Author: jameswharris

by James Wallace Harris, Sunday, September 17, 2017

I’ve read 1,004 books since 1983 when I began my second reading log. I kept another log in the early 1970s where I read 495 books during an 18-month period when I dropped out of college trying to find myself. I read then mostly a mountain of science fiction which provided little enlightenment. I often read a book a day during my K-12 years. I wish I had kept a reading log of them. I guess I’ve read between 2000-3000 books since 1962. But how much did they add to my life? I’d guess 10% affected me in a lasting way. Which suggests I could cut out 90% of my reading, but I’d truly miss another 10-20%.

Looking over my current log I find many forgettable titles. A few hundred were great books, and another few hundred were entertaining page-turners, but the rest were time wasters. My father often yelled at me when growing up, “Get your goddamn head out of that goddamn book and go out and goddamn play.” He was probably right most of the time.

Pamela Paul has a book out, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues where she writes about her reading list. Bob is “Book Of Books.” I wish I had written a book about my reading history. She started her list in 1988, so we cover roughly the same time period. I haven’t read My Life with Bob yet because I’m waiting on the Audible edition that comes out on the 26th. From reading the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon, and reviews I can tell we’re kindred spirits. I’ll be listening to her book at a great time because I’m reevaluating my own life-long reading habits.

I’m trying to develop a refined approach to reading and buying books. I’m choosing to read fewer books. I love being a bookworm, but I need to use my time wisely, now that my supply of remaining years is dwindling.

I’ve been studying my list of 1,004 books and I have reduced them to the 100 titles that mean the most to me. Some books are written by favorite authors and represent a jumping off point for many additional titles. Even though I read these books from 1983-2017, they really represent time traveling across the last two centuries.

There were another fifty books I wanted to cram into my Top 100, but I was ruthless. I could write a blog post or chapter of a book about each of the novels below. In fact, I started to do just that, but then I realized I would have taken me months. So, all you get is a list.

The titles below represent who I am. Reading them is how I’ve programmed myself since my early thirties. I’ve read many books by most of these authors, and I’ve read some of these titles below more than once, some many times, and will reread them in my waning years. I’ve listened to most of them on audio.

There are a few titles that made a great impact on me years ago. I just had to list them, but I won’t reread them because they are dated. Over time this list will distill into another list because my memory can only handle so many books. In five years it might only run 75 titles.

The biggest surprise was in an early draft I had six books by Bart D. Ehrman on Christian history. I’m an atheist. But those six books model studying history wonderfully. If I had drawn up this list in the year 2000 it would have been mostly novels, and most of them would have been science fiction. My soul is slowly shifting to nonfiction and classics.

[I’m going to link certain titles to essays I’ve written or books on Amazon which explain why these books are worth reading, or just a link to the book on Amazon.]

 

Daniel DeFoe	Robinson Crusoe	1719
Jane Austen	Pride and Prejudice	1813
Mary Shelley	Frankenstein	1818
Henry David Thoreau	Walden	1854
Charles Dickens	Great Expectations	1861
George Elliot	Middlemarch	1871
Jules Verne	The Mysterious Island	1874
Anthony Trollope	The Way We Live Now	1875
Leo Tolstoy	Anna Karenina	1877
Robert Louis Stevenson	Treasure Island	1883
H. G. Wells	The Time Machine	1895
Bram Stoker	Dracula	1897
Theodore Dreiser	Sister Carrie	1900
Edith Wharton	The House of Mirth	1905
Edgar Rice Burroughs	Tarzan of the Apes	1912
Zane Grey	Riders of the Purple Sage	1912
L. Frank Baum	Patchwork Girl of Oz	1913
Ernest Hemingway	The Sun Also Rises	1926
D. H. Lawrence	Lady Chatterley’s Lover	1928
Olaf Stapledon	Last and First Men	1930
George Orwell	Nineteen Eighty-Four	1949
George R. Stewart	Earth Abides	1949
J. D. Salinger	The Catcher in the Rye	1951
Ralph Ellison	Invisible Man	1952
William Golding	Lord of the Flies	1954
Isaac Asimov	The Naked Sun	1957
Jack Kerouac	On the Road	1957
Robert A. Heinlein	Have Space Suit-Will Travel	1958
Truman Capote	Breakfast at Tiffany’s	1958
Philip K. Dick	Confessions of a Crap Artist	1959
Harper Lee	To Kill A Mockingbird	1960
Sylvia Plath	The Bell Jar	1963
Jerzy Kosinski	The Painted Bird	1965
Larry McMurtry	The Last Picture Show	1966
Paul L. Briand, Jr.	In Search of Paradise	1966
Robert Sheckley	Mindswap	1966
Samuel R. Delany	Empire Star	1966
Charles Portis	True Grit	1968
John Brunner	Stand On Zanzibar	1968
Kurt Vonnegut	Slaughterhouse-Five	1969
Robert M. Perzig	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	1974
Stephen Weinberg	The First Three Minutes	1977
Gregory Benford	Timescape	1980
Tracy Kidder	The Soul of a New Machine	1981
Stanley Karnow	Vietnam: A History	1983
Gabriel García Márquez	Love in the Time of Cholera	1985
Ken Grimwood	Replay	1986
Richard Elliot Friedman	Who Wrote the Bible?	1987
Dan Simmons	Hyperion	1989
Alexei and Cory Panshin	The World Beyond the Hill	1990
Harold Bloom	The Western Canon	1994
Philip Pullman	The Golden Compass	1995
Mary Doria Russell	The Sparrow	1996
Robert Zubrin	The Case for Mars	1996
Barbara Goldsmith	Other Powers	1998
J. K. Rowling	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	1999
David Sedaris	Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim	2000
David Hajdu	Positively 4th Street	2001
Sue Monk Kidd	The Secret Life of Bees	2001
Yann Martel	The Life of Pi	2001
Steven Pinker	The Blank Slate	2002
Richard E. Rubenstein	Aristotle’s Children	2003
David Maraniss	They Marched Into Sunlight	2004
Bart D. Ehrman	Misquoting Jesus	2005
Jared Diamond	Collapse	2005
Bill Bryson	The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid	2006
Lee Smolin	The Trouble with Physics	2006
John Matteson	Eden’s Outcasts	2007
Nassim Nicholas Taleb	The Black Swan	2007
Malcolm Gladwell	The Outliers	2008
Ellen Ruppel Shell	Cheap	2009
Gail Collins	When Everything Changed	2009
Kristof and WuDunn	Half the Sky	2009
Paolo Bacigalupi	The Windup Girl	2009
Robert J. Sawyer	Wake/Watch/Wonder	2009
Edmund de Waal	The Hare with the Amber Eyes	2010
Isabel Wilkerson	The Warmth of Other Suns	2010
Oreskes and Conway	Merchants of Doubt	2010
Oliver Sacks	The Mind’s Eye	2010
Rebecca Skloot	The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks	2010
David McCullough	The Greater Journey	2011
James Gleick	The Information	2011
Jo Walton	Among Others	2011
S. C. Gwynne	Empire of the Summer Moon	2011
Lawrence M. Krauss	A Universe from Nothing	2012
Stephen Greenblatt	The Swerve	2012
Alan Weisman	Countdown	2013
Doris Kearns Goodwin	The Bully Pulpit	2013
Elizabeth Gilbert	The Signature of All Things	2013
Atul Gawande	Being Mortal	2014
Celeste Ng	Everything I Never Told You	2014
Elizabeth Kolbert	The Sixth Extinction	2014
Naomi Klein	This Changes Everything	2014
Thomas Piketty	Capital in the Twenty-First Century	2014
Kim Stanley Robinson	Aurora	2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates	Between the World and Me	2015
Yuval Noah Harari	Sapiens/Homo Deus	2015
Nancy Isenberg	White Trash	2016
Peggy Orenstein	Girls & Sex	2016
Susan Faludi	In the Darkroom	2016

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Friday, September 15, 2017

I’m surprised Christians can call America a Christian nation when looking at our healthcare system. It’s greed over compassion. Our current system is built around profiteering on misery. The poor are left to die of neglect, and folks in the middle-class are being extorted at scalpel point. And rich get richer on the sick and dying. Big Medicine, Big Pharma, and Big Insurers are in cahoots with Congress to produce Big Billionaires while avoiding any kind of Christian or humanistic values and forcing doctors to corrupt their Hippocratic Oath.

The rising cost of healthcare is going to bankrupt society, both individually and collectively. Republicans are hell-bent to keep this Ponzi scheme going at all costs. It’s time to rethink the rules of the game.

I’m reading An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal. She reports, “Medicare uses 98 percent of its funding for healthcare and only 2 percent for administration.” Private insurers are nowhere near this efficient. And Rosenthal’s book gives a history of how private healthcare insurance corporations are escalating medical costs for both individuals and for the GDP.

Many people are now talking about Medicare-for-All. Of course, politicians have no idea how to fund it or phase it in. I suggest we do it slowly, two years at a time. One year at a time for children while concurrently pushing the traditional enrollment age for adults earlier one year at a time. This would give private insurers time to either come up with a truly competitive system or be phased out. If in 20 years private enterprise can’t provide an effective alternative we go 100% government run.

The schedule would look something like this, phasing in these age groups:

2020	1	64
2021	2	63
2022	3	62
2023	4	61
2024	5	60
2025	6	59
2026	7	58
2027	8	57
2028	9	56
2029	10	55
2030	11	54
2031	12	53
2032	13	52
2033	14	51
2034	15	50
2035	16	49
2036	17	48
2037	18	47
2038	19	46
2039	20	45

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Monday, September 11, 2017

How should we act after learning something deeply important? If we read about evil, what should we do? Just start reading our next book? Should books change the way we live? Books teach us about reality, but what can we do with that knowledge?

I was emotionally shaken by reading In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi. The book had a tremendous impact on me because I read it just after the violence in Charlottesville and much of In the Darkroom deals with the history of the extreme right in Hungary before WWII and the resurgence of extreme right nationalism in modern day Hungary. Like Charlottesville, In the Darkroom reveals extremely ugly aspects of reality.

On the surface, this book is about a daughter learning that her estranged father has become a woman. Her father, Steven, a Jew from Hungary barely escaped being exterminated by Nazis as a teen, returns to his childhood homeland, just as anti-Jewish fervor was again reshaping Hungarian politics. The parallels to our current political landscape are horrifying.

I often find when finishing a great book I want to know more. I want to use what I’ve learned. I even wrote an essay about this craving for Book Riot, “Researched Rereading.” In the Darkroom left me with many unanswered questions. So, this essay will try to illustrate what I do after reading a specific book. Usually, it’s little more than read about the same topic, recommend the book to friends, or review it here on my blog.

In the Darkroom is so complex and rich that this is my fifth new draft attempting to capture my exact feelings. None of the earlier versions succeeded. I’m not sure this one will either. I believe In the Darkroom may require writing a book length reply to do it justice. Sadly, I don’t think it’s getting the attention it deserves, even though it was on many of the best-book-lists of 2016.

I keep wishing I could list all the important themes in the book but I don’t know how to phrase each for a bullet point. To say it’s about a man becoming a woman is misleading, although that’s part of the book. Faludi’s story is deeply psychological. It’s about identity and survival. Faludi’s Jewish father survived the Nazis sometimes by pretending to be a Nazi. Many times in his long life he pretended to be someone else to survive.

How do we survive our mundane lives, do we pretend too?

After reading In the Darkroom I wasn’t sure if Stefánie Faludi was a woman or pretending to be a woman to survive the final decade of his/her life. Steven became Stefánie, but her story is not like the typical transgender people I’ve met or read about. Susan Faludi’s father is a unique person that defies analysis. In the Darkroom is a case history of a psychological condition that is endlessly revealing but impossible to define.

Most reviewers focused on In the Darkroom being about a woman discovering her father having gender reassignment surgery at 76, and then writing a book about her dad’s life. And, In the Darkroom is part memoir and part biography. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Because both the father and daughter are named Faludi, I’m going to sometimes use their first names to reference the two. Because her father had three names and two genders in his/her lifetime, I’ll use the name from the period being discussed. Susan’s father was born István Károly Friedman on November 1, 1927, in Budapest, Hungary. Susan’s father died Stefánie Faludi at 87, in Budapest in 2015. Susan was born in Queens, New York in 1959, and knew her father as Steven. Susan’s parents divorced in 1977 and she saw little of her father after that until 7/7/2004 when she got an email from her father saying he was now a she and living back in Budapest. In the Darkroom is about Susan’s many trips to Budapest between 2004-2015 getting to know her father, an enigmatic person who did everything possible to hide his/her identity.

Susan grew up knowing Steven, a highly competitive very masculine man. She did not know of István, or his Jewish heritage and extended family. So her book is about Hungarian family history in the 1930s and 1940s, and 21st-century Hungarian history and culture.

As I read In the Darkroom I wondered if Susan’s father was a psychopath, but Susan doesn’t explore that issue. I did find this paragraph from Psychology Today that fits István/Steven/Stefánie quite well:

Psychopaths, on the other hand, are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them and will appear normal to unsuspecting people. Psychopaths are often well educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature.

But István/Steven/Stefánie defies any singular labeling.  Susan’s detective story to unravel her father’s secrets is far more than just a story of having a transgender parent. Susan’s father had a profoundly complicated and fascinating life that perfectly illustrates that fact is indeed stranger than fiction. In the Darkroom contains countless seeds for novels and nonfiction books if other writers wish to spout them, as well as a goldmine for grad students wanting Ph.D. dissertation ideas.

The hardback edition does not include photographs. The photograph shown above is widely used on the internet, and I assumed it was released for the publication of the book and safe to copy. Faludi writes for the NY Times “In My World, Photographs Lie,” which includes a slideshow of photos that are now in the paperback edition. They are not enough! And they do lie. But words deceive too. Susan constantly describes photographs throughout the book which I’m sure most readers crave to see too. When I finally saw some of those photographs they weren’t like I imagined. Steven was a photographer and cinematographer, so it seems odd to leave out photographs in a book about that part of his life. And the book uses the word “darkroom” from the title as a multidimensional metaphor. However, no amount of Googling has provided enough photographs to fill my desire to see what Susan wrote about.

Ultimately, In the Darkroom is about identity and not just transgender identity. István/Steven/Stefánie never says she felt female from childhood like other transgender female memoirs I’ve read. And most of the book is really about István/Steven/Stefánie conflict between being Jewish and wanting to be Hungarian, even Magyar Hungarian. Magyars persecuted the Jews before and during WWII, and again today. Read Susan Faludi’s “Hungary’s sharp rightward turn is a warning to America” in The Guardian. Jobbik is an extreme right political party in Hungary whose success should scare Americans, especially after what we saw in Charlottesville.

In the Darkroom could be a supplemental text for any graduate course about current day fascism or how racial and nationalistic hatred overwhelmed Hungary in WWII. I could imagine a professor asking students to list similarities between German and Hungarian nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, and what we see with the Alt-Right today. Just read Susan Faludi’s piece in The Baffler, “Pity, O God, the Republican.”

One of the constant ironies in the book is Susan’s feminism in conflict with her father’s concept of being female. Joy Ladin at Lilith, a Jewish feminist publication, wrote, “What’s Wrong Here? One Daughter’s Rendering of Her Dad’s Gender Transition,” and felt Faludi might be misleading readers about transgender psychology because Susan doesn’t warn readers her father is atypical. Ladin worries Faludi is presenting anti-trans stereotypes. Faludi does profile a transgender woman that cared for her father after surgery, and who had doubts of about choices she made. Faludi also includes research on transgender people who end up being unhappy. However, Faludi is very careful to explain how her father did an end-run around all the psychological guidelines used for people electing gender reassignment surgery. Stefánie is so unique that nothing should be generalized about her story.

Even though In the Darkroom is a masterpiece, it left me wanting to know more. Of all the family Susan interviews and profiles, why did she leave out her mother and brother? Faludi chronicles her encounters with her father like a journalist carefully documenting evidence and sources, yet I don’t feel we get Susan’s reactions and feelings. And why is she maintaining dual citizenship with a country that was so horrible to her family? We get hints that Susan is like her father, and like her father, she hides her identity too. And like her father, I wonder about the inner identity that Susan hides from us readers.

István/Steven/Stefánie is a master manipulator of people, (the reason I wonder if he/she was a psychopath). Susan constantly shows the reader how her father tried to manipulate her and everyone else. I believe Ladin’s worries are unfair. Susan Faludi does an excellent job separating her father from the typical person, be it male, female, Jew, American, Hungarian, etc.

The real question is whether István/Steven/Stefánie Faludi knew himself/herself. István/Steven/Stefánie was so obsessive-compulsive his/her whole life about secrecy that it’s hard to accept what we do know. Somehow István/Steven/Stefánie was able to drag a lifetime of possessions with her over three continents. When Susan visited Budapest she found rooms recreated that she had seen in America as a child, as if István/Steven/Stefánie was the curator of a museum devoted to his/herself. I wished Faludi had included photographs of all these rooms and possessions, and from the time Steven was a photographer in Brazil in the 1940s.

The hardest part of the story to grasp is István/Steven/Stefánie feelings about being Jewish. At one point, Stefánie describes herself as an “overdressed shiksa.” She has chosen to be a woman and appears to identify as a Magyar. Both identities that have persecuted István/Steven/Stefánie over a lifetime. This is rather amazing because Stefánie has overcome two physical barriers – gender and ethnicity – to create an outward appearing identity of her own making. In the dark room of her mind, she invents what she wants people to see, even her daughter.

It’s a shame István/Steven/Stefánie didn’t keep a journal, but then, that would have been too revealing.

Reading In the Darkroom makes me wonder about my own identity. I don’t think about gender, race, nationality, religion, or ethnicity when it comes to my identity. I side with scientific and liberal thought. I might tell people I’m a liberal or atheist, but what does that mean? I’d guess the best one-word description for myself is bookworm.

Books have to stand on their own, and In the Darkroom does. However, any great book should introduce the reader to a new path into reality to explore. And In the Darkroom does that too. My craving to know more really boils down to wanting to ask all the people involved my own questions. But I can’t. The best I can do is look for interviews other people have done.

• “Q & A with Susan Faludi” – Tablet Magazine
• “Author Susan Faludi on her transgender father, Trump and feminism today” – Financial Times
• “‘In The Darkroom,” A Writer Comes to Grips With Her Dad’s Gender Transition” – NPR
• “Susan Faludi: the feminist writer on trans issues, Donald Trump and masculinity” – The Guardian
• “Susan Faludi: ‘In the Darkroom’” – Diane Rehm
• “Susan Faludi Discusses ‘In the Darkroom’” – C-SPAN

All of these are polite interviews which are typical for authors while doing book promotion. Faludi is famous for writing controversial books on complicated subjects, including Backlash and Stiffed. In the Darkroom has fathoms of depth to it. I’d love to read an academic anthology collecting essays that dissect it, but it’s unlikely such a book will ever be assembled.

But I still haven’t answered my title question. A great book should change us so we act differently. The reason I was so upset at reading In the Darkroom is the same reason why millions got upset over the news from Charlottesville. What can we do about people who hate? Susan Faludi’s book is about what her father did. He survived where many in his family didn’t. I don’t want to survive the Alt-Right by his method. The tragedy of In the Darkroom is Stefánie is not a likable person even though she is incredibly remarkable. I don’t want to change myself, I want the people that hate to change. Is that even possible?

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Friday, September 8, 2017

[reprinted and slightly updated from Book Riot]

Digital technology is again disrupting the rules of book selling. Ebook self-publishing allowed Andy Weir, Hugh Howey, E. L. James, among others, to become best-selling authors. Now Dennis E. Taylor has written an under-the-radar bestseller by selling first to Audible.com with his science fiction novel We Are Legion (We Are Bob). The book is relatively unknown because Taylor is still selling self-published printed copies on Amazon, but it’s a huge hit on Audible.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) came out 9/20/16 on Audible. As of 9/8/17 has 36,360 ratings, with an average score of 4.7 out of 5 stars. It’s sequel, For We Are Many came out 4/18/17 and has 22,635 ratings with an average of 4.8 out of 5. The final book in the trilogy, All These Worlds, before it was released on 8/8/17 was at 5^th place out of 27,980 science fiction titles at Audible based on sales, just after Ready Player One, The Dark Tower, A Game of Thrones, and The X-Files: Cold Cases, all titles with movie tie-ins. In comparison, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, just a few titles above the current position of We Are Legion (We Are Bob) has 29,484 ratings with an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars. 1984 by George Orwell only has 13,851 ratings with a score of 4.4 out of 5 stars.

What the hell did Taylor write to create such a success? The book is a lot of fun! It’s not a literary masterpiece, doesn’t really have a plot, and most of the characters are the same person. Yet, it works very well as entertaining science fiction. Ray Porter, who narrates the trilogy on audio, is pitch-perfect for the job. I expect he’s a major factor in the success of the Bobiverse trilogy.

I’m also wondering if Audible and audio books are changing the way bestsellers are created. I was recently doing statistics on the way books are rated on Goodreads, Amazon, and Audible (all companies owned by Amazon). Generally, Goodreads has the most ratings for books by far, but that’s to be expected. It’s a site for collecting and rating books. But books on Audible generally get way more ratings than Amazon. Are more bookworms listening than reading? Then I realized that people listen to books on their smartphones. When a book ends empty stars pop up to rate the book – almost impossible to ignore. It’s just more convenient to rate books on Audible. Far few readers go back to Amazon to rate a title.

Still, how much does Audible influence the success of books? We Are Legion (We Are Bob) proves Audible by itself can create a bestseller. Of course, it takes a good book too. Again, are more bookworms listening to their books than reading them?

I bought We Are Legion (We Are Bob) because I told my friend Mike I was in the mood for a new science fiction novel that would be as fun as the science fiction I first discovered as a teen fifty years ago. He said he just bought We Are Legion (We Are Bob) for that very reason. Overall, I got a big Sci-Fi kick out the story. Mike thought it was fun but slight, but he’s more of a critical thinker than I am. There is something very definite about We Are Legion (We Are Bob) that’s likable.

My guess is the book was written to push all the buttons science fiction fans have for loving science fiction. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is science fictionally recursive. (You might need a high Geek score to understand it.) Dennis E. Taylor is the James Thurber of science fiction, turning all of us into Walter Mittys imagining ourselves having Bob’s Big Sci-Fi adventure. Of course, it’s the Jimiverse in my mind. And even though this story has a male POV – there are damn few women characters – plenty of women readers love the book at Goodreads. Evidently, women readers have no trouble renaming Bob after themselves for their own personal fantasies.

The book only gets 11,834 ratings with an average score of 4.33 out of 5 stars at Goodreads. One of the few books I found with fewer ratings at Goodreads than Audible (32,137). I wonder if that’s because more of the people rating the book at Goodreads only read it. Around 120 people are adding this title to their Goodreads library each day. Compare that to New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, a recent SF book that’s getting a lot of mainline press. It’s adding around 60-75 titles a day currently, and several hundred a day just after it came out.

So Dennis E. Taylor is doing extremely well.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) has a serial problem-solving plot like The Martian by Andy Weir, and tons of geeky pop culture references like Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Does that mean there’s a chance that We Are Legion (We Are Bob) will be made into a movie?

Taylor’s story has just about every science fictional idea known to science fiction. I don’t want to list them all because it might create spoilers. But yes, I think the Bobiverse could be made into a movie, and should.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Monday, August 28, 2017

The Twilight Zone is the classic science fiction television show that ran five seasons on CBS from 1959-1964 producing 156 black and white episodes. Because each episode was a standalone story, the series makes a great laboratory for dissecting storytelling. The overall quality of TZ writing is very high, with many memorable episodes, but it’s also true the show had its clunkers.

I recently bought The Twilight Zone:  The Complete Series Blu-ray on Amazon for $64.99, but that price changes almost daily and can run much higher. I also snagged a copy of The Twilight Zone Companion Second Edition by Marc Scott Zicree. However, you can stream The Twilight Zone on CBS All Access, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. (Netflix and Amazon only have four seasons.) And Wikipedia has a list of all the shows with links to essays on each. Each episode entry on Wikipedia often provides more information than the book I bought, but that volume makes a handy companion to keep by my TV recliner. I bought the Blu-ray set because of the glowing reviews about pristine transfers and all the extras.

Modern television fans (meaning young folks) might prefer studying Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad for their exceptionally high-quality storytelling and addictiveness. But those stories are so huge and complex that I can’t grasp their bigger structures. I figured I’d be better off analyzing tiny 22-minute tales. This coincides with my rediscovery of short story reading. I’ve been listening to The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick and Untouched by Human Hands by Robert Sheckley and I’m amazed at how dramatic and compelling their stories were from their early career in the 1950s, doing so much with so little.

Last night I watched two TZ episodes, “Nothing in the Dark” which featured Gladys Cooper as an old woman afraid of dying, and Robert Redford playing a beat cop that gets shot on her doorstep. The story was told with one set and three actors. What amazed me was how much was conveyed without putting it into the dialog. The old woman wouldn’t leave her basement apartment in a condemned tenement because she feared meeting Mr. Death. Watching makes you imagine her life and how she lived. In one scene, she sits on the edge of a dirty bathtub and you question how often she bathes. Cooper’s face is old and wrinkled, and you wonder just how long she’s evaded death.

And of course, we learn her fear of death is unfounded, not because Robert Redford isn’t Mr. Death trying to trick her, but because her death is peaceful. This is one of the episodes of The Twilight Zone that stuck in my memory, but I only remembered Robert Redford being shot, lying in the snow in his dark police uniform. However, I’m not sure when I first saw it. My family often watched TZ together in the late 1950s and early 1960s and I’m positive I remember some shows from when I was young. But I think I first saw this one in the 1970s as a rerun.

The second episode I watched was “A Quality of Mercy” about a squad of American soldiers on August 6, 1945, the day before the first A-bomb was dropped. Again, the set was sparse, with just a handful of actors, mainly Dean Stockwell and Albert Salmi. (It did have a couple short vivid scenes with Leonard Nimoy without his Mr. Spock ears.) Salmi is the wise sergeant that’s war weary, leading squad of men that’s tired of killing and being killed. This comes across amazingly well via limited dialog and acting expressions. Their short scenes recall so many war movies that their cliché lines feel like intensely distilled encryptions of dozens of great war movies. The plot of the story involves a green officer, Lieutenant Katell played by Stockwell, wanting to get into the fighting before the war is over. The fantasy of the show begins when he drops his field glasses. After picking them up we see Dean Stockwell made up as Lieutenant Yamuri with a squad of Japanese soldiers attacking the same position now held by Americans. The show’s title comes from The Merchant of Venice, “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes” by William Shakespeare.

Both shows might feel like slight nothings to the average 21st-century television watcher. 30-minute television is only used for sitcoms today. We need an hour for drama, and we’ve become so addicted to continuing story dramas that we binge on them hour after hour. So it might be hard to take seriously anything that begins and ends so swiftly.

Do we need all those hours to tell a good story with a soulful insight? Wouldn’t Ernest Hemingway have written the seven-volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire in one-volume of about 400 pages? I can’t finish Proust’s epic work, but I do find a few paragraphs now and then worth contemplation. The Twilight Zone isn’t Proust or even Hemingway, but it is as good as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction or Galaxy was back in the 1950s. I believe The Twilight Zone captures the Happy Days decade more faithfully than any show from its era. That’s because it took 156 different snapshots. I suppose if I had access to other anthologies shows of the time I’d give them the same credit.

I’m not the only one remembering The Twilight Zone:

• The Enduring Legacy of The Twilight Zone – The New Atlantis
• This Day in Twilight Zone History – SyFy
• The 10 Greatest Twilight Zone Episodes – CBS
• How the Twilight Zone Predicted Our Paranoid Present – The Atlantic
• Five Episodes of The Twilight Zone That Are Only Slightly More Horrifying Than Our Current Reality – io9
• The Twilight Zone Can Make You A Better Person, Really – Wired
• How a War-Weary Vet Created The Twilight Zone – The Daily Beast
• The Twilight Zone – Mental Floss
• The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone – Arlen Schumer

JWH