Category: Books

Finding New Ways to Choose Books I Want to Read

Every New Year’s Day for the past six years I’ve posted on Brimmings my annotated recommendations for the finest fiction and nonfiction reads. I spend hours culling my lists from authoritative sources. I give emphasis to canonical works, both domestic and international—books intellectually stimulating, challenging, and broadening, the kind that will still be read generations hence. Often one of my criteria has been to fill gaps in my own reading, those books I should have read long ago, but somehow missed.

But lately I’ve been musing on a new way of choosing books—more personal than public, more in keeping with my desire to read systematically, to fill in the areas I don’t know well but should.

While my published lists have value, they fall short of providing full acquaintance with an author through a single recommendation. A fragmented forest, bisected by a highway or development, comes to mind—isolated stands of trees cut off from the territorial expanse essential for their flourishing.

It used to be that when I encountered a great writer for the first time, I would read five books: two about the author (often biographies), and three by the author. It worked well—Tolstoy, for example.

But now I want to do better still.

Perhaps I could read not only by author but by theme—a focus on, say, the environment, doing a minimal five books, maybe beginning with the late E. O. Wilson, who never disappoints, or the sagacious Carl Sagan. Reading only The Great Gatsby hardly gives one the fullest sweep of Fitzgerald’s range and mastery. It’s like movie buffs: if you admire Tom Hanks, you don’t stop at one film.

To really round out my education, I should read chronologically, starting with the classics. I’ve read and taught Euripides’ Medea, but it’s only one play—nineteen of his tragedies survive.

So yes, I can focus on an author or a theme—or read chronologically across disciplines.

Here’s another approach: why not read geographically, and I mean largely internationally? I know so little of Chinese literature, philosophy, and culture—the same for India and Japan.

Or I could venture a European country that most readers overlook—Finland, for example, a nation whose people are addicted to both writing and reading, dark interminable Arctic nights surely contributing. I already have Finland on my list.

I’ll still publish my annual New Year’s list, but when push comes to shove, know that privately I’ll be trekking the road not taken.

–rj

What I Read and How I Choose

I am committed to reading the best that has been thought and said. Escapism and the utilitarian have never been my guides to what I read. In our age of competing stimuli, we’ve imperiled our ability to reflect, to think hard about life’s meaning and live it well.

Stillness is prerequisite for reflection that enlargens our thinking, renders us more humane, the finding time for the right read that nurtures the goodness that lies within us.

I am dismayed about contemporary classrooms, vastly different from those of my New England childhood that lent emphasis to the reads that expand awareness and humane endeavor.

Classicist Michael S. Rose sums up for me what today’s classrooms have lost with their inability to distinguish the wheat from the tares:

“The great catastrophe of our time is not that children fail to learn, but that they have never been taught what is worth knowing. The tragedy that unfolds daily in classrooms across the land is the presence of amnesia, a colossal forgetting of our inheritance. The inheritance of human genius and beauty—from Athens and Jerusalem, through Rome and the Renaissance, to Shakespeare’s London and Lincoln’s prairie—is what now stands in peril. It has not been violently seized; that would require too much effort and too much awareness of what was being lost. Rather, it has been carelessly misplaced, forgotten among the dazzling distractions of modernity” (Substack, Oct. 9, 2025).

—rj

A Book’s Greatest Compliment

I think the greatest compliment one can pay a book is to want to read it again. I doubt I can ever shed Eliot’s Middlemarch or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—or, more contemporary, Pullman’s The Dark Materials.

You know me as loving anything by Virginia Woolf: a summer day of floating clouds in sea of blue, daisies blooming at my feet; a tranquil sojourn in the shade of a leafy maple, my back propped against its furrowed bark, To the Lighthouse in my hands.

A momentary escape from a troubled world of tribal factions…

How can I not enter into character Lily Briscoe’s insightful awareness of art’s ability to unify experience and grant it meaning?

“She could see it so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.”

And then the question that hovers over all our lives:

“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

The artist’s struggle to render visible her inner contemplations—it’s all there. Those rare moments when the gates of mystery yield, and we glimpse the whole.

As Lily exclaims in triumph and exhaustion:

“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

Great artistry helps us find our own vision, makes us more aware, and doing so, lends nurturance for living our lives better.

And so it is for me with To the Lighthouse: like a well-brewed tea, to be sipped slowly, savored, drunk down to the very lees.

—rj

A Polarizing Artist: Rudyard Kipling’s Legacy

I remember it well. I was a young graduate student, privileged to study under one of the world’s foremost professors of Victorian literature, a renowned authority on Thomas Hardy.

The course was rigorous. We read the greats of the age—Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, and of course Hardy. Yet strikingly absent was Rudyard Kipling. Our professor dismissed him as the mere voice of imperialist Britain—an attitude then dominant in the Academy, and one I suspect still lingers on American university campuses.

I had never read Kipling. I had not yet learned to question. I accepted what I was told.

It was only later, during a summer course at Exeter College, Oxford, that I encountered another view: one that esteemed Kipling’s literary brilliance without committing the American folly of conflating his politics with the merits of his artistry.

Kipling’s literary range was astonishing. His verse, endowed with rhythmic command, borders on the hypnotic. He opened poetry to colloquial speech and became a supreme craftsman of the ballad form.

Yes, he gave voice to Empire in works like The White Man’s Burden, Kim, and The Jungle Books. But he also revered Indian culture—its spirituality, wisdom, and sensory richness. Often, with subtle irony, he questioned the very order he seemed to affirm.

Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the short story. With precision and nuance, he crafted narratives of extraordinary compression, modern in their suggestiveness, wide-ranging in their scope. The Man Who Would Be King remains a masterpiece—its sweep and power undiminished. Kipling’s influence on Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway, Borges, and others is beyond doubt.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907—the first English-language writer to receive it—honored for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.”

Kipling’s stories, like all enduring art, probe psychological depths. They are complex, skeptical of conventional wisdom, and riveting in their precision.

In today’s multicultural Britain, he is taught in context: his genius as a storyteller acknowledged, his colonial perspective rejected. Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman have recognized him as a precursor to modern fantasy.

In India, where he was born and spent his early years, his reception is understandably ambivalent: many readers disdaining his imperial condescension, yet acknowledging his literary craftsmanship. Salman Rushdie has called Kim “one of the greatest novels written about India,.” Other Indian writers continue where Kipling left off, offering vivid vignettes of India, but through an Indian prism.

Controversy about his place in the Western literary canon remains. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed Kipling for his moralizing, He deemed his indulgence in exotic adventure stories as juvenile. Great literature, he argued, obeys the aesthetic imperative of narrative neutrality, or distance, as in Flaubert and Joyce.

On the other hand, the late eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom came to Kipling’s defense. In his The Western Canon. Bloom lists Kipling among hundreds of writers deserving inclusion in the canon. Bloom saw Kipling as a myth maker and gifted story teller, especially in his short stories. On the other hand, he found his poetry “scarcely bear reading.”

While I find merit in both Nabokov’s and Bloom’s arguments, I lean towards Bloom’s appraisal as more balanced. I have long resisted either/or equations, particularly as to the political or aesthetic. Over a lifetime, I have frequently found reasoned judgment occupies a middle place. I have given my own arguments earlier in this essay for his belonging in the canon.

Whatever a reader’s verdict, Kipling was a singular voice, very much his own man. In short, authentic. As he said in an interview shortly before his death,

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Qtd. in the Kipling Journal, June 1967).

rj

Thoughts After Reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary

I’m almost done reading Virginia’s Woolf’s Diary, 1918-1941. She means much to me ever since Howard Harper, a Woolf authority at UNC, introduced her to me.

Such a scintillating intellect. Writing didn’t come easily to her, frequented with anxiety, sensitivity to criticism, writer’s block, and bouts of depression. Without husband Leonard, I doubt she’d have pulled off her prodigious achievement.

The Diary serves largely as her workbook of creative struggle—getting things right, the interplay of new formulations, the unleashing of her interiority.

The Diary catalogues books she’s reading and plans to read. It teems with recall of literary and artist luminaries she knew intimately, many associated with the Bloomsbury Group to which she belonged—Strachey, Forster, Keynes, and her sister Vanessa Bell among them. Henry James, George Meredith and T. S. Eliot were frequent household guests.

She’s opinionated about several of her rivals, Joyce for instance. She adored Proust: “My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? You can’t go further than that.” And, of course, there were Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and not least, Dante, to whom she turned often.

She read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides in the original Greek and continued so throughout her life. I have her essay, “On Not Knowing Greek.”

Woolf spoke French fluently and read Proust, Gide, Flaubert and Maupassant in French. I hadn’t known until reading the Diary that she read Dante’s The Divine Comedy in Italian.

Largely self-educated apart from courses in the classics taken at the Women’s Department of King’s College (Women were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge), her intellectual achievements are extraordinary.

I introduced my students in Modern Novel to her “A Room of Their Own,” a feminist classic elaborating the interiority of female consciousness and exposing the barriers silencing women’s voices. And then, there was Mrs. Dalloway and To a Light House, now canon staples of English literature.

Nonetheless, in reading the Diary I found myriad passages that grieve me. She could be elitist, contemptuous of the working class; condescending towards blacks; antisemitic: “I do not like the Jewish voice: I do not like the Jewish laugh”; she felt uncomfortable in the company of the disabled.

In many ways, her views were not atypical of the mindset of the snobbish British upper class in the days of Empire.

Despite these faults, I try always to separate the artistry from the life; otherwise, there would be few artists to pursue, given the human proclivity to misbehave.

And so, over the years, I keep coming back to Woolf—her ability to recreate the inner life, to make universal the world of the quotidian; the beauty of her lyrical prose, her experimentations with narrative, her wrestlings with life’s frequent inequities.

Dare I Read a Nora Roberts Novel?

Parodying T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, I ask, Dare I read a Nora Roberts novel?

I ask this after coming upon Lulu Garcia-Narraro’s NYT interview with the author (November 19, 2023). Now 75 and still writing, Roberts indisputably reigns the queen of today’s romance genre, authoring some 250 novels, 224 of them making the NYT best seller list, and half a billion copies sold.

Roberts isn’t into harlequin narratives, her female characters resolute, resilient, independent women who may enjoy the company of men, but not their dominance.

Often fighting against the odds in a patriarchal world, they exemplify courage, daring and resourcefulness. They aren’t perfect, but this lends to their plausibility.

Feminists have criticized her for her preoccupation with romantic relationships, but Roberts, a self-declared feminist, sees nothing wrong in a partnership of equals: “Whether it’s a man or another woman, it’s someone you love that you build a life with,” Roberts says.

In real time, Roberts is politically engaged. She is incensed with frenzied book banning. Eight of her own books have been removed from shelves.

I remain conflicted. Do I want to enter a genre of preeminent feminine sensibility where in real life I may be resented as an intruder?

Then, too, I’ve always been suspicious of prolific novelists who seem to write effortlessly with sales in the millions. But then there was the Victorian Anthony Trollope, who could flush out a novel on a train ride, composing forty-seven of them, along with short stories and essays. Today, his books, celebrated as canonical, are admired and studied for their political and social insights.Genre writers, nonetheless, don’t win or get nominated for the literary awards that matter to the Academy, e.g., the Booker, National Book Award, Pulitzer, and Nobel prizes.

It’s grievously unfair, the line between the literary and the popular often porous. Take science fiction, for example, and writers like Wells, Huxley, Bradbury and Clarke. I think their prescience and literary acumen quite stunning. And yet they and their cohorts haven’t secured any of these prestigious awards, apart from two exceptions, science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Quin for her YA novel The Farthest Shore (1973) and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story {2002). Le Quin was a fierce opponent of genre discrimination.

The other exception is Margaret Atwood, winning a Booker in 2000 for her Blind Assassin (2019) and in 2018, the Golden Booker for her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, selected as the best Booker in fifty years.

I find this frequent condescension toward genre writers as faulty as it is snooty. It bothers Roberts, who now simply defines herself as a novelist.

But returning to the romance genre, the classical exemplum is surely George Eliot, whose Middlemarch excels in its delineation of relationships fulfilling or frustrating the human longing, not only for reciprocal love, but to be heard understood and free to pursue one’s authenticity.

I’ve read Roberts excerpts. She writes a nimble and witty prose.

Writing often clarifies things for me. Yes, I’ll dare to read a Roberts novel, but with this caveat—perhaps just one novel for now, knowing so many vibrant books, fiction and non-fiction, that stretch the mind, I still have yet to read.

rj

Reading Told Me I Belonged


It’s important we find time in a busy world to pursue what gives us joy.

Over a lifetime, it’s been growing flowers and hostas, studying languages, reading and writing. Arthritis has ended my gardening days, but those other interests compel me still, especially the reading of books that stretch my mind, grant me new awareness, and open unanticipated conversations.

I discovered reading early, resorting as a youngster to the Montgomery Street library—it’s still there—to escape Philly’s sultry summer streets, foreclosing on a boredom that promised mischief.

Reading became another world, generating deliverance from what might have become a narrow mindset, igniting new vistas redolent with expectation, though often tinctured with youth’s unbridled idealism

Favorite writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, taught me “that is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

Ever since, I’ve been all in.

rj

Banning Books: An American Tradition

America has a stubborn tradition of banning books. The First Amendment may guarantee free speech, but we’ve never stopped trying to police it.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses were once blacklisted. More recently, schools have targeted Harry Potter, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Kite Runner—and, with no sense of irony, 1984.

This isn’t new. Aristophanes’ 2,500 year-old comedy Lysistrata, in which women withhold sex to end war, was banned here from 1873 until 1954 under the Comstock laws. The crime? Mailing “lewd” material.

Easy to blame the Right. But the Left has been just as eager to censor.

In California, a liberal bastion, To Kill a Mockingbird was pulled from schools for its depiction of racism.

Progressives mirror conservative groups like Moms for Liberty. Campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books and Disrupt Texts demand the removal of classics: Huckleberry Finn for racial slurs, To Kill a Mockingbird _for “white savior themes,” Little House on the Prairie for its portrayal of Indigenous and Black people. Even Harry Potter  is shunned—not for witchcraft this time, but for J.K. Rowling’s views on gender.

The real answer isn’t banning. It’s conversation.

Read the books. Put them in context. Argue about them. That’s how we confront uncomfortable truths—and maybe even learn something from them.

rj

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others: A Review

Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images) Susan Sontag (Photo by Deborah


Taking photos is now so universally accessible via our smartphones that we’re likely to take it for granted.

Until recently, it required buying a dedicated camera, inserting a film roll, setting the lens, then waiting—perhaps a week or more—to see the results of a distant lab.

I think of photos as a freeze on time, lovers as Keats reminded us, still fresh in their youth; sons and daughters, children still; parents and grandparents as we remember them. But photos, buttressed with videos, do even more, providing a window on what ails us.

Susan Sontag in her splendid book I’ve just read, Regarding the Pain of Others, argues that the visual not only helps us remember, but sensitizes us to the plight of those who acutely suffer while we warm ourselves under the blankets on cold winter nights, our bellies full. A moralist and cultural critic, she takes on the scourge of war’s ravages, a predominantly male enterprise it seems, unleashing the human capacity to inflict limitless evil, often with impunity.

Photography reminds us of Hiroshima and Nagasaki viewed aerially following their atom bomb devastations, incinerating 200,000 civilians within minutes; of emaciated prisoners released from Nazi death camps, the residue of 12 million exterminated; of ethnic strife in Bosnia in 1992, culminating in Srebrenica; of the dead and dying of 9/11; the machete butchering, killing 500,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. We cannot afford to let their horrors be relegated to the dumpsters of oblivion.

I remember Vietnam and My Lai (1968) and the American massacre of 500 villagers, the burning of their village, that consolidated American resistance to a needless, barbarous conflict consuming 64000 allied lives and 900,000 Vietnamese, ending a president’s re-election bid. Without film crews, we would have lacked evidence, much like when unleashed Soviet troops raped 130,000 German women after taking Berlin.

The trail is long. Much of Sontag’s narrative isn’t pleasurable reading to be sure, but without photography’s capability for exactitude, man’s inhumanity will never be addressed and perhaps, though distantly, vanish like slavery from the human repertoire. It is our duty not to turn aside, but remember and, beyond acknowledgement, understand war’s antecedents and protest their repetition.

I mourn Sontag’s passing from us in her prime—her cerebral introspection of what ails us, delivered always with compassion and unceasing hope that we can and will do better.

After reading her book, I thought of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, desperate for food, killed daily, many of them women and children. As I write, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) informs us that 900 Palestinians seeking food have been killed since mid-May. Unlike other conflicts, the foreign press has been banned from access to Gaza.

I think, too, of Putin’s accelerated nightly aerial assaults, on Ukraine, targeting civilian infrastructures: hospitals, ambulances, apartment buildings, shopping malls and, by day, farmers plowing their fields.

Photography offers documentation. Sontag was right: without photography, we are denied access to the truth and the scourge of war is assured its continuence.

—rj





Remembering Edmund White (1940-2025)

I’ve just come off reading Edmund White’s 2005 New Yorker essay, “The Women I Dated as I Tried to go Straight.”

Whatever your sexual orientation, reading Edmund White’s essay is worth your time—the unchecked wit; the metaphoric grace; the vivid, often astonishing anecdotes; the shimmering brilliance that makes experience palpable. Like essayists Orwell, Woolf, or Sontag, he has that rare ability to make you pause, reassess, change course.

Above all, there’s his candor.

This morning I was heartened to see The New York Review of Books commemorating him by featuring six of his essays, written for them over the years.

Just a few weeks ago, June 3, 2025, White slipped into eternity. He had long faced declining health: a heart attack, a stroke, and his decades-long reckoning with HIV. He was 85.

I read somewhere that Vladimir Nobokov, that other preeminent prose prodigy, admired White’s literary acumen, so much like his own. What writer wouldn’t relish Nabokov’s compliment, bestowed upon so few.

White was the high priest of gay literature, writing prolifically on its themes and torments, addressing with fearless clarity the culture’s imposed shackles of shame.

Across five decades, he authored thirty books—novels, memoirs, plays, hundreds of essays, many of them distilling the gay journey into a language of self-acceptance and grace.

A devoted Francophile, he spent nearly twenty years in France, where he would write his erudite The Flâneur and Genet: A Biography.  

In A Boy’s Own Story, a blend of fiction and autobiography, White chronicles the interior landscape of a young gay man confronting the burden of identity.

His 2005 autobiography, My Lives, unflinchingly narrates his first 65 years.

With the essay “The Women I Dated as I Tried to Go Straight,” White reflects on his early sense of same-sex desire, repressed under the weight of cultural condemnation: “In the past, when homosexuality was still considered shameful, I was slow to confess my desires to anyone.”

To atone for those hidden desires, “the fire in the crotch,” White dated women—many drawn to his intellect, good looks, and sensitivity. Empathy pervades his essay as he recalls these women, acknowledging the structural inequities they faced, confronted with a patriarchal hegemony: “I came to think of men as monsters with absolute power, the darlings of the Western world, and of women as their unfortunate victims.…This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.”

White’s sympathy undoubtedly owes its genesis to the gay community’s own troubled quest for validation.

I found his retrospective vignettes of women moving, bringing alive each woman’s individuality in vivid, lyrical prose replete with introspective finesse:

Sally was celebrated for her big breasts and her face, which was that of the Apollo Belvedere—bow-shaped lips, a long, straight nose, a wide, domed brow, an ensemble that was classical and noble and oddly mature. She looked like a woman, a grownup woman, not a raddled adolescent. She said little, but she smiled dreamily with veiled eyes. Her smile had a way of lingering two beats too long, after the conversation had moved on to a different mood. Was she lost in her own thoughts and not paying attention? Had someone told her that she was at her best when she smiled? She never guffawed or squealed or made violent movements, though catty classmates told me that when boys weren’t around she was a real sow, rolling on the floor, drinking beer, and giggling with the other girls at obscene speculations about penises they had known or divined through Speedos.

He thinks that had he not been gay, he might have fulfilled their myriad longings: “Unhappy women! How many of them I’ve known. Sniffling or drinking with big reproachful eyes, silent or complaining, violent or depressed—a whole tribe of unhappy women have always surrounded me.”

For most of my life I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I’ve wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I’d be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.

White remembers falling in love with fellow schoolmate Marilyn Monroe, a recollection tender and adolescent, full of longing and projection:

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. My fantasies weren’t specific as to what I would actually say to her or do for her. I never got beyond her little smiles of love and recognition, which burned with a brighter and brighter glow.

My favorite daydream was that she’d come with me to my senior prom. All the other guys would be astonished: the toad, Eddie White, was really a prince. I pictured her on my arm, her sequinned gown glittering, her voluptuous body undulating as we entered the dining hall, which had been transformed by crêpe paper into a ballroom. It was like a mermaid’s visitation. The thin boys with their brush cuts and spotty faces, their dinner jackets and burgundy cummerbunds with matching bow ties, would gape at us. No way, man, the biggest dweeb of them all with . . . Marilyn!

Fortunately, not all the women in his life were unhappy. Some lived fulfilled lives outside a dependency on men, easing his guilt:

What I loved about Anne and Marilyn {another Marilyn}, even Alice, Sally, and Gretchen—was that they weren’t unhappy. Marilyn wanted nothing from me but my friendship, and she has it still.

Because she and the others I’ve written about here were the first women I knew who weren’t unhappy, who never once made me feel guilty, they showed me the way to friendship with women. 

White’s essay emerges a paean to women across the years who were there for him in the hard places, lending solace and fostering courage.

I will miss Edmund White keenly, a voice in the wilderness.

—rj