“Reading for Pleasure and Knowledge”

December 22, 2011

Note from Old Lyme

“Reading for Pleasure and Knowledge”

“A Capacity and taste for reading gives access

to whatever has already been discovered by others”

                                                                            Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

I Can Read With My Eyes Shut (1978)

                                                                            Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel – 1904-1991)

From time to time I get asked about the books I read. There is nothing remarkable in the list. Several friends read a lot more and a few, less. For the past ten years, I have kept tabs of the books I have read, largely as a reminder; for age has reduced my ability to retain.

Books have always been important to me. My habit is to buy them far faster than I can read them. While I have both a Kindle and an I-Pad, and have read books on both devices, I prefer real books. My library is eclectic, with books ranging from current fiction to town histories, from the classics to favorite literature from childhood. One of my favorite things about books is that they transport you from wherever you are to a different place in another time. While others would rather spend leisure hours watching sports or favorite TV shows, I prefer to immerse myself into a period of history or a fictional character.

Attached are lists of the books I have read over the past two years. It includes three classics that I recently re-read. They are reminders that no matter how creative we have become, or how sophisticated we are, the art of writing knows no time: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoi and Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers demonstrate that time has not damped the music of words written 150 years ago. Generally these are books we read in school or in college – too early in our lives to fully appreciate their beauty and their wisdom. They are worth re-reading today. In my limited opinion, Anna Karenina is the best novel ever published.

For almost forty years I have collected the works of P.G. Wodehouse, the British humorists known among aficionados as “The Master”, and who was described by Hilaire Belloc as the best prose writer of his age; so I always read a couple of his. The Code of the Woosters written in 1938 when he was at the peak of his formidable talents is my favorite. Lee Childs, Charles Todd (a mother-son team) and Jacqueline Winspear write diverting, fast-reading mysteries. Amor Towles wrote an extraordinary first novel, Rules of Civility, a story involving four friends that takes place in New York City throughout the year 1938. The Wall Street Journal recently named the book as one of the top ten novels of 2011. Not only is Amor a beautiful writer, but he is an articulate speaker, as we discovered when we recently hosted a lunch for him. And, my daughter-in-law, Beatriz Chantrill Williams will have her first novel, Overseas, published by Putnam in May 2012. I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of the manuscript a few months ago and found it very well written. Julian and Kate are memorable characters who transcend two time periods (the trenches on the Western Front during World War I and the hedge fund world of modern day New York.) I will leave it to the reader to see how she makes this surreal leap; suffice it to say that she does so in a totally credible fashion.

In terms of non-fiction, my interests lie principally in history. American Heroes by Edmund Morris, Richard Brookhiser’s James Madison and Ron Chernow’s Washington covered the Revolutionary War period. Adam Hochschild’s tale of the incredible bravery of anti-war pacifists during World War I, To End All Wars, is as moving and powerful as anything I have read. A Journey: My Life in Politics by Tony Blair was fascinating to read alongside George Bush’s Decision Points, particularly regarding the events leading up to the Iraq invasion – how they both arrived at the same decision, but from different perspectives. Blair’s more analytical mind could be contrasted with Bush’s instinctive judgments. There were other fascinating books. David Reynolds’ Mightier Than the Sword tells the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lincoln, on meeting Ms. Stowe in 1862, allegedly said: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra carries the reader back 2000 years. I still find it hard to believe that the main street in Alexandra, at the time of Cleopatra, was as wide as Park Avenue in New York today, and that the sides of the street were designed so that sewage could be carried off. It is humbling to realize that at the time there was no civilization in Northern Europe, and it would be almost 1500 years before America would be “discovered.”

Other fiction that I particularly enjoyed were Jacques Chessex’ powerful tale of the Nazi influence in war time Switzerland, A Jew Must Die and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat, which tells the story of the brutality of Trujillo’s reign in the Dominican Republican.

Who could not be amazed and moved by Laura Hillenbrand’s story of survival in the Pacific and Japanese prison camps in Unbroken, or learned something about the financial crisis we continue to live through, in reading George Melloan’s The Great Money Binge or Michael Lewis’ very readable Boomerang. Mitch Daniel’s Keeping the Republic is the best thing I have read on how to extricate ourselves from what seems to be an intractable political morass.

As the quote from Lincoln at the top of this essay makes clear, reading is not only about enjoyment, it is about learning. There is almost an infinite level of knowledge in the world of books, which is available to all for a reasonable price. And, as the title of Dr. Seuss’ book makes clear, reading allows one to use one’s imagination, a luxury in today’s world where images from televisions, computers and smart-phones dance continuously before our eyes.