Not For The Beach: A Different Kind Of Summer Reading

By Nancy K. Crevier

“I do not read anything but history and biography. You perceive that for me to presume to indicate the hundred authors which a person ought to read, would be folly. No, leave me out: My testimony would not be valuable.” —Mark Twain in letter to Joseph Glider, 1886

Summer, with its longer days and laissez faire attitude, is the perfect time to pick up a book (or awaken the e-reader) and wile away the hours in someone else’s world. Beach reads are satisfying, when it is only escapism that is sought, and periodic interruptions can be tolerated. But having some solid reading time on hand beckons solid reading material. Where to start, is the question.

Will it be Longfellow, Austen, Alger, Maugham, or Tolstoy that offers the challenge? Will a more contemporary author, like Irving, Allende, or Franzen provide food for thought? Will it be Sullivan, Hooks, Emerson, or Huxley whose essays get your mind churning?

Fortunately, unlike Mark Twain who was loathe to make suggestions, a number of Newtowners are willing to go out on a limb and share their “bucket list” of books.

Martin Margulies is an author, law professor, a civil rights lawyer, a member of the Connecticut Citizens’ Ethics Advisory Board, and tennis coach for Newtown High School. His list of “must reads” is based on a lifetime of extensive reading. “I’ll go with the collected plays, including the prefaces and afterwards, of George Bernard Shaw,” said Mr Margulies. Citing Shaw’s “superb writing, coupled with trenchant and insightful commentary about human nature and the human condition,” these are works that have stayed with him his whole life, he said. “As for when I first read him, it was as a kid — 10, 11, maybe 12 years of age. He taught me how to write, that’s for sure,” Mr Margulies said.

Also inspirational to his writing, he said, is the “sheer prose poetry from start to finish, accompanied by searing social commentary” of Culloden by John Prebble. Culloden is about the mid-18th Century battle that destroyed Gaelic society. “I read it for the first time in the early 1980s, and it triggered my lifelong interest in Scotland,” he said. His own book, Battle of Prestonpans 1745, is patterned after the writing of Prebble.

Four other books are among Mr Margulies recommendations. Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics and I.F. Stone’s Weekly are books that represent excellent political writing, he said.

Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, and any collection of his political essays, “especially the ones about colonialism,” are high on his reading list. “I read these books, as I read Shaw’s, when I was a kid, and let’s just say that they help explain why I counseled and represented draft resisters during the Vietnam War. Similarly,” said Mr Margulies, “David Caute’s The Great Fear, the McCarthy-era laid bare, pushed me into becoming a First Amendment specialist.”

“My favorite books as a child were The Black Stallion by Walter Farley, Lad A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith,” said retired English teacher and writer Liz Arneth. Farley’s novel imbedded dreams of horse ownership in her, as a girl, said Ms Arneth, and her continued love of the equine world, as she grew older.

“Lad wasn’t a super dog, like Lassie, but he had great grace and dignity, and I loved him,” she said of Terhune’s canine character. “I wrote to Terhune’s widow, and she was nice enough to write back. And what,” asked Ms Arneth, “can I say about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?” They remain books she recommends to readers old and young.

Life is capricious without some sort of guidance. Author Justin Scott recommended Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel as necessary reading, on that perilous path. “They are great, historical novels that are packed with examples of how to survive a treacherous world,” he said.

“Never ask an old man to reminisce,” joked antique books expert and former school librarian John Renjilian. From toddlerhood on, Mr Renjilian has been influenced by numerous books: “First book I can remember being read to me, Little Engine That Could, followed closely by Little Toot. Both highly influential, incidentally!”

Paddle To The Sea was his first book ever taken out of a library. “A teacher read it in class… I was terribly disappointed to find I was too young to get a library card. My mother took it out for me… Memory of that, and the then-rule that children were not allowed in the adult section of the library, made me a very easy-going librarian,” said Mr Renjilian.

He follows up with the “best of” from various periods of his life: “Best series when I was a kid, The Little Indian. Very influential on my approach to things. Best book from high school: Courage by Hugh Walpole — the American, not the older and better regarded Brit. The opening line was ‘It isn’t life that matters, but the courage you bring to it.’ Another I read later was the autobiography of an old African elephant hunter,” he said, from which he took another good line for living: “Only the earth is immortal, and man survives only by the mark he makes on it.”

Best book from college: Thomas Bailey’s American Pageant. Best book from elementary career: Stone Words by Pam Conrad “Well written, good story, thought provoking, all you could ask,” said Mr Renjilian. Last two books read: “A biography of John Hancock, and a WWII memoir by Joseph Farris, a then-Danbury, now Bethel resident,” he said.

Friends of the C.H. Booth Library volunteer and former librarian Carm O’Neil suggested The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. “It’s another of those Young Adult books that certainly should be read by any adult,” declared Ms O’Neil. Brilliantly narrated by “Death,” the story, set in WWII Germany, taught her about that time and place, said Ms O’Neil.

She also recommended a 1933-era book, Lost Horizon by James Hilton, which deals with how plane crash survivors deal with finding themselves in a Tibet-like world, very different from what they know. Another book, one of the best she knows of in the sci-fi genre, said Ms O’Neil, is Dune. “I read it at least 30 or 40 years ago, and still remember how amazed I was that Frank Herbert could create so many different worlds,” Ms O’Neil said.

For town historian and former history teacher Dan Cruson, it is The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra, which he recommended “for anyone who enjoys learning about Leonardo D Vinci, use of symbolism in Renaissance art, and Italian politics of the 15th Century.”

For general light reading and a peek into the American culture of the 20th Century, Mr Cruson recommended three novels by local author Justin Scott with Clive Cussler: The Wrecker, The Spy, and The Race.

“I tend to steer away from ‘bucket lists’, which I find somewhat grim,” said Newtown resident Peter Van Buskirk. That said, he shared a list of books that he thinks are “very good.” Endurance by Alfred Lansing; The Year of Decision by Bernard deVoto; The Journal of Bernal Dias; Giving Good Weight (a collection of essays) by John McPhee; and A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester as among those he finds worth mentioning.

 He added, “A person I respect noted that nonfiction can never be completely true, while fiction is perfectly true, i.e., true to that author’s vision. I am hopeless reader of nonfiction.”