★★★★★

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

/ ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

★★★★★ | Literature | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Ah, Gatsby. It’s been a moment. I last read this book in college, and although I remember the story, I’m fairly sure I missed the point. It has been good for me to go back and reread these perennial classics that I thought I knew.

Here we have a true American tragedy, wrapped in social wit and irony, stewed in alcohol and disillusionment, where wealth, whether old or new, buys not love, but misery, where the strong moral values of the Midwest prove all too corruptible, where the very premise of the American Dream is nothing more than a cheat, a scam.

Other than maybe Gatsby, there isn’t a trustworthy or likeable character in the bunch. Ungrateful, snobbish, and vain, they look at people as novelties to play with and discard. Even Nick, our narrator, is cruel and two-faced. While her husband, Tom, is despicable, Daisy Buchanan is the real villain of this story. Her voice is full of money, Gatsby tells us. Not love, not empathy, not kindness. Money.

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Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I didn’t like this book at first. I felt claustrophobic, there in the first chapter, squeezed in at the kids’ table surrounded by a large group of strangers at a Manhattan apartment dinner party. These guests were too witty, overly confident, and entirely full of themselves. Who talks like this? And more pressing, who would want to read an entire novel with these assholes?

But I persevered. In fact, it was the Manhattan setting of this book that initially drew me.  I lived in New York in the mid-1990s and recently returned to an apartment on the Upper East Side, where much of the story takes place.  McInerney’s first book, Bright Lights, Big City, helped to convince me to move to New York when I read it in college. The descriptions of the city, its magic, and absurdity were spellbinding. The city itself becomes a character in the story, which we follow over a year, from the bitter cold of winter through the languor of summer to the bracing beauty of fall.

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Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

/ ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

★★★★★ | Literature | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss. 

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

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Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Lao Tzu

/ ★★★★★, Philosophy, Reading

★★★★★ | Philosophy | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must. ★★★★★ 

Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?

Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.

The Notebook by Roland Allen

/ ★★★★★, Reading, Writing Guides

★★★★★ | Writing | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

What a delightful book. The first chapter reeled me in with the story of how the Moleskin notebook exploded in popularity in the 1990s. The author clearly has been bitten by the same notebook fetish bug. He cites brand names of notebooks that are all too familiar to me. He decided to write a history of the notebook about ten years ago and proceeded to fill four or five notebooks with scribbles and quotes and references that ultimately became this book.

Allen used effective storytelling techniques to share dozens of examples of notebook usage over the past six hundred years from accounting ledgers in the 1400s, artist sketchbooks in the 1500s, Darwin’s field notes, to modern day journaling. Definitely a niche book, but great for any lover of notebooks and journals.

Rousseau and Revolution by Will Durant

/ ★★★★★, History, Reading

★★★★★ | History | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

The tenth volume of the incredible Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant. This one, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, provides an immensely readable history of Europe leading up to the French Revolution. Reading this series has been such an education. My only wish is that I had read them sooner. 

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The Age of Voltaire by Will Durant

/ ★★★★★, History, Reading

★★★★★ | History | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Continuing my quest to read all eleven volumes of Will Durant’s Opus, The Story of Civilization. Volume IX centers on science and philosophy overtaking religion through thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot. The church did its best to stop it, but in the end, the French Enlightenment steered the faithful away from religion toward the beginnings of existentialism. While this movement addressed religious corruption and the horrors of inquisitions, there is also a feeling of great loss as civilization let go of its rudder of morality and faith.

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