In tomorrow's Wall Street Journal I write about five great travel books: https://www.wsj.com/articles/five-best-books-by-travelers-in-residence-11628261021.
The other day at Big Apple, the secondhand bookstore on Federal Highway, I came across a copy of Helen Muir’s memoir, Baby Grace Sees the Cow. I got to know Helen, author of Miami, U.S.A., in her later years when we both attended Trinity Cathedral. Toward the end of the memoir she complains of elderly friends who go on and on about their ailments, monologues she and her husband called “organ recitals.”
Is it just me, or were this year's Independence Day celebrations not only more exuberant - not surprising, considering last year's 4th - but more heartfelt? Even the dour New York Times seemed uncharacteristically celebratory, running in its Book Review a glowing appreciation by Robert Gottlieb of John Gunther's Inside U.S.A.
Sunday’s New York Times contained the Book Review’s Summer Reading issue and among the dozen roundups – of everything from thrillers to sports books – there was none for travel books, a perennial in the annual holiday and summer reading issues. You can see them being dropped perhaps from the first one, at the start of winter, but to ignore books of travel at the beginning of summer – especially the summer after a pandemic – defies logic. I know publishers have been down on travel books, so perhaps the editors didn’t think there were enough good new ones to warrant a roundup. Whatever the reason, it’s a development that doesn’t bode well for travel writers, or our increasingly self-involved country.
I took Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies to read in the hospital, a bad choice, I discovered: While experiencing great pain it is hard to muster up sympathy for someone else’s suffering.
Back home I’ve been reading only things that make me feel better (the one exception being the Sunday New York Times). Yesterday I plucked from my shelves (in the Polish section) Gary Gildner’s The Warsaw Sparks. The author was a Fulbright professor in Warsaw in the late ’80s where, in addition to teaching English, he coached a makeshift baseball team. Halfway through the book Stan Musial, paying a visit to his ancestral homeland, meets the team. Twenty pages later, Gildner has a meeting in Gdansk with Lech Walesa. There are not many books in which those two men both make appearances.
Finally finished Martin Amis’s Inside Story. It took me months. It is a great grab bag of a book as the author alights on a multitude of topics, including, on a couple of occasions, his rules for writing. (The book’s subtitle, printed on the title page but not the cover – where it is boldly proclaimed “A Novel” – is “How to Write.”) Most of his rules I agree with: avoiding cliches, using a thesaurus to find a word with the right number of syllables to fit a sentence’s rhythm, never employing three dashes in a sentence (see previous sentence). Though I take exception to his taking exception to what he call’s Elegant Variation, finding a synonym to avoid repeating the same word in a sentence (see previous sentence). And I would add another, very important rule for authors: Don’t finish your book, as Amis does, and then artlessly tack on two superfluous chapters.
After being bid adieu – a not totally successful Amis trope here is to occasionally address his reader as a guest in his home – the reader (no EV now) turns the page to find an “Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea,” which, as the title suggests, is a meditation on Israel. There is much in the book about anti-Semitism, and Amis’s admirable abhorrence of it (he pretty much dismisses Virginia Woolf as a writer because of her qualifications as an anti-Semite), but … really? He decides to close his “novel” with this essay? No, actually, he doesn’t, because when the dear reader, having already once thought she had finished the book, turns the page – more eager than ever to close the cover and be done with the thing – she finds “Addendum: Elizabeth Jane Howard,” a heartfelt tribute to the author’s stepmother. Yes, it’s interesting, but the reader’s pleasure in reading it is diminished by the thought of what might still await (because of the index – yes, this is a novel with an index – there are more pages behind it) and pestered by the idea that there were no editors at Knopf brave enough to say, “Martin, perhaps these last two chapters would work better in your next collection of essays.”