my fathers musings

[redneck joe]

yeah how its made is more along my mental capacity...

 

[redneck joe]

What are your favorite books?


The problem I have with trying to answer that question is that my favorite book is frequently the book I am reading when asked that question.

But I will name a few.


The God Problem is one that persists high on my favorites list.
It’s by Howard Bloom who graduated from Reed College a long time ago and has never ceased being impressed by the intellect that that achievement implies.
Having read the book several times, I agree with his high self-esteem.
Howard takes his readers through a maze of history, science, math and physics and leads to the rational conclusion that things are as they are due to the inevitable facts of rules and mechanics rather than supernatural design.
At least I think that’s what he is saying.

Another book that comes to mind isn’t a book at all, but a long and deep friendship that holds together a story that is meted out in 20 volumes. The Aubrey/Maturin Epic is addictive because each time I enter it I’m back in the midst of my closest friends - Jack and Stephen drag a lot of people with them - and I can’t stop reading until volume 20 is read again. The only downside to that phenomenon is that at the end of volume 20 the story of that relationship is only beginning. Unfortunately, the epic’s author, Patrick O’Brian, dies after completing volume 20. I own the published draft of volume 21, but it’s pretty thin gruel.

The Great Rehearsal by Carl Van Doren is a good thing to read every five years. It is a minute-by-minute re-creation of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787. Having some idea about that morsel of United States history can help make one appear less foolish when talking Constitutional Law at cocktail events.

Adventures in Time and Space, published first in 1946, is a thousand-page anthology of the best science fiction of the first half of the Twentieth Century. I read it first in the summer of 1962. I finally found a used hardback reprint of it in 2020. It’s still untamed magic.

Speaking of magic, for me Amor Towles weaves a magic raiment in A Gentleman in Moscow. The plot is magical, so, to be consistent, the characters and their relationships are therefore magical and, in this book - I read The Lincoln Highway and the magic was missing - Towles’ prose often conjures magic. His description of vast miles and miles of Eastern Russia densely clothed with apple trees - an apple forest, he calls it - is one of the clearest pictures of a magic thing that I have ever seen.

Napoleon by Vincent Cronin comes to mind. I bought it on a whim while in the museum store at Versailles. That was my introduction to Napoleon. It’s the reason that I am a fan of Napoleon. It’s why I have read a number of other Napoleon biographies. Reading them has been interesting because biographers of Napoleon adopt one of two approaches: they are either all mayhem and battles, or they are all gossip and relationships. I prefer the latter. Cronin does a third thing: he gossips and battles and gets into the heads of his subjects. That’s why I re-read Napoleon by Cronin every now and then.

The Bears of Blue River by Charles Major is another magical thing. I read it fairly recently after not having read it for, perhaps, fifty years. It unleashed a phenomenon I had never experienced. I found myself reading a word or two and turning the page, time after time after time: I have the book memorized.

The rest of my favorite books reside on various shelves, in various locations. Some are even in boxes. Some I haven’t even read yet. They are all my favorites.

 

[flashback]

I whole heartedly agree with him on the Patrick Obrien saga. I have most in paper back except for those that I loaned out over the years.

 

[redneck joe]

How did you choose where to go to college?
A couple of paragraphs from Screen Saver are the answer to this question.

I had the good fortune to have a good job in the summer of 1960. I was on a surveying crew doing the engineering work for Wanapum Dam which was under construction.

Most of that summer I was on the crew that was establishing exactly where the railroad tracks adjacent to the Columbia River were going to be in relation to the giant lake that would form behind the dam when it filled up.

The specific function was called “shooting a traverse”.

I will leave out the details of that function.

On the traverse down the railroad tracks there were sometimes days on end when the terrain was uniform from hour to hour and day to day. I was always a chain length down the track from the level, and the terrain was unendingly the same; all I had to do was walk to the end of the chain, hold the rod plumb, and let Jerry take the elevation, and then do it again, and again. In those times I had a lot of time to think.

It was during one of those extended periods of days of never-ending repetition that I had a life-changing revelation. It was late enough in the summer that my savings account was getting fairly large, at least by my standards. I had calculated that by the time I ended my summer I would have $730 in the bank. That was, for a seventeen-year-old, a lot of money in 1960. Then I began to think about the financial implications of going to Portland University, even with the partial scholarship. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. I was going to have to spend most of the $730 just to pay for my tuition. I would have almost nothing left over for clothes, or dates or whatever. And why was I going to Portland University? Certainly the scholarship had had something to do with it, but the real answer to the question was that I was going due to inertia. Other than the “assumption” that I was going to go to college, where or how had never been addressed. The $730 addressed the how, but the catastrophic effect addressing it would have on my now treasured bank balance caused the “where” to suddenly surface for the first time as something to be thought about. The answer to “where” came almost magically. And it came in the form of a decision, not a possibility, which made it even more unusual. My typical decision-making process had been to come up with one or more possibilities and worry them to death until I could decide what to do. Those decisions frequently ended up concluding to do none of the above and going back to discovery mode. But on this day I had jumped from a problem to a solution almost instantly. And the solution had just felt right.

The fact that my choice of “where” had felt right from the outset was amazing. Other than being vaguely aware that there was a member of Oregon’s higher education apparatus in Portland, and that its name was Portland State College, I had never thought any more about it. All of a sudden, that was where I was going to go to college. That had been my first object lesson in how money would serve me well as a significant catalytic contributor to clear and decisive thought.