Books and Authors Worth Thinking About

Reading Moby Dick, or any great classic, requires patience. I'm up to chapter 25 and the crew hasn't even departed Nantucket to start looking for a whale. But it's obvious that Herman Melville had a lot to say in this novel, though it did not sell well during his lifetime and he was largely forgotten by the literary community when he died.

Like most people, I first watched the movie by Gregory Peck well before reading the novel. Though the movie was good, the book goes deeper into themes and character that the movie cannot due to limited time and format. If you take your time and have patience you'll understand why this novel is a classic.

What could be more full of meaning?- for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

You can read this book online at several sites for free, but paperbacks are cheap and well worth the price.

A lot of poetry in recent years is what I like to call "navel gazing" poetry: pontificating on the beauty of a blade of grass, or the rhapsody of a sunset. Don't get me wrong, those kind of subjects in the hands of a good poet can be great.(see Pablo Neruda's book "Odes to Common Things"). But too often these kind of poems are detached from the experience of common life, leaving people to feel disconnected from poetry and their lives.

But this is not the case with Charles Bukowski. He writes with what I characterize as "poems from the streets". The everyday sights and sounds of a city. His home turf was the city of Los Angeles, but there's a lot of common ground with all cities. Some of his poems will make you laugh, and others will make you cringe. But Bukowski manages to walk a fine line with a direct, plain-spoken technique mixed with a gritty lyricism. Pick up a copy of his collection "What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire", and you might look at poetry in a different way; less academic and more connected to everyday life, especially if you live in the city.

Today I finished reading Steven Johnson's book "The Ghost Map" on my Kindle. It's a well-told story about a cholera epidemic in London in the mid-nineteenth century(Charles Dickens' time), and the two men who went against conventional wisdom in solving the mystery, and in the process, saving thousands of lives, and paving the way for densely packed cities to be successful.

Today in "industrialized" countries we take for granted the fact that clean water is readily available and that our sewer system is functioning well enough to keep us from getting sick. But it wasn't always like this as big cities became packed with people. With superstition, class bias, and quirky science, disease was still a mystery. Steven Johnson does a great job of telling the story of a cholera outbreak in London that killed hundreds without a clear reason why:

"As their neighbors begin dying, two men are spurred to action: the Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose faith in a benevolent God is shaken by the seemingly random nature of the victims, and Dr. John Snow, whose ideas about contagion have been dismissed by the scientific community"

It's not a long academic book, and that's a plus. It's told in the style of a mystery, and it will keep you turning pages to figure out how things will get resolved in spite of overwhelming odds.

I'm almost finished with the first volume of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative" trilogy. It's a great book written in a novel-like style that manages to capture the huge panorama of death that defined America as we know it today. But what strikes me most is the tragic waste of human lives due to a war caused by a few politicians and leaders of the southern states, and the disappointing fact that we continue to mythologize the conflict today and even continue some of the same arguments, refashioned for the 21st century. But if you're looking to make sense out of this history Shelby Foote's book is great reading and a monumental achievement.

Frank McCourt's first memoir "Angela's Ashes" won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 in literature. The story is accessible to casual readers and literati alike, and reading the story is almost like sitting next to him at a bar taking pulls from a Guinness Stout and listening to a steady Irish accent tell you about a journey of poverty, challenges, and dreams. Here is a man that loves literature and it shows. The prose is smooth and never gets in the way, but still has a lyrical quality that goes beyond mere recollection. Frank McCourt's success is a triumph of the human spirit, and a light at the end of the tunnel for anyone dreaming far away dreams. Read the first of his three memoirs and you'll know the man deserved his hard won success.