I first heard about “The Martian Chronicles” when I read Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ a number of years ago. Back then, I was under the impression that the “Chronicles” was actually a series of books, or at least a very long book. This is not so. The “Chronicles” is a fairly brief collection of short stories that fit into an overarching fictional history, starting in 1999 and ending in 2026. 

The book was initially published in 1946 - right after WWII - a time in which the year 2000 must have still seemed a long way off. Due to the specific time frame of the book, it is somewhat dated and less convincing than it must have been in the 1940s. After all, we live in the time Bradbury depicts, and the world is of course not the same as in his fiction. 

But the dates in the book are the only thing that’s dated, because the stories themselves are timeless. And I don’t say this lightly. For me, the predicate “timeless” is one of the highest praises I can bestow on a book. This one deserves it. 

It is most emphatically not a science-fiction book per se, and it is not even remotely about technological gadgets. Bradbury himself has likened the book to mythology rather than science-fiction, and I think he’s right. 

Not technology, but human identity and the experience of the ironic - this is the golden thread that runs through the book. From the beginning when men first arrive on Mars and do not at all experience the kind of welcome they expected, to the very end when - well, but let me not tell you how the book ends. Suffice it to say that is full of the ironic. Often it is tragic irony, but always thought-provoking and delightful. 

Bradbury touches on other themes too: religion, the effect of science on humanity, racism, illusions vs. reality, etc. 

It’s only the second book by Bradbury I’ve read, so I can’t compare it to his other works. But for all those who crave the timeless, this is the real thing.

Last week my eldest daughter and I drove my son back to college. He is a sophomore this year. This simply means that I was not filled with anxiety as I anticipated leaving him at  school.  I will miss him and, of course, worry about him as any mother would. However, I know he was a great student  last year, he honored his Dad’s wishes even in his absence, and he enjoyed himself.

So we had a long, but enjoyable drive. We talked, listened to our favorite radio hosts, and my daughter read to us as I drove. She read from one of our family’s favorite collections, The Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace.

Maud Hart Lovelace based this collection of books on her own lovely childhood in a small town in Minnesota. The time period is the early twentieth century. Betsy, the main character, is followed from the time she enters kindergarten (Betsy-Tacy) through her first year of marriage (Betsy’s Wedding).My children never tire of Betsy and her friends as we read over and over about their elementary years.  However, our favorite books in this series begin with Heaven To Betsy . Here we find Betsy entering high school. The remainder of the series sees her through high school graduation, into her young adult life and culminates as she is married just as World War I begins.

Lovelace’s characterizations are fabulous. Even her minor characters are three-dimensional. By the time Betsy enters high school in 1906 the reader is intimately familiar with her thoughts, attitudes, worries, hopes, and aspirations. Her family and friends will become your family and friends. You will enjoy Sunday dinners with her “crowd”, devouring her father’s famous onion sandwiches. You will spend evenings singing around her family’s piano. You will fret with Betsy as she studies for Latin exams and prepares for essay contests. You will love her discussions of the classics and even Wagner’s operas. 

Lovelace captured the time period with delightful descriptions of the fashion, architecture, and culture that created Betsy Ray’s life. Betsy’s life may seem idyllic but I believe it is simply a picture of a beautiful family enjoying a simple life to the fullest.  The entire series is available through Amazon.

This entry originally appeared in The Call with Mike Milton.The article was subsequently published on Salem Communication’s Preaching.

lexander Solzhenitsyn died on Sunday, August 3 at the age of 89. We would do well to remember this man.

Surely Solzhenitsyn’s greatest work was his extraordinary writing. Underneath his contributions to literature are his flesh and blood contributions to faith and life. Two of his books stand out: The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. These works describe the life of a prisoner in the notorious Russian gulags. They also signal the inhumane consequences of a bad idea: totalitarianism and Communism. Both of those ideas are infused with a seminal, corrupting idea of “no God.” Without God, culture hardens and begins to destroy its own. This is what Communism did in the 20th century.

I was born in the midst of that century. My early years of military service were spent in the Cold War seeking to undo that system (in my own small way). But this man’s death causes me to remember the horror of that system. And as I do I remember that there are believers, like Solzhenitsyn, still suffering under dictatorships, totalitarian governments, and oppressive regimes. The Communist super powers are (almost) gone, but the bad idea of “no God” persists in human history. Solzhenitsyn’s death calls us to remember that there are believers who worship in fear.

Just this past week, while on annual chaplain duty in Washington DC, my family and I worshipped at The Falls Church. Sunday, when Solzhenitsyn left the chains of this present evil age, the minister, with no knowledge of his death, called us to remember the believers around the world that day for whom he said “worship is dangerous.”

As the congregation knelt in the beauty of that venerable sanctuary I looked around. “…for whom worship is dangerous.” Those words hit me. Worshipping Jesus Christ is worth giving our lives for. And this is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn might have taught us best. 

St. Paul wrote to the Church and the Holy Spirit speaks today, perhaps through the prayers of a nameless woman in China, or a child who has come to faith in Iran, or a family gathered with others for secret prayer in North Korea: 

                    Remember my chains. Grace be with you (Colossians 4:18 ESV).

[This is the first in an occasional series of brief posts on books or authors whose work I can’t review at more length. The posts will be saved in the “Diary” category.]

A soggy morning in New Jersey. The chilly rain reminded me of a comment often made about the novels of Barbara Pym – they’re “good books for bad days.” They’re good books for good days, too.

Pym (1913–1980) had suffered more than her share of rejection until, in the 1970s, the Times Literary Supplement asked well-known writers to name the most underrated writer of the 20th century. After years of neglect by the British literary establishment, Pym was the only writer nominated by two of the authors, the poet Philip Larkin and the biographer David Cecil. Their praise, especially Larkin’s, sparked a revival of interest in her work that has abated slightly in the U.S. but has never disappeared.

I’ve read five or six of Pym’s quiet novels of English life and admire their modesty, intelligence and low-keyed irony. No writer would be less likely to give a book the sort of bombastic title — Everything Is Illuminated, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I Am America (And So Can You) — that is fashionable today. And each of her novels involves circumstances different enough to keep them from becoming repetitive despite their similarlarities of tone. Excellent Women is about a group of single women who, though young, are verging on what used to be called spinsterhood. Quartet in Autumn deals with the enmeshed lives of four friends, male and female, who are facing retirement. An Unsuitable Attachment explores the effects of a single woman’s attraction to a younger man. And The Sweet Dove Died is about the losses of middle age and beyond, especially menopause (though Pym is too discreet to use the word).

Where will I start when I return to Pym en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Pym? Excellent Women is among the wittiest of her novels, so I might begin there if I needed reliable diversion on a day when the weather was hoarding its comforts – a day, in other words, like today.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

The latest in an occasional series of posts on books I didn’t finish and why I didn’t finish them

Title: Sons and Lovers

What it is: The second novel by the English novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), best known for the much-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

How much I read: The foreword, first chapter and part of the second, about 50 pages in the edition I read (not shown at right).

Why I stopped reading: The Tribe couldn’t lock up the American League pennant in the fourth game, so I had to watch the fifth on Sunday night, when I had planned to read more of the book. Then life intervened and I couldn’t get back to the novel in time to finish it for a book group I was supposed to go to tonight. Good-bye, book group meeting.

Comments: The pages that I read involve the early married life of the Gertrude and Walter Morel, as mismatched as Emma and Charles Bovary. Gertrude — well-bred, intelligent, and endowed with a high moral sensibility — chafes against the limits of her life as the wife of a good-hearted coal miner of little income and less refinement. Some critics have said that Lawrence portrays women too harshly. But his treatment of Gertrude’s frustrations in these pages was poignant. Lawrence deals much more directly than many of his contemporaries with the frighteningly rapid loss of self that women of his day risked when they married.

Best line in what I read: On the married life of young Gertrude Morel: “She went indoors, wondering if things were going to alter. She was beginning to realize that they would not. She seemed so far away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking heavily up the back garden at Bottoms, as had run so lightly on the breakwater at Sheerness, ten years earlier.

“ ‘What have I to do with it!’ she said to herself. ‘What have I do with all this. Even the child I am going to have! It doesn’t seem as if I were taken into account.’

“Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, takes hold of one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves one’s self as it were slurred over.”

Worst line in what I read: “ … and on a newspaper spread out upon the hearth rug, a myriad of crescent-shaped curls …”

Furthermore: The Reader’s Catalog (Jason Epstein, 1989) gives this one-line summary of Sons and Lovers: “The talents of a sensitive young man are liberated from a coal-mining background by an intelligent but dominating mother.”

Published: 1913 (first edition)

Links: www.dh-lawrence.org.uk

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

A book full of ideas on what to read at the beach besides Tina Brown’s tales of Princess Diana and her prize-winning guinea pig

If you’re looking for a classic to read on vacation, you’ll find lots of ideas in John Carey’s Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books (Faber and Faber, $14, paperback), a collection of 50 reviews of some of its author’s favorite books. I wrote when I reviewed it in October:

Part of the charm of Pure Pleasure lies in the brevity and directness of its essays, which first appeared in the Sunday Times of London. Secure in his reputation as one of England’s most admired critics, Carey has neither the need nor the desire to wear his erudition like a top hat at a royal wedding. His method is to dive straight into what interests him most about a book and wrap up his review in about 800 words. Here are the first lines of his essay about John Updike’s A Rabbit Omnibus: “Updike’s Rabbit saga is often praised as a lifelike portrait of middle-America in the second half of the 20th century. This should give grave offense to middle-America.” And here is how he introduces Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled: “This is a book about stress, a problem of epidemic proportions in our culture that modern fiction largely ignores.” Carey’s writing is never harder to understand than that, yet it is full of insights into works as different as The Great Gatsby, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.

To read the full review, click on this link: www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2006/10/27/

I also love two other collections of essays on books, Noel Perrin’s A Reader’s Delight (Dartmouth, $19.95, paperback) and Michael Dirda’s Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (Indiana University Press,$24.95), both elegantly written and full of wonderful ideas on what to read. And while Carey’s book can be hard to find, both of these are in stock on Amazon and elsewhere.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Who knew that one of the 20th century’s most entertaining playwrights also wrote wonderful short stories?

Noël Coward: Collected Short Stories. By Noël Coward. Preface by Martin Tickner. Methuen, 629 pp., $17.95, paperback.

You’re in for a treat if you know Noël Coward only the English playwright who wrote sparkling comedies of sexual jealousy like Blithe Spirit and Private Lives. Coward also wrote wonderful short stories that, at their best, have the droll wit and brisk pacing of his finest plays. All 20 appear in this welcome collection, published to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1899.

Part of what makes these stories so appealing is that they have a clear beginning, middle and end, whether they take place in London or New York or the South Seas. This alone would set them apart from many recent stories that are so oblique that reading them tends to resemble code-breaking.

But there’s more to Coward’s tales than their solid yet graceful architecture. Poet and scholar Robert Phillips has noted correctly that Coward was a “master of the shifting point of view, and managed the difficult balance between comedy and tragedy.” Coward also wrote about a kind of glamour that has almost disappeared from literary fiction. And although his stories vary in length and effectiveness, together they reflect a uniquely theatrical sensibility, with many involving actors or others in show business.

Most of Coward’s stories were written in the mid-20th century, but an eerie freshness surfaces in some of their themes, such as the cost of living in age drunk on celebrities. In one the best stories, “What Mad Pursuit?”, an English novelist is besieged by his hosts on an American tour. In “A Richer Dust,” an actor moves to Hollywood, hoping to retain some privacy: “But during the last few years this has become increasingly difficult owing to the misguided encouragement of a new form of social parasite, the gossip columnist.” This “assault upon the credulity of an entire nation” confuses people: “It would not be so were the information given checked and counter-checked and based on solid truth, but unfortunately it seldom is; consequently anybody who has the faintest claim to celebrity is likely to have his character, motives and private and public actions cheerfully misrepresented to an entire continent.” You might never know he was talking about people with names like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons instead of the editors of the National Enquirer or producers of Access Hollywood.

Best line: Many. One from “A Richer Dust”: “Adele was a conscientious young actress with good legs and little talent. In the farce she played the heroine’s best friend, who made a lot of pseudosophisticated wisecracks and was incapable of sitting down without crossing her legs ostentatiously and loosening her furs.”

Worst line: What’s the point of trying to pick the worst diamond at Tiffany’s?

Recommended if … you like stories by the masters Coward admired, such as O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant.

Published: 2000 (Methuen paperback).

Posted by Janice Harayda

(c) 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

A witty guide for reading groups and others that focuses on books, not on whether to serve gin with The Great Gatsby

Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books. By John Carey. Faber and Faber, 173 pp., $14, paperback.

Reading group guides are thick on the ground this year, and some offer strong opinions on almost everything except books — refreshments, meeting times, power plays among members. All the more reason, then, to savor Pure Pleasure, a collection of 50 witty and literate essays on modern classics. This is not a reading group guide in the usual sense. But any group would benefit from taking some of its suggestions, and not just because John Carey wouldn’t dream of telling you, as one recent guide does, that strawberries are the “go-to fruit” for book clubs.

Part of the charm of Pure Pleasure lies in the brevity and directness of its essays, which first appeared in the Sunday Times of London. Secure in his reputation as one of England’s most admired critics, Carey has neither the need nor the desire to wear his erudition like a top hat at a royal wedding. His method is to dive straight into what interests him most about a book and wrap up his review in about 800 words. Here are the first lines of his essay about John Updike’s A Rabbit Omnibus: “Updike’s Rabbit saga is often praised as a lifelike portrait of middle-America in the second half of the 20th century. This should give grave offense to middle-America.” And here is how he introduces Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled: “This is a book about stress, a problem of epidemic proportions in our culture that modern fiction largely ignores.” Carey’s writing is never harder to understand than that, yet it is full of insights into works as different as The Great Gatsby, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.

Several aspects of Pure Pleasure might give pause to an American book group. Carey writes mainly about authors from Britain and Ireland with a scattering from France, Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere. Many of his choices reflect tastes that, however refined, have fallen from fashion. (How many people would today appreciate the wit of S. J. Perelman, famous for such lines as, “I’ve got Bright’s Disease, and he’s got mine”?) And Carey considers only five women: Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Stevie Smith, Muriel Spark and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

But you could argue that, for the same reasons, Pure Pleasure is an ideal complement to book group guides that take their cues from the current bestseller lists. Without ever saying so directly, this is a book that reminds us that long before Bridget Jones flirted with Daniel Cleaver by interoffice e-mail, Philip Larkin wrote: “In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life lived according to love.”

Best line: “The current vogue in university English departments is to reduce literature to politics — a way of engaging in the class war without actually risking income and politics.”

Worst line: On Elizabeth Bowen: “No writer has ever pursued people’s thoughts and feelings — or half-formed thoughts and half-recognized feelings — with such intricacy.” Take that, Shakespeare.

Recommended if … you like John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald better than Amy Tan and Jane Smiley, and George Orwell or Evelyn Waugh better than any of them.

Published: 2000

Consider reading also: A Reader’s Delight (Dartmouth, 1988), a collection of 40 brief and elegant essays that the author and critic Noel Perrin for the Washington Post about some of his favorite books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Posted by Janice Harayda

(c) 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.