The 40s: The Story of A Decade from The New Yorker

A generous friend brought me a book the other day. As you can imagine, I rarely turn down the gift of a book. It was one he wanted to pass on and thought I would like.

Oh, yes.

The book contains a collection of fine pieces from that illustrious magazine The New Yorker and is entitled The 40s: The Story of a Decade.

And what a decade it was. During the first half the world was at war and the second half was spent beginning recovery from that war.

I whooped out loud with glee when I opened the book to the Table of Contents. Oh, the riches. Here are pieces written during WWII by E.B. White, A.J. Liebling, along with John Hersey’s profile on the then Lieutenant John F. Kennedy.

There are post-war pieces by Edmund Wilson, Lillian Ross, and Rebecca West’s report on the Nuremberg trials.

And, oh, the section of Character Studies: Walt Disney, Edith Piaf, Duke Ellington, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Of course I read the book section first. Clifton Fadiman muses on Ernest Hemingway’s latest offering For Whom the Bell Tolls (he finds it to be a much deeper book than The Sun Also Rises), and Lionel Trilling gets a glimpse of the future in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a book he found to be “profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating.” It is compelling to read these reviews written so soon after the now-famous books were just hitting the market.

There is also commentary on film, theatre, art and architecture, musical events, and fashion.

And of course it wouldn’t be The New Yorker without poetry - verses by William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop - and fiction - Carson McCullers, John Cheever, and the first publication of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

Irresistible! You can see why I am excited to have this book at hand. History combined with stellar writing. So much more convenient - even at almost 700 pages - than a mile-high pile of ten years’ worth of magazines.

It is one I will dip into slowly and savor every word.

P.S I am quite a fan of The New Yorker, especially its early years. You can read three of my previous posts on the writers from that era here, here, and here.

Books about Books

Kevin Smokler

I love reading books about other books... Clifton Fadiman (The Lifetime Reading Plan), Michael Dirda (anything by him), Nancy Pearl (Book Lust), Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris). 

So it is no surprise that the discovery of a new book, Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School, sent me running to the library to check it out. Though it has been a while since I was in high school and I may or may not have read any of the books author Kevin Smokler revisits, I do believe I will enjoy this book. 

Here is a bit from his introduction:

Either we can be the kind of reader that read Invisible Man in high school and never looked at it again, or we can be the kind of nut who reads it once a quarter and gets angry when someone doesn't appreciate it exactly as much as we do.

Those of us who love the simple act of reading, I suspect, are somewhere in between. Practical Classics is my attempt to find a place for this kind of reader, someone who loves to have worlds opened up by books but finds the act of reading as joyous as fainting into a chocolate cake.

Who knew there would be cake!

Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be

This is Jonathan Letham - he with the neat bookshelves in yesterday's entry - quoted in Unpacking My Library:

I hate lending, or borrowing -- if you want me to read a book, tell me about it, or buy me a copy outright. Your loaned edition sits in my house like a real grievance. And in lieu of lending books, I buy extra copies of those I want to give away, which gives me the added pleasure of buying books I love again and again.

I surely understand the idea of a borrowed book sitting as a grievance. I have one I borrowed from a neighbor, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, that rests on my bedside table that, honestly, I do want to read, but have just not gotten around to beginning it. I really must give it back.

As for lending books, even though I now have a library lending kit of my own (see it here), I may have learned my lesson. Oddly enough, of all the books that people have borrowed - and never returned - there are two that I wish I still had. I lent Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña to a college dorm mate. Never saw it again. I doubt if I would even want to read it now, but still its loss rankles. Talk about keeping a resentment!

The other book was an early edition of Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan. I have since replaced it with a later edition, but I would like to have my first purchase back on my shelves. Well, just because...

I have one book that I read as a library book, The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I loved it and bought a copy of to give to a relative. I don't know if she ever read it or not - she said she did but she was prone to saying the nice thing which is different from the true thing. She eventually gave it back to me. I am glad to have it.

Is there a book you have borrowed and never returned that 'sits like a real grievance'? Or are your grieving the loss of a book that you lent to a someone?