Monthly Archives: April 2026

Too Many Favorite Books:  The Interviewer’s Dilemma

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“What’s your favorite book?” I asked when I interviewed local writers for my friend’s newsletter, which was aimed at local writers. 

I did not have time to do these interviews, but my friend was often in crisis. “Please, please, please. No one will help me.  Couldn’t you interview somebody, anybody?”

“Somebody, anybody! What a request!”  I loved the idea of interviewing somebody, anybody.  Perhaps I could approach a person in a suit and sneakers.  “Excuse me, have you ever written a  memo?  Well, see – you are a writer.”

Soon I had interviewed everybody in the small local community of writers.  Friends, friends of friends, frenemies, friends of frenemies, enemies of friends or frenemies…   

Then I started calling PR people to set up phone interviews with writers who hailed from our city or state.  The writers were gracious, but weary of being asked the same questions in interviews.  Did they write by hand or on a computer?  Almost everyone said by hand.  When did they write?  In the morning.  Nobody wrote in the afternoon.

My favorite question was:  “What’s your favorite book?” But that was a naive question, I learned, and much too specific.

“So many books,” they always said.  “I can’t narrow it down to one.”

I felt humble.  I was so simple that I  could narrow it down to one. 

They kindly mentioned some favorite books, always at least one new book, sometimes a cult classic, and they also plugged books by friends.

I often helped her out, for the sake of friendship. It was volunteer work. There was a dearth of volunteers!

I doubt she got paid much, if anything, for editing and writing that newsletter.  She also worked part-time at a demanding job, reviewed books, and was a talented fiction writer. But she died young, in her forties, before she finished her book.

…atque in perpetuum, soror, ave atque vale..

The End of the Book Group

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The last time the book group met was in my back yard in 2000.  We ate chicken, a salad, and dessert (something from the neighborhood bakery), and desultorily discussed John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich. 

I remember their faces, but can’t remember their last names. 

Time passes. Details drift away, unless one needs to remember. And yet we met for four years, and I felt close to them.  I had met these people at a support group. We socialized sometimes.

And so I organized a monthly book group, and I picked the books. We read some dazzling memoirs and novels, among them Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Lisa Zeidner’s Layover, John Thorndike’s Another Way Home: A Father’s Memoir, Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man, Kaye Gibbons’ Sights Unseen, and Jay Neugeboren’s Imagining Robert.

One evening a cartoonist showed up at book group.  She hilariously skewered one of my favorite novels, and was so witty that I hiccoughed with laughter.  Really, it is and is not ideal to have a cartoonist in your book group!  

At that last meeting, I was distracted, still packing for the move.

“You shouldn’t move.  You have a lot of friends here,” said one of my favorites.

“I’ll miss you a lot. You’ve got to keep the book group going.”

“We won’t,” he said glumly.

But there must have been someone bossy enough to take over. I’d phoned them, arranged transportation (I’m a master of bus schedules and carpooling), and occasionally sent out a newsletter to remind them of our selection of the month.

As you can see, I have a clear memory of my bossiness, and/or powers of organization, and it makes me laugh. I remember the group vividly, but I wish I had a photo.

Seneca and Time:  Stoicism and the Brevity of Life

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Writers and publishers are savvy about readers’ needs. There is a market for self-help books, and now, more charmingly, for books on Stoicism. Hundreds of books on Stoicism have been published in recent years:  David Fideler’s Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living, Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Live Like a Stoic:  A Handbook for Happiness, and many books with titles like Think Like a Stoic, How to Think Like a Stoic, and Live Like a Stoic.  And then there’s the ever-popular Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Am I or am I not a Stoic? It’s both more complicated and simpler than you think.  The Stoics recognize four emotions, pleasure and pain, desire and fear.  If you want to lead a good life, and that is the goal, reason must conquer emotions. But the system is more complex than that:  it is logic, physics, and ethics. 

The three main stoic virtues are fides, virtus, and pietas, and if you have read Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, in Latin, you are familiar with them. Fides means faith and trust. Virtus literally means “manliness” (the first syllable, vir,  means “man“), but also excellence, courage, or the best in any endeavor.  Then there’s pietas, the recognition of obligations to the gods, one’s nation, and the family.  Virgil’s Aeneas, forced by pietas to sacrifice personal happiness after the fall of Troy, is a reluctant leader of the surviving Trojans in their journey overseas to found a new homeland in Italy. This will bring no happiness to Aeneas’ generation. The brutal ending of the epic, when Aeneas erupts in rage during a battle, throws the concept of pietas into question. 

I used to fancy myself an Epicurean, but I recently returned to Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, graceful writer, satirist,  tragedian, and tutor and political advisor to Nero.  I read Senecus’s Letters in graduate school,  and was delighted by his elegant, pointed style, lucidity of explication, and the slight edge to his wit.

In his philosophical treatise, De Brevitate Vitae (On the Brevity of Life), Seneca explores the concept that life is too short. (The following is my translation from the Latin.)

“We do not have too little time, but we lose much.  Life is long enough, and is granted generously for the accomplishment of the greatest things, if the whole life is well-spent; but when life slips away through debauchery and carelessness, and when life is applied to no good cause, and when the final necessity compels the end, we realize that our life has passed without our understanding it was going.”

Seneca has no sympathy for the complaints of working men who do not use their time well.  Too many devote themselves to pointless tasks. Some waste time networking with men who do not think well of them. And then there are the high officials who don’t retire gracefully: they die in court or in the midst of a financial transaction. But the most astonishing story is that of Sextus Turannius, a canny old man who was forced to retire at 90. He insisted that his family deck him out like a corpse, wear mourning, and conduct funeral rites until his boss hired him back.

Seneca is a critic, but he is also a comic genius.  Take his satiric portrait of the dandy who wastes hours of his life at the barber.  The following is my translation from the Latin:

“You call them leisurely who spend hours of their lives at the barber’s, where any hair that has grown in the night is plucked, a council is held about each individual hair, where either a dislodged hair is replaced, or one thinning hair is combed over the forehead…”

 Reading this in Latin was a charming experience.  Whatever else Seneca was, whatever he did or not do during Nero’s regime, he was a brilliant writer whose letters and philosophical writings have fascinated and comforted readers for centuries.

Recommended Spring Reads:  Daphne du Maurier’s “The Parasites” & Maria Semple’s “Go Gentle”

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Everyone loves Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel, Rebecca.  “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” the novel begins. I first read that sentence when a friend returned from a miserable archaeological dig and said Rebecca had kept her sane at night while her roommates played Mah Jong.

If you love Jane Eyre, you will love Rebecca.  There is a mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre;  in Rebecca, it’s a contemptuous, unfaithful wife who taunts her husband and is killed.  When The New Yorker published an essay about Rebecca, I realized that the feminist canon had expanded to include women’s novels formerly dismissed as pop fiction.

Rebecca may be du Maurier’s best book, but I prefer The Parasites (1949), a novel about three step-siblings who grow up in the theater.  They have no fixed abode:  they accompany Pappy, a famous singer, and Mama, a famous dancer, all over Europe and the U.S.  And they  don’t seem marred by the experience: on the contrary, they thrive on it.

Daphne du Maurier, the daughter of Sir Gerald du Maurier, a famous actor and manager, certainly knew the theater.  And I am addicted to theater novels:  I also recommend J. B. Priestley’s Lost Empires, Ferdia Lennon’s Dangerous Exploits, and Doris Langley Moore’s A Game of Snakes and Ladders.  In The Parasites, two of the children, Maria and Niall, grow up to have careers in theater and music.  Maria becomes a famous actress, Nial a popular songwriter, and  poor Celia, who loves to draw, is stuck as the caregiver of their alcoholic Pappy. (Mama died in a tragic accident.)

But it’s not just the complicated relationships – and Maria’s and Niall’s is the most complex, being quasi-incestuous – but the narcissism, the selfishness, and the histrionics. 

Take the opening of the novel, written in the first person plural. Du Maurier uses the first person plural at the beginning of several segments.

It was Charles who called us the parasites.  The way he said it was surprising, and sudden; he was one of those quiet reserved sort of men, not given to talking much or stating his opinion, unless upon the most ordinary facts of day by day, so that his outburst…had the force of an explosion. 

Are “we” indeed parasites? Much of this novel is comical – it is not a soap opera – but Charles doesn’t believe acting and song-writing are real work. Mind you, Maria is always acting, so one sees why he tires of it.  In fact, she married  Charles so she could be called the”Honorable”: she loves being an “Hon.” And Niall is a popular songwriter, whose career was boosted by his parents’ eccentric friend, Freada. At a posh school, the music teacher had said he had no talent. Running away from school (several times) turned out to be a wise decision.

Perhaps there is most hope for Celia, who, after years of looking after Pappy and being at Maria’s beck and call, achieves her own creative goal – and it is completely free of the theater.

A brilliant, flamboyant book.  One of my best rereads this spring.

Maria Semple’s new novel, Go Gentle, is charming, funny, and a bit over-the-top.  The heroine, Adora Hazzard, is the author of a best-selling book about stoicism and is leading the good life with her daughter and dog in a chic New York apartment. She has organized a whimsical “Coven” of single and divorced women who live on her floor of the apartment building:  they save money by sharing a dog-walker, splitting packages of vegetables, and even save on ballet and theater tickets

But even if you quote Marcus Aurelius as you walk down the street, you will run into trouble eventually. She loves her work as a philosophy tutor to the sons of a wealthy philanthropist-art collector, but is haunted by an episode of sexual harassment that happened during her stint as a comedy writer in L.A.

At first I didn’t understand how this long episode fit in with the rest of the book. It almost seems like a self-contained novella. Around the turn of the century, Adora’s fellow TV comedy writers, all male, made a bet about how far one of them could sexually maul her during a meeting.  The humiliation ends in her being fired, because the network didn’t want gossip or trouble, and she is given a huge sum of money in exchange for signing an NDA.  And so she went back to school and got her Ph.D. in philosophy.

But it is a turning point for Adora. She reinvents herself as a philosopher. And, of course, we see that Semple can write seriously, just as Adora isn’t restricted to comedy.

Adora stoically understands that, statistically, she is unlikely to marry again. But when she meets a charming, handsome guy, we think we’re in for a romance. But there’s something wrong there, maybe…

And then the novel turns into a mystery, in which Adora tries to resolve her suspicion of an art theft, or similar crime, in her employer’s collection. S

Go Simple is a great read, if slightly baggy. Semple is a  great comic writer, and this is by far her most complex novel.

Notes from the Woods: What Do You Do When Your Friends Hate Thoreau?

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Many years ago, when I lived in a gray polluted city in the Rust Belt, I was startled to learn that people hated Thoreau.

Mind you, my closest friend was a poet with a degree in philosophy who was as enraptured by Thoreau as I was. We loved the idea of living in tune with nature and enjoyed walks in the woods. On a camping trip, we learned that we loved trees but feared ticks and wildlife. A scary raccoon, who did not look like a Disney character, wandered into our camp. We also learned that no amount of Off! can keep the mosquitoes away. 

But our weak camping talents aside, Thoreau made us see the world differently.  You can turn to almost any page in Walden and take inspiration.  Here’s one of my favorites.

 This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.  As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, and though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me.

Now that it’s spring, I plan to take some evening walks. Thank you, Thoreau, for the inspiration.

But some of my non-poetic citified friends hated Thoreau. One day, I happened to mention my love of Walden to a charming posh friend over lunch.

She fumed. “What a hypocrite that guy was!  If he’d had to really live in the woods, he wouldn’t have lasted a day.  His mother did his laundry, and he came home for dinner.”   

“Well, I never heard anything about his laundry, but he did live in the woods!”  I said, laughing. “And he’s such a great writer.”

Captain Nemo has a correction to make about the laundry. “More likely it was Emerson’s wife who did his laundry!”

On another occasion, my friend and I stopped in Concord because she wanted to tour Louisa May Alcott’s house.  I would have loved to visit Walden Pond as well, and perhaps Emerson’s house, if it’s still there, but decided it was best not to mention the Transcendentalists, who were essentially radical 19th-century hippies. (It turned out my friend was a Republican, so I can only suppose Thoreau was a threat to the economy.)

Another of my friends, a devout Methodist stay-at-home mom, who spent most of her time supervising her children’s homework and writing their papers, completely lost it when I mentioned Thoreau.  She, too, was upset about Thoreau’s laundry!

This must be one of those bizarre complaints that get passed down from female generation to female generation of non-Thoreau fans. If I lived in the woods, damned straight I’d take my laundry to Mom.

Anyway, I recommend an excellent new PBS documentary about Thoreau. This film may send you back to the books, and may even give you strength to cope with the modern world.

If You Have One Friend…  What Would Cicero Say?

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Cicero

“You’re lucky if you have one friend,” Dad said.

This was pessimistic even for a pessimist; yet one of my poet friends described Dad as the loneliest man he knew. Near the end of his life, Dad couldn’t decide whether to apologize or spit in the faces of foes. (He and his second wife were quarreling, and he had an ongoing disagreement with a tenant.) Even if he were friendless, and with a sinking heart I realized that might be the case, I didn’t think he should declaim it publicly.  In his 80s he was still active, working out at the gym and singing karaoke.  As a child i remember his singing:  “If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady…” ( I used these lyrics to teach the subjunctive in Latin class.)

Friendship, and even casual acquaintance, has been a great support  in my life.  Mind you, this isn’t the amicitia (“friendship”) valued by Cicero, a famous Roman orator, in his slightly priggish dialogue/essay, De Amicitia (On Friendship), written in the first century BCE..

Cicero uses the word amicitia more than 200 times in his writings, but the historical use of amicitia, used by Caesar, Livy, Sallust, Pliny, Tacitus, and others, describes a league or alliance of nations or politicians. Amicitia is a political alliance, or a buisness relationship, not necessarily a friendship.

In Cicero’s treatise, the main speaker, Laelius, explains that amicitia is lofty, honorable, and philosophical.  You must mix only with the best people, because they are the only ones who understand friendship, and you must discuss only the loftiest subjects. In addition, you must be honest and critical to the point of cruelty.  For reasons unclear to this common woman, it is necessary to speak the exact truth to your amici (friends) about their faults, with no shilly-shallying around. 

After a chat with Laelius, one imagines his friends rushing out of the forum holding back tears. The Roman matrons would roll their eyes. That Laelius again!  He should be locked up!  But one thing I can say about Laelius;  he speaks out firmly against slander. 

 Of course Cicero hated to see the fall of the republic and opposed the amicitia of the First Triumvirate, an alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.  And then there was the Second Triumvirate, the amicitia of  Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian (who later became the emperor Augustus).

As for Cicero’s De Amicitia, it cannot be compared with other great ancient philosophical treatises. Cicero is remembered primarily as the greatest orator of his time, an elegant, witty writer and complex thinker. But his philosophy is simplistic. I respect his trying to write it: he had endless energy. But my reaction to De Amicitia is “meh” – because he can do so much better.

Why We Want to Live in an English Novel: The Influence of Rumer Godden, E. Nesbit & Margaret Kennedy

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I would love to live in an English novel. Not the novels of the UK in the 21st century, but the English novels of the 20th century. From Rumer Godden’s A Fugue in Time to Margaret Kennedy’s Lucy Carmichael to E. Nesbit’s The Lark, I am prepared to travel to unreality. 

THE TWEE & ANTI-TWEE DILEMMA

I don’t know what twee is, but I suspect my psychelelic lit-trip is twee.  Here I am, a woman from another time, dressed in old tatty jeans and a Take Back the Night t-shirt (how young I was!), reading while I sip tea out of a bone china mug from Fortnum and Mason. I had two bone china mugs, but one broke.  Now the broken one is a receptacle for old political buttons. And I’m planning a surreal book trip in which I drink tea. Twee?

WHAT’S IN MY FICTIONAL LUGGAGE?

A twin set and sensible shoes, tea bags in case the security guards bust me for loose tea, because it might be mistaken for marijuana, and The Oxford Book of English Verse,so I can catch the allusions to poetry in English novels.

WHICH NOVELS SHALL I LIVE IN? 

Rumer Godden’s A Fugue in Time (1945).  Born in India and educated in England, Rumer Godden taught ballet in India, traveled widely in Asia, and eventually moved back to England.  In this little-known novel, A Fugue in Time, Godden asks the question: what happens if you lose your home? Rollo Dane, a retired general, is about to lose the family house, because the owner will not renew the 99-year lease: he plans to sell the house to a developer. 

And then Rollo’s grand-niece, Griselda, a service woman in the U.S. army, shows up looking for a place to live in London. He is reluctant to let her stay, but she brings vibrancy, energy, and hope into the house. Rollo spends his days dreaming about the past, remembering the different generations who inhabited it during the 99 years. As is common in Godden’s books (see China Court), time-lines are blurred with memories. This is partly a ghost story, with much repetition of poetry, a retelling of family history, and allusions to T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster.

Margaret Kennedy’s Lucy Carmichael (1951).  Recently reissued in Penguin’s The Mermaid Collection, this is my favorite of Kennedy’s novels. Every image is so vivid you almost need sunglasses, and every sentence is exquisite.  Kennedy tells the story of Lucy Carmichael, a jilted bride who struggles back from grief when she takes a job at an Arts Institute.

A charming Oxford graduate, Lucy fell in love with Patrick, a best-selling travel writer, and he jilts her at the church. She thinks she has missed a phone call, or a telegram has gone astray, or that he has been in a car accident, until it becomes obvious that he simply left. Lucy’s best friend, Melissa, another Oxford graduate, is also devastated:  she had never trusted Partrick and feels she should have warned Lucy. But then, fortunately, Lucy gets a job at a provincial Arts Institute established by a philanthropic millionaire.

Although Lucy has no work experience, she is hired to be the assistant director of the drama department on the basis of her Oxford degree. Because the well-known drama department director is away lecturing in Europe, she must direct Hamlet, which is comical, because she discovers mistakes only at rehearsals. The students are fond of her: they gamely cooperate when she changes the blocking.

And Lucy befriends faculty members, most of whom are much older, many of them eccentric. But she can’t keep silent when she realizes the director of the institute is conspiring to fire the most talented and expensive employees, a famous Jewish painter, who is a refugee from Germany, and the well-known drama director, who is often on the road lecturing.

Lucy stands up for what she thinks is right and learns about the dangers of politics. What will her future be? What will the future of the other anxious Institute employees be? I loved the characters, and this beautifully-written book is just what I needed on a very cold day in April.

E. Nesbit’s The Lark. Best-known for her children’s fantasy novels and her Fabian socialist politics, Nesbit’s adult novel, The Lark (1922), is a masterpiece.  Two young women, Jane and Lucilla, learn that their guardian Mr. Rochester has lost all their money.  (Prepare for romance: the guardian is named Mr. Rochester and Jane is the name of one of the girls.)  

And so Jane and Lucilla move into a charming cottage with a beautiful garden, and support themselves by selling the flowers. And when all the flowers are gone, they find a larger, somewhat run-down house, with a larger garden.  Utterly charming from beginning to end, and by far the best of Nesbit’s adult books. it celebrates her love of gardens.

The AI Question:  Do We Need Artificial Intelligence?

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I deny knowledge of AI, since I do not quite know how it works, or how it differs from the internet. That may be because in graduate school the T.A.’s (teaching assistants) were called A.I.’s (assistant instructors), so I always think of teaching.  Perhaps the science fiction (SF) scholars insisted that T.A.’s be called AI’s. There was a lot of whimsy.

In many contemporary novels, AI plays a prominent role. It can be used for good or evil, de[pending on the writer. In Paul Bradley’s thriller, The Confessions, LLIAM, an international AI system, shuts down for ethical reasons after it becomes sentient. World chaos results.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s SF mystery, The Tainted Cup, has a magical view of AI. An assistant detective, Din, is magically altered so he can collect every detail at crime scenes. HIs magic sounds exactly like AI. He and his boss, a psychic genius, use the data to solve crimes.

In Ian McEwan’s novel, What We Can Know, few humans have survived a worldwide catastrophe.   AI still exists, albeit in a simpler, less dangerous form. One character consults an AI chatbot about  his quest for a famous writer’s lost poem. The bot tells him he must visit the site personally, because you cannot find everything on the internet.

Although I like to say I don’t know about AI, one can’t avoid the articles and essays.  Last summer, The New York Times published an essay by an English professor who had experimented with a chatbot.  She found it useful for writing email, which had taken a lot of her time. And once, when she was overwhelmed by work and family, the chatbot comforted her.  “It’s hard to be a good mom.” But one gathers that she didn’t continue to use it.

On the internet everything is virtual, so why not have a chatbot as best friend? Yes, I’m appalled, but in a commercial for a chatbot, obviously aimed at young people, this is a selling point. You can tell it everything. As if humans didn’t already spend too much time on the internet, what with phones, tablets, computers.  

Certainly there are many problems with AI.  Students use it to write papers. Instead of trawling  the internet to do research, they ask chatbots to do it for them. And then the chatbot can write the paper.

I am horrified but I wonder: how does this differ from students’ plagiarism of papers at websites in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?   Some professors – the ones who weren’t exhausted – spent hours online trying to figure out if papers were plagiarized.  Now they try to learn if the papers were written by AI.

The real tragedy is that people miss out on the joy of thinking, the joy of research, and the joy of writing. It’s a different world now, and I wonder if the changes are for the greater good.

So hope for the best, expect the worst – but try to hope for the best!