Really Rapid Wrap-up of Rather Recent Reading

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to write a post. The biggest part of my problem has actually been the reading. I set up my yearly schedule assuming that a history book or biography will come in at around six-hundred pages. But here in the last weeks of the year, when I don’t have much leeway, I opened up this year’s volume in the Oxford History of the United States and found out it was nine-hundred pages long and then started the biography of Grant that I had chosen only to find that it was nine-hundred sixty pages long. These surprises form part of the adventure of e-reading. If I had purchased hard copies of these books, I would have known by their thickness to set aside extra days.

Anyway, I’m packing two months of reading into one post today.

I’ll begin the quick catch-up with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I reread books III and IV this year, and it finally sank in (perhaps because of something I read this year about Richardson’s Clarissa) that Spenser isn’t trying to prove anything about virtues but simply aims to present the reader with examples of each selected virtue and its opposite(s) through the interweaving stories of his knights, damsels, wizards, gods, and monsters. By a multitude of examples, we see in book III, for instance, that a life of charity is simply and obviously better than a life of hatred. I love the language and the stories, and I enjoyed reading the unfinished epic enough to read it again, but only now did I really understand this plan and purpose.

Next up, Trollope’s Castle Richmond. I have to give a bit away, but only as much of the early plot as you might find on the back cover of an edition of the book. Right off the bat, Herbert Fitzgerald becomes engaged to Clara Desmond. When the two kids get engaged at the beginning of the book, you know something is going to go very wrong. It turns out that Herbert's mother was married previously to a cad who abandoned her and then, based on extensive research, seemed to have died. But twenty years or so later, the first husband shows up, arranges a secret meeting with Sir Timothy Fitzgerald, Herbert’s father, and blackmails him. Now, within the accepted norms of the time, this situation makes for an interesting, tense plot. But, wow! Why was this normal at the time? Why is the honor of Herbert’s mother dependent on whether this creep really died or not? (A later twist that I won’t reveal shows how really arbitrary this view is.) Why is Sir Timothy so convinced that his wife is too frail even to hear the news? (Thankfully, Trollope is not convinced of that chauvinistic view at all.) And why can’t they just admit the truth to the public, thus taking away the blackmailer’s power?

Now for Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. The two volumes I've read in the Oxford History of the U. S. that seem to me to be superbly written (Battle Cry of Freedom and What Hath God Wrought) both won the Pulitzer prize for history. The two that I enjoyed without going crazy over (you’ll have to ask my wife about all the strategies she developed in dealing with my daily outpourings of enthusiasm for What Hath God Wrought) were both finalists for the prize (The Glorious Cause and Empire of Liberty). Richard White’s offering, covering 1865-1896, was not a finalist for the prize and I . . . yeah, I think I just have to say that I didn’t like it. So I guess my critical eye for good nonfiction writing, honed over decades of grading papers, is in line with the Pulitzer committee. (My wife can’t figure out why I read nine-hundred pages of a book I didn’t like.) On virtually every page, I came across a sentence whose place in the argument of its paragraph I could not discern. Many times I encountered paragraphs whose occulted relation to the chapter, I could not understand. Much of the information was interesting, but it’s presentation was such a jumble! A typical example: “The United States was still the country Mark Twain took so much pained delight in, and it produced figures hard to imagine until they had actually emerged.” Mark Twain had not been mentioned for many chapters; I don’t know what singular vision of the country Twain had; I don’t know why his delight in the country was pained; I don’t know why the personage about to be introduced, Jacob Coxey, was so hard to imagine; and I can’t conceive why the existence of eccentric people is harder to imagine in a country painfully loved by its leading author. How did the greatest publisher in the world make a deal with this guy?

Jacob Abbott’s King Alfred of England, was the only biography of Alfred the Great I could find at the time. (This isn’t the long one.) I thought I was in big trouble when this nineteenth-century book began with a declaration of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over everyone else in the world. But it eventually settled in and provided me, surprisingly, with exactly what I was looking for: a coherent telling of the life of the great king with careful notes about discrepancies in the chronicles, and arguments about what in all the tales we can believe and what truths we can infer from the parts we can’t believe. I loved seeing that Abbott conducted his most detailed inspection of variants in dealing with the story in which Alfred, hiding out from the momentarily overpowering Danes and disguised as a farm hand, is scolded by the wife of the house for burning some bread. Here’s another thing I’m never going to do (as SNL’s couple of Sammies would say): write an opera about Alfred the Great in which his time at the farm takes up all of Act II.

I end with Ron Chernow’s Grant. (This is the long one.) Both the book and the President deserve longer, more glowing reviews than I have time to give them today. About the author, I’ll just say that his biography of Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the musical and that he went on to be a very active historical adviser during the writing and development of the show. About the President (I already knew so much about him as a general, my main hope in reading this book was to learn more about his years in the White House), I’ll only say this: Voter suppression during his eight years as Chief Executive didn’t just mean requiring a literacy test or purging registration rolls or closing polling places. Thousands of black voters in the South were simply murdered (together with a few white Republicans). And Grant sent in troops to fight against these outrages when the states did nothing.

I’m going through my schedule for 2023 now and checking the length of each potentially hefty book. So I should have fewer days next fall when I have to read in panicked overdrive.