Miranda Seymour’s Mary Shelley.

  A LITTLE LEFT OF CENTER

  A lot has been written about the so-called rise and fall of the liberal establishment, but these two books led me to consider just what it means to be a liberal today, and howto the meaning of that word has changed since the beginning of the twentieth century.

  In Blood of the Liberals, George Packer looks at the evolution of the L word through the experiences of his maternal grandfather and his own father. Packer’s grandfather, George Huddleston, was elected to Congress from Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914 as a Jeffersonian Democrat, and was finally defeated in 1936, having broken with FDR over the president’s consolidation of power in the central government. Packer’s father, Herb, believed that being a liberal meant that rational discourse and thought, rather than emotion, guided one’s decisions. As an administrator at Stanford during the Vietnam War, Herb Packer was seen as the enemy by left-wing students, who wanted him to take immediate action against the war. Both Huddleston and Packer called themselves liberals, and both were destroyed by their beliefs. So what is liberalism? The third-generation Packer doesn’t come to any real definition, but he raises some interesting and difficult questions about how we define ourselves in political terms.

  The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice uses the life of the president of Yale University during the turbulent decade from 1960 to 1970 to illuminate a circle of influential men (Republicans all) who came from privileged families, had inherited wealth, belonged to the toniest, most exclusive clubs, and yet worked to make important societal changes in civil rights, university admissions, and the problems of the inner cities. These liberal Republicans—Cyrus Vance, McGeorge Bundy, and Elliot Richardson among them—were the scourge of the conservative wing of the party, and were frequently scorned as well by those who felt they didn’t go far enough in their reforms (just as George Packer’s father was). Definitely not just for Yalies, this book is relevant to anyone interested in this era.

  LIVING HIGH IN CASCADIA

  Cascadia has been described as a state of mind as much as a geographic place. Geographically, it is the coastal Pacific Northwest region of North America, from northern California through southern British Columbia. The poet Denise Levertov (who lived there during the last years before her death) described Cascadia’s mind-set this way:...I’ll dig in,

  into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.

  Grey is the price

  of neighboring with eagles, of knowing

  a mountain’s vast presence, seen or unseen.

  Cascadia is fertile ground for both memoirs and fiction. The memoirs I describe here were written by transplants who dug in tenaciously and grew themselves deeply into the place, while still retaining an outsider’s sense of awe. These books vividly portray people and wilderness with evocative clarity, with zest and passion. Read them when you want to summon sea fogs, cedar smoke, and salmon streams.

  Living High: An Unconventional Autobiography by June Burn is a spirited account of a young couple’s adventures homesteading in the San Juan Islands in the 1920s. The author’s happy-go-lucky narrative of often-harrowing events is emblematic of the buoyant resilience that runs through all these memoirs. Floyd Schmoe, in A Year in Paradise, tells how he returned from World War I and landed a job as winter caretaker at Mount Rainier’s Paradise Lodge. After moving the hotel’s grand piano into their quarters for nightly recitals by his concert pianist bride, the couple settled in for a long snowbound winter, emerging in the spring to spend the rest of an idyllic year exploring the park and its surrounds.

  For two views of Cascadia through the eyes of children, read Opal Whiteley’s The Diary of Opal Whiteley and Helene Glidden’s The Light on the Island:Tales of a Lighthouse Keeper’s Family in the San Juan Islands. Opal Whiteley’s childhood diary, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1920, is now available in several different editions, including an online version from the University of Oregon. Written in the idiosyncratic prose of this six-year-old pioneer in an Oregon logging community, the diary chronicles the explorations of Opal and her extravagantly named animal friends, both wild and domestic. Helene Glidden’s book tells of life on lonely Patos Island with her colorful lighthouse keeper father, mother, and twelve siblings. Smugglers and Indians, shipwrecks, and a visit from Colonel Teddy Roosevelt all make for plenty of family adventure.

  For Love of Some Islands, another lovely book by Floyd Schmoe, recounts the author’s summer sojourn on a houseboat with a difference. Wishing to study the marine ecosystem of the San Juan Islands, this biologist cut a picture window into the bottom of his boat in order to conduct research in the comfort of his own home.

  A more adventurous boater was M. Wylie Blanchet, author of The Curve of Time. This intrepid Vancouver Island widow set off each summer with her five young children (and a dog) in a thirty-foot boat. Taking only their bathing suits and one change of clothes, they explored the chilly waters and sun-drenched shores of British Columbia’s Inside Passage.

  The Inside Passage is also the scene of Alexandra Morton’s Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us. Like Jane Goodall, the woman she most admires, Morton earned her research credentials in the
field and is a gifted storyteller. After breaking into cetacean research by getting hired to paint a mural in scientist John Lilly’s house, her studies of captive orcas eventually led her to a new life among the whales of Johnstone Strait.

  For a taste of Inside Passage life around the turn of the last century, read the remarkable Klee Wyck by Emily Carr.Traveling with only a small dog as companion, the maverick British Columbia artist braved dangerous seas and Victorian disapproval to forge strong friendships with First Nations villagers and sketch the vanishing monumental carvings on their remote islands. Klee Wyck, “The One Who Laughs,” was the name the Indians gave to her.

  Michael Modzelewski’s Inside Passage: Living with Killer Whales, Bald Eagles, and Kwakiutl Indians tells of a solitary sojourn on one of these islands while learning the ancient alphabets of sky and wave, season and inner wisdom, challenged by a Kwakwaka’wakh visitor who observed, “You no survive here. . . . I be by neks time to pick up you bones.”

  Survival is also the theme of Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species by Freeman House, but here the bones in question are those of a watershed and its indicator species, one of the last genetically native chinook salmon runs in northern California. It’s part legal thriller, part treatise on biology, and part hero’s journey, but it all comes together as a gripping account of how human beings with little in common except the place they call home learn to work together to create a sustainable future for themselves and their non-human neighbors.

  A Whale Hunt, Robert Sullivan’s account of the Makah Nation’s decision to reassert their tribal whaling rights, attempts to fathom the murky cultural and ecopolitical depths of the region from an outsider’s point of view. Sullivan spent two years getting acquainted with participants in the hunt, and he sympathetically portrays the swirling currents surrounding them. But ultimately the cultural gulf dividing the multifarious stakeholders seems unbridgeable. Brenda Peterson’s collection of essays, Singing to the Sound: Visions of Nature, Animals & Spirit, includes the author’s thoughtful reports on the hunt as well as new revelations from her quarter-century apprenticeship to Puget Sound, first described in Living by Water: True Stories of Nature and Spirit.

  In Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, Kim Stafford seeks to regain “the nourishing ways: listening, remembering, telling, weaving a rooted companionship with home ground.” Jim Nollman also attempts to do just that in Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place. While ruminating on the etymology of the word “paradise,” which originally referred to a walled garden, he discovers the futility of fencing out resident deer and learns to coexist by creating a permaculture garden. Jo Ann Ridley’s San Juan Islands Journal chronicles life in the islands with economy and humor, portraying the marginal but deeply satisfying life of the independent and quirky San Juan Islanders, who cling as tenaciously to these rocky shores as do barnacles and lichens.

  A final, more journalistic exploration of place is The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan. Egan combines historical research, interviews, and his own experiences as a third-generation Westerner to seek “a common narrative in the land.”

  There’s good historical fiction about Cascadia too.

  Don Berry’s trilogy of novels—Trask, Moontrap, and To Build a Ship—is set in the Oregon Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. Long out of print, the books have just been reissued and will give pleasure to a whole new generation of readers.

  Molly Gloss’s antiromantic western The Jump-Off Creek tells of Lydia Sanderson’s experiences in the late nineteenth century as a single-woman homesteader in the high mountain region of Oregon.

  Annie Dillard’s The Living is an expansive novel about settling the area around Bellingham Bay in Washington, near the Canadian border, in the late nineteenth century. Well researched, well written, and filled with memorable characters and events, Dillard’s novel is hard to put down.

  Ken Kesey’s classic Sometimes a Great Notion is on every list of top ten Northwest novels. Due to the stubbornness of the family patriarch, his two sons and daughter-in-law are caught up in a bitter conflict with striking fellow loggers—a Greek tragedy set in a coastal Oregon logging town.

  Although Bernard Malamud’s A New Life is set in the fictional town of Eastchester, in the fictional state of Cascadia, it was clear from the day it was published in 1961 that this novel about a New York writer who comes West to teach in the English department at a land grant college in the rainy Northwest was a thinly veiled autobiographical account of the twelve years Malamud and his family spent in Corvallis, Oregon, where he taught at Oregon State University.

  Two novels use the high-flying dot-com world of 1990s Seattle as a backdrop: Michael Byers’s Long for This World and Jonathan Raban’s Waxwings. Byers’s first novel is about a geneticist who has to decide whether the possibility of saving the life of a young patient is worth the likelihood of losing his license to practice medicine. Raban’s novel is about an expatriate British writer going through a midlife crisis, and an illegal Chinese immigrant who comes into his life.

  One of the best-known Pacific Northwest novels is David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. Whether you’re drawn to wonderful evocations of place, love a page-turning plot, or enjoy meeting a variety of well-drawn characters, you’ll be engaged by this novel, set after World War II, about a returning Japanese internee who is arrested for murder.

  Two other good novels set in Cascadia are Robin Cody’s Ricochet River, set in the logging town of Calamus in the 1960s, about two high school seniors who are faced with difficult choices that will determine the rest of their lives; and Educating Waverley by Laura Kalpakian, which takes place at a progressive boarding school on an island in Puget Sound.

  The mystery shelf is packed with tales set in Cascadia. M. K. Wren’s series about bookseller/private investigator Conan Flagg includes King of the Mountain and Wake Up, Darlin’ Corey. Kate Wilhelm’s The Hamlet Trap is the first in a series of solid mysteries featuring Constance and Charlie Meiklejohn, a psychologist and former Manhattan policeman, that take place in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. (Wilhelm also has a series of mysteries about Oregon defense attorney Barbara Holloway, including Clear and Convincing Proof and Defense for the Devil.) Firefighter Earl Emerson has written a series featuring private investigator Thomas Black (Catfish Café is a good one to begin with) as well as several novels with firefighter heroes, including Vertical Burn and Pyro. Aaron Elkins’s The Dark Place has a main character who is a professor of anthropology. Lowen Clausen’s First Avenue, Second Watch, and Third & Forever are police procedurals by a former Seattle cop. J. A. Jance’s series starring Seattle homicide detective J. P. Beaumont includes Failure to Appear and Lying in Wait. Mary Daheim’s Silver Scream is a cozy mystery set in a bed-and-breakfast in the heart of Seattle. G. M. Ford’s novels about disgraced investigative journalist Frank Corso include Fury and Black River.

  LIVING THROUGH WAR

  Among the many accounts of wartime by men and women who were combatants are these excellent works: Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma by George MacDonald Fraser, a candid account of the author’s military service in the British army during World War II (for more about Fraser, see “George MacDonald Fraser: Too Good to Miss” in Book Lust; Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That, about his disillusioning experiences in World War I; and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Sassoon’s feelings about World War I are conveyed in his poetry as well, most strikingly in “Aftermath,” written in 1919:Have you forgotten yet?

  For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,

  Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:

  And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow

  Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,

  Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

  But the past is just
the same,—and War’s a bloody game....

  Have you forgotten yet? . . .

  Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

  Less readily available are memoirs by noncombatants who found themselves caught up in the most profound and life-changing events of their time. It’s often through reading their stories that we come to understand the wider effects of war and wartime, and the bravery and courage it took for civilians to live through weeks, months, and even years of occupation or incarceration. These accounts of human suffering and terrible trials also attest to the power of the human spirit to overcome deprivation and despair.

  In Testament of Youth, probably one of the finest accounts ever written of World War I, Vera Brittain describes her own and her friends’ experiences during the war, including the deaths of those she loved most. Although Brittain served as a nurse—in London, Malta, and at the front in France—this memoir’s strength is not so much her experiences in the thick of fighting but her depiction of a lost generation. She continued her memoirs in Testament of Experience (which covers the years 1925-1950) and Testament of Friendship.