10 Books

Over on Facebook, there was a meme asking people to post 10 books that have stuck with them.  Without over-thinking it.  So here's my 10, in no particular order:

Duane Decker, Rebel in Right Field. Right in the middle of this baseball book (published in 1958) aimed at early-teens, there's a rant against major league baseball's reserve clause. Made me, at age 10 or so, stop and think.

J. D. Salinger three ways:
The Catcher in the Rye (which I have found unreadable as an adult).
Franny and Zooey
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Seymour is an amazing portrait of a man having something of a breakdown.

Michael Harrington, The Other America. 1963 (?), and my first real acknowledgement that American poverty was something to be very concerned about.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. Two amazing essays that took me into a life I could never have imagined.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.

Rex Stout, The Doorbell Rang. A mystery, but mostly memorable for its rather subversive view of the FBI.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep.  The opening paragraph might be the best opening ever to a mystery novel.

Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars. Two brilliant essays on elementary/secondary and higher education. I read this while contemplating committing grad school, and it helped shape my view of what it means to be a member of the community of scholars

Window and shadow

More photoblogging at Crooked Timber by Chris Bertram, and my version of the topic.

 

 

 

I took this in Milan in 2005.

Photoblogging again

Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram continues his Sunday photoblogging, with a beautiful shot of Severn Beach.  I can't come close to that, but I am fond of this shot of Lago Bolsena, in Tuscany.



 



War Memorials: France, 2000 and Italy, 2002

At Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram continues his Sunday photoblogging series, with War Memorials.  He posts an aerial photo of "...the Arlington West memorial at Santa Monica beach..."  I have a couple from World War II.  The first is a plaque on a wall in Paris, commemorating a Yugoslavian patriot; the second, at a cemetery in Pitigliano (a Tuscan hill town), in memory of one of the Jews of the city who were deported.

Paris

 

 

Pitigliano

 



Photo cycles

Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram is photoblogging bicycles on the Via Cavour, in Florence.  I have no bicycle pictures, but I do have motorcycles (on the Via Veneto) in Rome:

And in Pisa (by the river):

It's July 4

And here are some of the people who were born on the 4th of July:

Ashikaga, Shogun of Japan (d. 1367)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Guiseppe Garibaldi
Hiram Walker
Stephen Foster
Calvin Coolidge
Rube Goldberg
Gertrude Lawrence
Meyer Lansky
Lionel Trilling
Jimmie Rodgers
Tokyo Rose
Manolete (the bullfighter)
Abagail Van Buren
Ann Landers
Eva Marie Saint
Gina Lollobrigida
Neil Simon
George Steinbrenner
Chuck Tanner
Bill Withers
Ron Kovic
Morganna Roberts (“The Kissing Bandit”)
Pam Shriver

(http://www.historyorb.com/today/birthdays.php)

Robert Goldsborough

Beginning in 1986, Robert Goldsborough published 7 Nero Wolfe novels (with the permission of the estate of Rex Stout) in 8 years; more recently, he has written two more.  I have them all, and I was glad to be able to read new Wolfe mysteries, but there was always something missing (the two most recent ones are better in that respect).  After a while, I thought I knew what it was--Goldsborough was unable to get Archie's "voice" right, and, since everything is seen from his viewpoint, everything was just slightly off. 

So I was interested in seeing what Goldsborough would do with a character of his own, and I now have had a chance to get into the Steve ("Snap") Malek books.  Malek is a reported for the Chicago Tribune (where Goldsborough worked for years), working out of  the press room of police headquarters, in the 1930s and 1940s.  The first book (of 5) in the series is Three Strikes, You're Dead, involving the murder of a wealth Chicago political reformer about the make a run for mayor in 1937.  In the second, Shadow of the Bomb, two physicists at the University of Chicago die--because of their participation in the atomic bomb research underway?  Or for some other reason?  (Enrico Fermi makes a cameo appearance.)

Malek in an interesting character (and I have and will read the next three books), but, at least in the first two, the endings are somewhat anti-climactic.  In both books, Malek becomes involved in his own investigation of the murders (rather than being just a reporter).  But, also in both cases, his investigations (while they uncover some interesting things) never lead him to the solutions of the crimes.  In both cases, the murderers take actions (attacks on Malek) that reveal his identity.  But in neither case did Malek, in fact, have a clue as to what was actually going on.

This is, ultimately, unsatisfactory.  If we are to remain interested in the activities of an amateur sleuth, that sleuth must (it seems to me), ultimately, uncover the truth.  To have the truth revealed only because the murderer was too incompetent to finish Malek off is, well, a let-down.  But, for now, I'm off to read #3, A Death in Pilsen.

UPDATE: 11 June 20144: Having finished A Death in Pilsen, I'm sorry to say that we now have three instances of Malek failing to solve a mystery.  In this case, the murderer commits suicide and leaves an extremely detailed suicide note, explaining why and how the murder was accomplished.  Oh, well...two more shots for Malek actually to detect something...