Books Worth Reading This Week
My recommendations this week are Homer Price by Robert McCloskey and Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. As the subject line of this email hints, the books I cover this week say something about the past, something that most modern folks have a hard time hearing without going “ACKSHULLY….
Typical reddit take. We’ll get to that.
But before we get into the reviews, here’s what I’ve been reading online this week:
Literature Links
Auberon Waugh was one-of-a-kind, and a chip off the old block at the same time. Waugh’s great strength was “his complete absence of restraint and good taste.” Reading Keats on John Milton makes it clear what a long shadow the older poet cast. “Life to him would be death to me.” Another win from Philip Bunn at Everything Was Beautiful. If you’re looking for a good read, Philip has some great suggestions, including one book that he describes as the “literary equivalent of a sleeve of Oreos.”
Was Hank Williams the “Hillbilly Shakespeare?” John Rossi writes: “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” not only has an evocative melody but its lyrics come close to pure poetry: “The silence of a fallen star/Lights up a purple sky/But as I wonder where you are/ I’m so lonesome I could cry.”
Books Worth Reading
1) Homer Price by Robert McCloskey, 149 pages
Were the good old days better?
The days of kids building radio sets and riding bikes instead of getting bullied on snapchat?
Good children’s literature might be the hardest genre. It has to be appropriate for the reading level of kids and engaging enough to keep an adult’s attention. And children’s minds are precious, so content matters. You need something wholesome and aspirational, but not too serious.
Homer Price is a 1943 masterpiece from one of the best children’s writers ever, Robert McCloskey. Everyone knows McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal and Make Way For Ducklings. Homer Price is written for a slightly older demographic but has much of the same charm.
It consists of six separate stories, featuring Homer and his friends and relatives in Centerburg, a sleepy Midwestern town. Except, Centerburg turns out to be not that sleepy, and Homer is caught up in a number of escapades, ranging from a shaving lotion robbery to a string-collecting competition at the county fair.
Why is it worth reading?
The stories are preposterously funny, and my kids, (ranging from 6 years old to early teens) loved the humor and the drawings. I loved both as well, but also couldn’t help but yearn for an America like Homer’s, where most people are good-hearted, and innocence is widespread. Literacy is also widespread in Homer’s world - sly references to the Odyssey are mixed with overt plot points about literary characters like Rip Van Winkle or the Pied Piper.
It almost makes you think that the good old days really existed.
And to all you reply-guys out there, I don’t believe that the Norman Rockwell America is wholly an idealized mirage - stories from my grandparents, (1920’s and 1930’s) great-aunt, and even my Dad (1950’s), reflect a simpler, better time.
Yes, nostalgia is a powerful veneer, but the idea that “things were never that good” is cope. Just because we live in a world of urban carjacking and rural meth manufacturing doesn’t mean that the world has always sucked this hard.
Being a reply guy means you have to demand “source?” and dismiss anything that isn’t a double-blind quantitative study, as if you could weight the polio vaccine, racism, teenage suicide rates, happiness surveys and rural crime statistics against one another and come up with a definitive answer as to whether 1943 was better or worse than 2023. But I think we suspect the truth.
There is a substantial amount of troubling evidence showing the world is becoming a worse place to raise children in. Loss of social trust, skyrocketing mental health problems among the young, declining life expectancy, increasing out-of-wedlock births, increasing polarization, and decreasing self-reported happiness are all well-documented trends in study after study.
Now, I distrust studies as a way of understanding the world. (If you’re curious as to why, see Stanford professor John Ioannidis’s seminal paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”)
To me, one of the great virtues of literature is that it allows us to comprehend truths on a transcendent and intuitive level, to sense a wrong, or a loss, without proving it to others.
It’s a lost world that Homer Price, and my grandparents, lived in. In Homer’s world, the town faces challenges, and there are robbers, drunks, and occasional vagrants to deal with. But the social institutions that hold places together are strong, whether it’s the town library, or the Ladies Aid or the barbershop where the sheriff and Uncle Ulysses play checkers.
As a result, Homer gets to be a boy. Fishing, manning the lunch counter, collecting string and bottlecaps from the townspeople, riding his bike all over the county - it’s a world that is designed for kids to grow up in. That world existed in 1943, and before and after as well. And not just for “straight, white families.” You can still talk to people who remember it.
And though those people are slowly leaving us, you can always pick up a book like Homer Price to remember the good old days.
2) Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote,
When I wrote on the “Great American Epic” last month, one of the candidates suggested was Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which prompted me to read the book, since I had only seen the movie.
Why is it worth reading?
It’s not the American epic. And it’s not as good as the movie. That out of the way, I do think it’s worth reading, for one reason - the Holly Golightly character.
It’s not easy for a writer, even a renowned one like Capote, to create a character that stands out as an all-time original in the canon of literature. Thackeray did it with Becky Sharpe. Margaret Mitchell did it with Scarlett O’Hara. Capote does it with Golightly.
It’s not about Audrey Hepburn. Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Golightly in the film and it’s easy to see why, reading the book. She’s wild and unpredictable and dangerous and innocent in a way that the worldly Hepburn could never be. To her credit, Hepburn went a different way and created an all-time film character. But reading the book, you get something you’d never get with the movie.
I dislike Capote’s brutal relish of the sordid - it’s a characteristic that he shared with modernists and Beats alike, and did much to coarsen American literature. The characters orbiting around Holly Golightly, including the narrator, are sleazy versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters, but without the glam of the Jazz Age. But Holly is mesmerizing.
If you don’t want to miss out on one of the most fascinating characters ever written, you should read this book.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the opposite of Homer Price - and it goes a long way toward taking the goody-goody veneer off the good old days of the 50’s. There’s plenty of sex, booze, and broken lives in 50’s New York, as there has been in every big city since the dawn of history.
But even with Capote’s best efforts at making New York sinful, it’s still curiously homey, in a way that modern cities aren’t. I’ve pondered on why this is, and my answer, is that Edmund Burke’s societal institutions, while much weaker than in Centerburg, still exist even in the big city.
Instead of a church or a barbershop, it’s Joe Bell’s local bar, where Holly finds the support system to whisk her to safety when facing down a prison sentence. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine anyone in a Manhattan bar ever even learning your name, much less serving as a social safety net.
Capote does his best to make the city seem sordid, sweaty, and seamy - it’s what he does as a writer - makes things nasty. But the worst he can do still seems well, nice, compared to the modern hellscape that is Manhattan.
Holly and the narrator ride horses rented from the stables on West 66th street, and ride the city. They have dinner-parties in their apartment in a brownstone, where the “open-windowed warm spring nights were lurid with the party sounds, the loud playing phonograph and martini laughter.”
Did I mention these neer do wells can afford to live in a brownstone on the Upper East Side? This was well before global capitalism hollowed out the cities of America and sold them to Chinese and Russian billionaires.
It’s no heaven - but it’s telling that even Capote’s best attempt at a hell doesn’t involve the common dangers, depression, and filthiness of modern NYC. Not to mention it’s soulessness.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s isn’t a nostalgia-fest - indeed it strives to be gritty and disillusioning. But it doesn’t completely succeed, and that should tell us something. If this is the worst that 20th century America had to offer, maybe it was a better time.
Quotes:
“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."
“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”
“What I found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it;nothing very bad could happen to you there.”
Poem of the Week:
Anne Bradstreet was the first published American poet. An early resident of the Massachusetts Bay colony, Bradstreet was first published in England. In 1650, a volume of Bradstreet’s poems, entitled The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America appeared, and staked her claim as the founder of American poetry. Our poem from Bradstreet is short, but very, very sweet.
“To My Dear and Loving Husband”
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can
Old Book Advice Column
“Buy not what you want, but what you have need of; what you do not want is dear at a farthing.” – Cato the Elder, Epistles, 94
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Book Looks
See you next week!
Books Worth Reading is an email digest that allows busy people to connect with great minds - without wading through thousands of pages to do so. I’ll recommend books, as well as highlighting a poem or two, some quotes and articles, and perhaps some discussion of great literary figures or movements.
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Nice to see the comments on Homer Price, what a wonderful book. Reminds me sort of Elizabeth Enright’s work as well. And I love your line, “It’s not the American epic. And it’s not as good as the movie.” What a useful corrective to those who claim to think the book is better than the movie.