2019 was a good year for reading. If you’ve been reading the blog, you know I went to Iceland this year (trip report). I read a lot of Icelandic stuff in preparation (my reading list here),  so I won’t recount that. Other big themes for the year: lots of Social Reading, using my app Bookship; the usual dose of spy novels and some literary fiction; and lastly comfort food, in the form of old favorites and Jack Reacher books. 

Bookship continues to enable a lot of social reading for me. With various friends I read Henry V, Justine (I love Lawrence Durrell!), Following the Equator by Mark Twain, The Hound of the Baskervilles and Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs (who once lived about a mile from my house!). I also re-read Dan Simmon’s Hyperion with my family, which was good fun! The book club I am in read some fun stuff as well, including Unfamiliar Fishes, a fascinating history of post-contact Hawaii, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Power by Naomi Alderman, and the rather disappointing Life After Google by George Gilder. 

Reading Henry V with my friend Thomas was a high point of the year for me. It’s the first Shakespeare I can remember reading (I’m sure I read Romeo & Juliet in high school, but I don’t remember it). Learning to flow with Shakespeare’s language, stopping occasionally for a dictionary check, but usually just going with the flow, was good fun. We used that reading as a jumping-off point to explore Salic Law (kidding, sort of, it’s a plot point), the history of the battle of Agincourt, where a heavily outnumbered English force (estimates vary, but commonly reported as 6000 English against roughly 30,000 French), destroyed the French force, the English Longbow being the decisive factor. We also explored the various theatrical renditions of Henry V (Olivier, Branagh, et. al.). I also re-read Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful book Agincourt, a nice fictional complement. Henry V is the source of a number of quotes you may know, yet not know whence they came: 

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”
“The game’s afoot!” (you may have thought, as I did, this originated with Sherlock Holmes)
“Oh for a muse of fire”

and my personal favorite, delivered best by Branagh. 

I was not angry since I came to France! (watch it here)

Kenneth Branagh delivers the goods.

Inspired somewhat by Traveling the Equator, Mark Twain’s travelogue of the Pacific and Asia, I tackled Max Adams’ In the Land of the Giants, an historical travelogue of Dark Ages Britain. Very interesting, although extremely dense in history and place names, so I had to read in increments, on-and-off for most of the year. 

On the more serious side, I read some truly outstanding novels this year. The most memorable of them, Norwegian by Night, is actually not entirely serious. In fact it’s the funniest book I’ve read in a long long time.

Definitely more serious is James Salter, whose writing I love deeply. Solo Faces is a literary exploration wrapped inside a mountain climbing adventure novel. Not unlike, although not quite the equal of, Wind, Sand and Stars. But close. Light Years is the heartbreaking story of a disintegrating marriage. One of my favorite passages (which is not bleak as is the rest of the novel).

“I think I’d like a martini,” Viri said.
He drank one, icy cold, in a gleaming glass. It was like a change in the weather. The pitcher held another, potent, clear.
“How do you make them so cold?” he asked.
“Well, you happen to have commanded the drink which is, in my opinion, the one true test. You have to have the right ingredients— and also you keep the gin in the freezer.”

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is another grim masterpiece, the harrowing experience of Australian prisoners of war building the Burma Railway during WWII.  City of Crows is an atmospheric medieval tale by Chris Womersly, well worth the read. Transcription is WWII-era historical fiction from Kate Atkinson. I found it good, but not great; some of her other works are likely better starting points. Out of left field, I found a copy of Miské’s novel Arab Jazz, a unique murder mystery set in the Arab section of Paris. As The Guardian says, “Arab Jazz is a genre novel in the same way that Pulp Fiction is a genre film – superseding the form even as it pays homage”. 

Spy Stuff. 

You know I love a good spy novel. This year I read a number of good (although perhaps not great) spy novels. The exception to the “great” are the few John Le Carré books that I read. Joseph Kanon’s Leaving Berlin was very atmospheric and good fun; but I felt it covered territory that Alan Furst has already covered quite extensively. Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje was equally atmospheric, but felt confused and rambling; I couldn’t quite figure out the point of the book. I did a healthy dose of “thriller” spy novels in the form of Olen Steinhauer’s Nearest Exit, The Cairo Affair, and Liberation Movements. All solid efforts but not perhaps rising to the best of his work or thrillers in general. Mick Herron’s The List, a novella, had me laughing til the scotch came out of my nose. 

Comfort food

Bookish “comfort food” is what I call it when you are tired and want to read, and just get a great story without the effort of absorbing something new. It can be a book you’ve already read, or an easy read where you love what’s happening but you kind of already know where it’s going (looking at you Lee Child). A number of this year’s spy novels were comfort food: one of my favorite books of all time, Tim Power’s Declare, a crazy quilt of a novel including spies, Djinn (the supernatural kind), Kim Philby, Lawrence of Arabia, Mt. Ararat, Saharan adventures, Nazis and the Cold War. And with a plausible historical storyline behind it. John Le Carré’s Call for the Dead, and Smiley’s People, Alan Furst’s Blood of Victory, Lee Child’s Make Me, Past Tense, and The Christmas Scorpion. For about the nth time I re-read Tolkien’s  The Two Towers, my favorite of the three books, and William Gibson’s Count Zero, voodoo-inspired science fiction featuring world-weary, middle-aged mercenary Turner, one of my favorite of Gibson’s characters. 

what’s on deck

I am just finishing Smile of the Wolf (https://www.viking2917.com/smile-of-the-wolf-review), the last of my Iceland books, and wow. It’s like a time machine to 10th century Iceland. If that sounds even mildly interesting, read this book. The first half is utterly immersive. 

We’re traveling to Greece and Rome late this year, so I expect to be doing a lot of relevant reading. Thinking about Mary Beard’s SPQR, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, probably some Mary Renault to get me started. My book club has just started The Left Hand of Darkness, which I have not read since high school, so I’m looking forward to revisiting that. 

I traveled to Iceland last year, read a bunch of stuff, and found a few books while I was there. Top of that stack was Smile of the Wolf, by Tim Leach.

Kjaran, a wandering skald (a bard), and Gunnar, a retired Viking raider who has made his home in Iceland, encounter a “ghost”, with fatal consequences. The outcome of that start a feud that drives the entire novel. The early part of the book is so transporting. I’m there, in Iceland, in the 10th century. So well done. Here’s the first paragraph:

In the distant lands where men worship the White Christ, I have heard that a ghost is not such a dangerous thing. They are creatures of no substance, who may wail and howl but cannot hurt a man. But in my country, the people are warriors even in death. Our ghosts are not shadow and air, but walk- ing flesh. They wield their weapons with as much strength as they did in life, and more bravely, for they have nothing left to fear. And so, when we heard that Hrapp Osmundsson had crawled from his grave and begun to wander his lands at night, no man in the Salmon River Valley would leave his house after dark without a good blade at his side and a shield on his arm.

The early parts of Smile of the Wolf capture the grim beauty that is both the Icelandic terrain and the pagan northern world view. It mirrors the classic Icelandic sagas in many ways, but where the saga characters are usually pretty opaque, we get inside the heads of the characters and get a detail and color the sagas don’t provide, yet the cadence and speaking voices can be suitably terse or blunt.

The narrative and the prose really work for me. The initial scenes with the “ghost”, and events that follow, are magic. The gradual progression of the resulting feud, leading up to the critical inflection point in the novel, has the same fatalistic unfolding of the sagas. 

Eventually, one of the characters is Outlawed, which in medieval Iceland meant any man could kill you – so outlaws either left Iceland, or lived in desolate areas no one came to. I loved the Outlaw sequence. Many of the sagas feature people being outlawed, but none that I have read really explore what that means to the individual beyond being constantly on one’s guard to avoid being killed. I thought Leach added a lot of color, with the cave, the farming, the thieving, the cold, the rough medicine (for example, having your fingers amputated). 

Many of the sagas (and Smile of the Wolf) feel like American Westerns to me. And of course what’s more Old West than Outlaws? But it feels an interesting difference to me. The American Outlaws feel as though they have chosen their life, and being an Outlaw means one places oneself outside the law. It feels an active, individual choice in a way – I Choose to disobey the law. In the sagas, being an Outlaw is in a way not about choosing to disobey laws, it is that society places you outside the law, the laws do not protect you. You are outside the law, and can be killed. But society is doing it to you, rather than you doing it to society (a few related articles on being an Outlaw in Iceland, if your interests run that way.)

I also found very interesting the treatment of Christianity in the latter half of the book, and the inner life that might lead a pagan who follows the old gods to convert. Again, many books have explored the intersection of the Viking world with Christianity, but usually Christians are portrayed as pious, meek, and not necessarily fierce in battle, and the conversion process has always felt like it was just words, for convenience or under duress. The priest Thorvaldur who joins their Outlaw band is just a fierce a Viking as anyone. And the Christian God of SotW is not the God of love and mercy, that God is the God of Revenge, and feels like a bit like just another god. (also interesting: the Christian God and the White Christ seem pretty conflated in Kjaran’s head….). The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell (or the TV show), and the relationship between Uhtred and Alfred is an interesting comparison.

I read SotW with a friend on my social reading app, Bookship. They found parts of the book less convincing than I, and wished that some of the characters had been more explored – which I can’t argue with – they are fascinating people, some more explored than others. But in the large, I found the book transporting, and perhaps the best modern capture of the spirit and worldview that is the Icelandic sagas.

I recently reviewed the books I read last year. Some great stuff, but also too much “bookish junk food”. I’m committed to reading better this year.

(btw. I made a music playlist for this book. Salter always makes me think of jazz. Go ahead and push the play button on this while you read).

Some time ago I was wandering through a used bookstore in Manchester by the Sea and stumbled across Burning the Days, the memoir of the writer James Salter. The well known book reviewer Michael Dirda of the Washington Post famously wrote “he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.”. I opened the book to a random page, and found:

“I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know til the day I die.”

OK it’s two sentences.

Salter is an amazing writer, and behind that lies a fascinating, complex, insightful man. Burning the Days tells the story of his life, from the early days of learning about sex through to his early 70’s. The transience of all things is lurking on every page, but the book rings out with its joys as well.

In youth it feels one’s concerns are everyone’s. Later on it is the clear that they are not. Finally they again become the same. We are all poor in the end. The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare.

Before that, however is the performance. The curtain rises.

His description of becoming aware of sex is priceless. After a friend tells him stories, this:

Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue covers. Some had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. …fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.

Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,”, he said, “has come from books. I’d be in the darkness without them.”

I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg…. but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty page booklet in blue covers that described the real game of the grownup world.

At The Hawaii Project, we often say Books Change Lives. And they do.

His time at West Point was equally formative.

The most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same. My father had managed to do it, although, seeing what it was like, I did not understand how.

During his studies at West Point, a number of books figure prominently. But one book changed his life.

There was one with the title Der Kompaniechef, the company commander. This youthful but experienced figure was nothing less than a living example to each of his men. Alone, half obscured by those he commanded, similar to them but without their faults, self-disciplined, modest, cheerful, he was at the same time both master and servant, each of admirable character. His real authority was not based on shoulder straps or rank but on a model life which granted the right to demand anything from others.

An officer, wrote Dumas, is like a father with greater responsibilities than an ordinary father. The food his men ate, he ate, and only when the last of them slept, exhausted, did he go to sleep himself. His privilege lay in being given these obligations and a harder duty than any of the rest.

The company commander was someone whom difficulties could not dishearten, privation could not crush. It was not his strength that was unbreakable but something deeper, his spirit. He must not only have his men obey, they must do it when they are absolutely worn out and quarreling among themselves, when they are at the end of their rope and another senseless order comes down from above.

He could be severe but only when it was needed and then briefly. It had to be just, it had to wash things clean like a sudden, fierce storm…

I knew this hypothetical figure. I had seen him as a schoolboy, latent among the sixth formers, and at times had caught a glimpse of him at West Point. Stroke by stroke, the description of him was like a portrait emerging. I was almost afraid to recognize the face. In it was no self-importance; that had been thrown away, we are beyond that, stripped of it. When I read that among the desired traits of the leader was a sense of humor that marked a balanced and indomitable outlook, when I realized that every quality was one in which I instinctively had faith, I felt an overwhelming happiness, like seeing a card you cannot believe you are lucky enough to have drawn, at this moment, in this game.

I did not dare to believe it but I imagined, I thought, I somehow dreamed, the face was my own.

I began to change, not what I truly was, but what I seemed to be. Dissatisfied, eager to become better, I shed as if they were old clothes the laziness and rebellion of the first year and began anew.

To the anonymous poet mentioned above: yes, Books Change Lives. If they are good enough, and if we let them. On my reading, I was struck by how much this fictional company commander resembles the Leonidas of Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield, of which I’ve written elsewhere.

The first phase of Salter’s life is military, eventually becoming a pilot, and Burning the Days chronicles that life in ways that are by turns comical, heartwarming, and searing. This phase of his life leads to his first novel The Hunters, and flying the Korean War, and his true tales from that time open a window into the military experience few books can match.

The success of The Hunters eventually drives him to leave the Army and write full time. He discovers Paris. This leads him to write A Sport and A Pastime, an erotic chronicle of Paris, with an unreliable narrator. He goes into movies, writing screenplays for a number of films, most of them unsuccessful (I’ve recently become aware of how many writers of that era put food on the table by writing screenplays — Steven Pressfield is another). His stories of the movies, the stars, and set locations are thought provoking as well as interesting.

And always, there are the books. The books he’s writing, the books he’s reading — I’ve picked up 3 or 4 books other than his own, that meant something to him.

What a fascinating man and life. A fighter pilot, a man’s man, a serial womanizer it seems, and yet deeply introspective and caring. An aesthete, intimately aware of the transient nature of all things. Burning the Days is simultaneously elegiac and joyful, and will give you insightful perspective on life.