Gary Marvin Davison, Books Read, Winter 2026
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Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward [originally published in 1887]; H. G. V. Ogden, translator (Garden City, NY, Dover Publications, 1996)
This novel is the vehicle for the expression of Bellamy’s vision of a future in which the United States operates on the basis of a society with a dynamic, demonetized economy in which every person gives his vocational or professional talent and skill for the communal good, in which abundant free time is used in highly cultured, joyful pursuits, and in which violence or the threat of war have vanished in a world much under the influence of the United States model.
The plot via which the vision of perfect society is conveyed concerns a wealthy scion of Bostonian society of 1887 (the year the novel was published) who is transported to the year 2000, by which time United States society has been transformed and elevated greatly.
I read this book, as in the case of More’s Utopia (see below) in conversation with my son, Ryan, concerning the defining elements of the perfect society.
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Jack El-Hai, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of the Minds [originally published in 1704] (NY: Public Affairs/Perseus, 2013)
In this nonfiction work, El-Hai explores the relationship between the American psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley and the Nazi prisoners--- especially Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring--- awaiting trial at Nuremberg whom he examined to determine if commonalities in personality abetted the formation of Nazi policy.
I read this book after reading a review of, and anticipating viewing, the film, Nuremberg, based on the El-Hai work.
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Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (New York: Little, Brown, 2019).
This work examines the often overlooked influence of Christianity, in Holland’s view, in the development of secular as well as religious society in the Western world.
This book was a Christmas gift to me from son Ryan.
The book is enormously thought-provoking, critically both admired and thematically contested, and will bring forth much commentary by me in weeks to come.
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Thomas More, Utopia [originally published in 1516]; H. G. V. Ogden, translator (New York: Appleton-Crofts, 1949) details the admirable fictional island society of Utopia via the voice of one Raphael, an acquaintance of More’s friend, the diplomat Peter Giles, in an excursion that More and Giles took to Antwerp, Belgium. Raphael was along on the 1497 voyage of Amerigo Vespucci before at one point venturing forth from the main group with his own party, discovering among other peoples the highly admirable Utopians.
There is no private property on the island of Utopia and citizens have equal status. Both women and men are engaged vocationally mainly in agriculture while specializing also in a trade. The society is more patriarchal than that imagined by Bellamy, and war has been minimized rather than abolished, but this vision is remarkable for having been published in 1516.
I read this book, as in the case of Bellamy’s Looking Backward (see below) under the inspiration of conversation with my son, Ryan, concerning the defining elements of the perfect society.
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Captain J. B. L. Noel, Through Tibet to Everest; foreward by Chris Bonington [originally published in 1927] (London: Hoddard and Stoughton Publications, 1989)
Ryan bestowed this book on mom Barbara as a Christmas gift; I, too, took an interest in this volume given to My Beloved.
Noel presents in this book a riveting account of two early attempts, in 1922 and in 1924, to situate climbers at the top of Mt. Everest. These attempted were meticulously planned, with support crews totaling approximately 150 people to establish three major camps to feed and shelter the climbers and other personnel, cook nutritious meals, and serve as advance scouts for assessing weather conditions and current positioning of boulders and icebergs. But in each event lives of climbers were lost; in the latter climb of 2024, two climbers may have made the Everest peak before disappearing forever off cliffs or into avalanches. The eventual successful climb of Mt. Everest of Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay utilized an abundance of information from the chronicled episodes of the 1922 and 1924 expeditions, including the photographs taken by author J. B. L Noel.
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Jonathon Swift, A Tale of a Tub [originally published in 1704] (Minneola, NY; Dover Publications, 2017)
This is the major satiric novel written by Jonathon Swift
before Gulliver’s Travels; the purported
plot presents the interactions of the three brothers Peter (as in St. Peter, representing
Roman Catholicism), Martin (as in Martin Luther, representing the Lutheran
Reformation), and Jack (as in John Calvin and Jack Leyden, representing
Protestant movements inspired by and in contrast to the Reformation of Luther).
The father of Peter, Martin, and Jack upon his death left
a will the major instruction of which was to leave completely unaltered coats
that he gave each of them; but in their
competition to wrest the bequeathed fortune away from each other, to gain
prominence of recognition for their viewpoints, and in response to conditions
in which they found themselves that made alterations of the coats advantageous, the brothers authored contorted reasons why certain alterations could be
construed as consistent with their father’s otherwise clearly explicit
instructions.
The novel therefore is a grand metaphor for the struggle
between the Roman Catholic Church and two major strains of the Protestant
Reformation. Tellingly, though, Swift
leaves unassessed and unopposed the claims of Anglicanism, the institution of
which he served as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland.
Swift’s quirky satirical style, though, results in many
labeled “digressions,” that in fact take up more space than the escapades of
Peter, Martin, and Jack. In these
“digressions," Swift lampoons the literary establishment of the early 18th
century, clearly viewing the concerns of many imminent people of letters to be
errant, irrelevant, and pretentious.
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Tom Winton, The Riders (New York: Scribner, 1994)
This is a sensational novel that came to my attention as the selection for a book club of which son Ryan is a part.
The protagonist of the novel is Frederick Michael Scully, known to almost everyone simply as Scully. In the early going he establishes friendship with Peter Keneally, a postal carrier in the small Irish town and rural vicinity where Scully is rehabilitating a timeworn house and barn on property that Scully bought in deference to the wishes of wife Jennifer, who with six year-old daughter Billie has lingered in Australia to sell the home occupied before the prospective move to Ireland.
Winton paces the novel patiently, with great powers of descriptive detail, in the early going featuring the hardworking Scully accomplishing the nearly impossible task, with generous help from Peter, of successfully making the house and property livable. Scully rambles from the property infrequently but on one occasion is drawn to the mysterious appearance of horse riders dressed in appropriate garb for converging on the remnants of a medieval castle prominently positioned on the landscape.
The move to Ireland is the latest in a series of peripatetic wonderings of Scully, Jennifer, and Billie in a life that has seen them living in Greece, Italy, and France, in demonstration of their unconventional inclinations and as Jennifer searches for an identity as an artist who proves frustratingly to have only middling talent. Scully loves Jennifer deeply and assents along the way to her destination preferences and pines for the day when she and Billie join him in Ireland.
But here the novel shifts from the anticipated reunion to the stark reality that Billie arrives alone on the appointed reunion day, inducing Scully to lead Billie to destinations in Greece, Italy, France (Paris), and Amsterdam in a vain quest to find Jennifer. Billie apparently knows the reasons for her mother’s flight from the family but is too traumatized to relate what she knows.
The novel shifts eventually into a frenetic mode that finds both Billie and Scully physically and emotionally injured, leaving a trail of death and turmoil that descends into an abject degradation for Scully--- including unsavory moments with Irma, a German of perceptibly dual and interacting goodhearted and unseemly personality parts whom Billie and Scully first meet in Greece.
Billie, wise beyond her years but a child nevertheless, assumes the leadership of the frantic duo as her father gradually descends into emotional and physical debauchery, in striking contrast to his formerly behaviorally admirable and dependable self. Billie and Scully eventually are met and transported to the rehabilitated farm by the faithful Peter Keneally in a return to Ireland.
Lingering questions at novel’s end include,
Why was Billie unable to reveal the details of Jennifer’s behavior and disappearance; why at no point did Scully press Bilie for the pertinent account?
Where in fact did Jennifer go, what did she do, and what was her emotional state in abandoning the family?
And who exactly are those medieval riders who appear for the first time to Billie and for a second time to Scully in the mysterious deep of the night at novel’s end?
For me, the novel most prominently is an exercise of exquisite literary power with a message that life ever holds the unexpected, that genuine love is to be treasured most of all, and on the basis of love one must go forth to make of life whatever one can, knowing that idyll and chaos are equally possible.
And as to those riders:
Are they, as they appear to be, ghosts returning to life as previously practiced, hovering around the dilapidated castle relic as tangible symbol of that past?
What do they portend for those living in the present?
Are they symbols of ineffable life in which the real, surreal, comfort, unease, order, and disorder abidingly comingle?
With the final scene of the riders positioned at novel’s end, the latter question seems to argue for an answer in the affirmative.
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Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein [originally published in 1818] (Garden City, New York: Dover Publications, 1994)
I read this novel the first time after watching the most recent cinematic version of the famous story.
I admired Wollestonecraft’s writing greatly and found her original story to be superior to the films, the meaning of which is not mainly danger of technology that escapes control by human beings--- but rather the potential for beneficence and destruction that resides within all living souls, with potential’s realization depending entirely on life circumstances and the presence in one’s life of those who either give or withhold love.
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The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Yale Shakespeare, edited by Wilbur L. Cross and Tucker Brooke (New York: Barnes & Noble/Yale University Press, 1993)
I read this magnificent classic for the fifteenth or so time in anticipation of attending the superlative most recent staging at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Zhongguo Yuyan (Chinese Moral Tales), Series Volume Number One, editedd by Hsi-chen Wu, Li -cheng Kuo, and Teh-ming Yeh (Taipei, Taiwan: National Publications 1977)
I am rereading this and the other volumes in this series, featuring eighty stories in all, as I have many times for an efficient vocabulary review of Chinese, this time in preparation of another trip to Taiwan in late March and early April 2026.
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Gary Marvin Davison, Books Projected for Reading in Late Winter/Spring 2026
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Slavenka Drakulic, How We Survive Communism and Even Laughed About It (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993)
This is an intriguing book that I found in the gift shop of the Museum of Russian art in Minnesota.
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Wolfgang Benz, A Concise History of the Third Reich; Thomas Dunlap, translator (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006
This will be a companion piece to the El-Hai work mentioned above and a concise review of events chronicled in William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I have read twice.
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Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (New York: Vintage/Random House, 2004)
This work was mentioned by Ryan when I related my reading of the similarly themed work of Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, and is consistent with my current intense interst in visions of both utopian and dystopian society.
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Dennis J. Sardellas, Visible Images of Invisible God: A Guide to Russian and Byzantine Icons (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2022)
This is another work purchase in the bookstore of the Russian Museum of Art that will supplement and extend my knowledge of the art and the meaning of icons in the Orthodox Church.
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B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948)
I am planning to read for a third time this book by the psychologist whom I regard as having demonstrated scientifically the most compelling explanation for why people do what they do.
My particular motivation for this rereading is to review another vision of the perfect society.
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Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace [originally published in 1867]; translated by Constance Garnett (Garden City, New York: Dover Publications, 2017)
Ryan mentioned that a colleague had urged him to read Tolstoy’s classic, inspiring me to reread the monumental work that I first read a decade ago.
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Zhongguo Fongsu Xiguan (Chinese Customs and Traditions), Series Volume Number Two, edited by Hsi-chen Wu, Li -cheng Kuo, and Teh-ming Yeh (Taipei, Taiwan: National Publications 1977)
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Zhongguo
Lisi Gushi (di yi) (Stories from Chinese History, No. 1),
Series Volume Number Three, edited by Hsi-chen Wu, Li -cheng Kuo, and Teh-ming Yeh (Taipei, Taiwan: National Publications 1977)
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Zhongguo Lisi Gushi (di er) (Stories from Chinese History, No. 2), Series Volume Number Three, edited by Hsi-chen Wu, Li -cheng Kuo, and Teh-ming Yeh (Taipei, Taiwan: National Publications 1977).
I am rereading these latter three volumes in the same spirit mentioned above for the
first volume in the series.
