“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” That is Kurt Vonnegut in the introduction to Mother Night. The story is about an American spy in Nazi Germany, who pretends to be a Nazi because, he is, after all, a spy, but the American government can’t acknowledge that he is working for the government because he is, after all, a … [Read more...] about I Am Who You Perceive
Great Books
Kipling the American Author
Is Rudyard Kipling an American? Let’s start with the obvious fact about Kipling: he is out of fashion these days.About the only thing most people know about him is the title of one of his poems. Yeah, you know which poem. Nobody actually even bothers to read the poem any more. Everyone just knows: Kipling is bad, very bad. I have spent years trying to convince people that Kipling is well worth reading. I have spent years trying to convince people that Kipling is not at all what they … [Read more...] about Kipling the American Author
The Worst Wodehouse Novel
P. G. Wodehouse is one of the greatest writers of all time. He has over 100 books to his credit. There are endless web pages devoted to telling you which are the best Wodehouse books. But, what is the worst Wodehouse book? My current candidate for that (dis)honor: Not George Washington. One of Wodehouse’s early books (1907), co-authored with Herbert Westbrook, it is an autobiographically informed fictional account of a struggling writer seeking to make his way in … [Read more...] about The Worst Wodehouse Novel
Cultivating Awe
Which book meets this description: “could be read in an hour and its effect was like a punch in the solar plexus,” whose discoveries were thrown “like a bomb into the arena of the learned world”? Would you like to read that book? Is it even possible that such a book could be written today? Do wonder and amazement still exist in the 21st century? When was the last time you were awestruck, literally struck with an overwhelming sense of awe, about something newly … [Read more...] about Cultivating Awe
The Killer Inside All of Us
Stanley Kubrick described it as “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” That is the same Kubrick who directed a film based on A Clockwork Orange. So, what book is more “chilling and believable” than that Burgess’ novel? Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. First published in 1952 and now included in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. Lou Ford is the … [Read more...] about The Killer Inside All of Us
Becoming Immortal
Is the desire to be immortal a universal constant? I’ve never really thought about it like this before, but a combination of a short story by Hawthorne and a volume of short stories by Doyle, has me wondering about the desire for immortality. Hawthorne’s “The Devil in Manuscript” is a quick tale of an author who cannot find a publisher (he lived in the pre-blog era) and in despair hurls his life’s work into a fireplace. A fire roars up in the fireplace, sending flame onto the … [Read more...] about Becoming Immortal