Lack of Adult Readers to Serve as Role Models
Very few
people in the United States spend an appreciable amount of time reading books.
They are
too often on TikTok and Instagram or punch, punch, punching/twitter, twitter
twittering.
This
includes members of the education establishment, including superintendents,
other central office staff, principals, teachers, and teachers’ aides. This also includes most parents and others in
a young person’s home.
A key
vexation, then, producing so many students who not read proficiently at grade
level, is the lack of adult role models who have a driving interest in reading.
Contrast
this condition, further driving forth the lack of adult role models, by
considering the books that I read one after another, as much a part of my life
as the oxygen that I breathe >>>>>
Gary
Marvin Davison, Books Read, Winter 2026
...........................................................................
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 contributes her or 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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
Thomas
More, Utopia [originally published in 1516]; H. G. V. Ogden,
translator (New York: Appleton-Crofts, 1949)
More 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.
..........................................................................
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 attempts
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 in 1953 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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
Gary
Marvin Davison, Books Projected for Reading in Late Winter/Spring 2026
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
Dennis J.
Sardellas, Visible Images of Invisible God: A Guide to
Russian and Byzantine Icons (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press,
2022)
This is
another work purchased 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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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.
...........................................................................
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)
..........................
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)
..........................
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment