Books – Page 5 – Auxiliary Memory

Reading History Books About Events I Originally Watched on Television

by James Wallace Harris, 12/8/24

The 1960 U.S. presidential election is the first one I remember, but just barely. I was eight years old. My father was for Nixon and my mother for Kennedy. I decided I liked Kennedy because he was younger, more dynamic and had a good-looking wife. Even at eight, good looking women were often a deciding factor. I remember getting in a fight in the school playground because I was for Kennedy and the other kid was for Nixon. Neither of us got to decide the issue because a teacher pulled us apart.

During the Kennedy years I didn’t watch TV news. I would sometimes stay home from school to watch the Mercury space launches. Back then the TV news departments of each network would take over all broadcasting. In the first half of the 1960s, the space program was about the only real-world activity I paid any attention to.

I did pay some attention during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, mainly because I lived on Homestead Air Force Base, and everyone talked about it constantly. I remember having duck and cover drills at Homestead Air Force Base Elementary, but I was disappointed when there were no real A-bombs dropped. (I was very immature for my age.)

I didn’t become a news watcher until Kennedy’s death. I remember that weekend, my family watched the news constantly, and the following week too. That’s when I started following Walter Cronkite. I turned twelve three days after Kennedy was shot.

The news also became exciting in February of 1964 when The Beatles came to America. It was during 1965 that older boys I knew began worrying about being drafted, and I started paying attention to news about Vietnam.

The CBS Evening News was my main source of information about life beyond my own little world during the 1960s. I sometimes got to see The Today Show on NBC because my mother watched it while making breakfast. I liked that show because I found Barbara Walters hot. (Okay, I’ve already said I was a weird kid.) Sometimes I would watch news specials or documentaries. While in the ninth grade (1965-66) I had a civics course. But for the most part I just wasn’t that aware of what was going on in the world except for Top 40 AM music.

I don’t remember reading the paper, The Miami Herald, until 1968. I did start to read magazines in 1965, but that was haphazard. People would give my parents copies of Life, Time, Newsweek, Look, Saturday Evening Post, and National Geographic from time to time, and I found them fascinating. On my own, after 1965, I would buy Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and MAD Magazine. During twelfth grade (1968-69) my English teacher got me interested in literary fiction, and I subscribed to Saturday Review with money I made from working in a grocery store. I really didn’t understand it though. In late 1968 or early 1969, I got hooked on Rolling Stone magazine and sometimes bought Creem when it started publishing.

A whole lot of what I knew about the counterculture came from Life Magazine.

If you think about it one way, television and magazines offered a fairly diverse view on what was happening in the world, but squinted at it another way, it was a rather limited view.

In December 2024, I’ve been reading three books about the 1960s that explore events I encountered in two minute stories on TV, or read about in a few pages in a magazine when they first happened. Some of those short snippets of current events made huge impressions on me as a kid. They shaped who I thought I was. The history books makes me realize I was mostly uninformed.

The reality of the 1960s is I was a kid going to school every day except for long summer vacations. I started 1960 in New Jersey but moved to Mississippi then to Florida then to South Carolina back to Florida, then Mississippi again, and back to Florida. I went to thirteen different schools during the 1960s. The only newsworthy event I saw live was the launch of Apollo 8. I had a chance to see Kennedy in 1962 when he came to Homestead Air Force Base. They let us out of school to see him, but me and my friends went fishing instead. My sister was at Dinner Key Auditorium when Jim Morrison flashed the crowd. I got to meet an astronaut in 1968, but I’ve forgotten which one. And this is hardly newsworthy. I got to see Cream play during their farewell tour in 1968. Oh, and I attended one SDS rally.

In other words, I experienced the legendary Sixties mostly via AM radio, television, and magazines. I did have long hair sometimes, and I sometimes messed around with drugs, but I was hardly a hippie or a radical. I did get into the counterculture more in the 1970s, but that’s another story.

The point of this long-winded essay is I’m now reading history books about years I lived through. I can contrast my memories to behind the scenes accounts of things I got from soundbites. That’s quite enlightening.

We live with the illusion that we think we understand what is real and true. We delude ourselves that we make decisions on relevant information. But we don’t. If I could have read the history books about the sixties I’m reading in old age when I was young, I could have gotten closer to seeing reality.

Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, two heroes of my youth, claimed that LSD opened the doors of perception, and that might be true on a nonverbal level, but a deep reading of history books is far greater at revealing reality that we can comprehend on a verbal level.

Lately, I’ve been reading that reading is going out of fashion with young people. That’s a shame. Even back when I was a teen, and only got superficial understandings about the events around me from superficial news sources, it did make me more aware.

The three books above are filling in details on things happening around me as I was growing up. I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of the Thin Man.”

I realize I’ve been Mr. Jones my whole life, and I’m still trying to figure out what happened.

JWH

Meditating on a Meme

by James Wallace Harris, 11/28/24

Seeing the above photos as a meme on Facebook made me think about how much people, society, and pop culture changed in the 1960s.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then are two pictures only worth 2,000 words? I don’t think so, I think it’s 1,000 words times 1,000 words, or 1,000,000 words. I could easily write that many from all the ideas my mind has generated since I began meditating on those photos.

Here’s the original meme from Facebook:

I was eight on 1/1/60 and eighteen on 12/31/69. I have always thought the longest years of my life were from 1963 to 1969 because so much happened to me and the world I lived in during that time. For folks who didn’t grow up in the sixties, it was much more than what you can learn from watching Grease or American Graffiti and contrasting it with Hair or Woodstock.

When I first saw the meme above I instantly thought about how rock and roll music of the 1950s ended up becoming the rock music of Woodstock. I’ve tried several times just to write an essay about that, but after typing over 5,000 words, I realize I’ve barely hinted at what I could say. That’s too long for a blog post.

I recommend that you find two photos that bracket your adolescent years or the decade you identify with the most and meditate on them. Start with remembering every place you lived and what you did each year. Remember your family and friends, your pets, your homes, your schools and workplaces, the clothes you wore, all the activities you pursued, everything you wanted to buy. Then write the shortest essay that makes it all coherent. You will then feel the mental anguish I am feeling right now.

Then branch out in your meditations. The easy and fun things to contemplate are the changes in pop culture — how music, movies, books, TV shows, games, and technology evolved over ten years. But then move on to the political and social changes. That’s when things get heavy. Can you connect your firsthand experiences with all those external events? Have you ever compared the life you lived to what you saw on the TV news every night?

Every one of us has the life experience to write a Proust-size novel and has lived through enough social change to write a series of history books about the formative decade of our lives. If you don’t think so, meditate more on the two photos you have selected.

I turned seventy-three on Monday, and getting old has made me more susceptible to memes about the past. My memories are fading away so I desperately want to cling to them. Emotions gnaw at me to make sense of everything I’ve experienced. The urge is to put it all down in words, but I don’t have what it takes to do the job and do it precisely.

There is an undefinable mental barrier that keeps me from organizing my thoughts into coherent histories. And I’m not talking about writing something worthy of publication for others to read, but just producing a narrative that makes sense of things for myself about myself and what I’ve learned. The older I get, the more I want to understand.

This essay started out about when rock and roll music became rock music. After several drafts and much contemplation, I narrowed it down to the summer of 1965 when I first heard Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. As I kept trying to document my theory, I realized I could write a whole book on it.

Then as I was researching the subject, I found that Andrew Grant Jackson had already published the book I wish I had written, 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music. His book is what I wanted to write in this essay when I first saw the meme above.

The Kindle edition is currently $2.99, and it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I suggest we should chronicle our lives. Even if you don’t buy the book, read the sample at Amazon. I feel the format of organizing the narrative around a month-by-month description of what was happening is a great template to use for writing about memories.

JWH

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante

by James Wallace Harris, 10/19/24

Technically, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the first novel in a four-volume sequence that is collectively referred to as the Neapolitan Novels. Now that I’ve read all four books, I dislike that tagline for the whole story. The four books are really one whole novel, and even though Naples, Italy is very important to the story, it doesn’t properly describe the complete novel. Each volume picks up exactly where the last one stops. If they were published in one volume with no subdivisions, you wouldn’t notice any transitions.

For this review, I’m going to refer to the whole as My Brilliant Friend, and when needed, I’ll point to the individual titles as part of the story. The structure below uses the dates for the English translation. The books were originally published in Italian one year earlier.

My Brilliant Friend (2012)
- Prologue: Eliminating All the Traces
- Childhood: The Story of Don Achille
- Adolescence: The Story of the Shoes
The Story of a New Name (2013)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014)
- Middle Time
The Story of the Lost Child (2015)
- Maturity
- Old Age: The Story of Bad Blood
- Epilogue: Restitution

Circular Plot and Recursion

The complete story begins where it ends. And throughout this long story, it constantly refers to itself. It’s so recursive that it feels like two mirrors aimed at each other. It’s also cyclical because it’s about daughters and their mothers, who eventually become mothers of daughters. In so many ways, this story mirrors its parts.

The novel is about two women, Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo, who call each other Lenù and Lila. The story feels like an autobiography, and we have to remember that the author’s name is Elena too. Elena Ferrante hides behind a pseudonym, but this novel feels very autobiographical. Lenù and Lila react and respond to each other so intensely that it’s hard to tell who originates what traits. I even imagined that Elena Greco is writing about two versions of her own identity, the one who writes books, and her ordinary self. And it’s interesting that Ferrante hides behind her pseudonym, claiming she wants to remain anonymous while Lila also wants to remain anonymous throughout the story. So many reflections.

Literary Novels

I’ve always thought the greatest of literary novels feel biographical or autobiographical. They don’t need to be about real people, but they do need to feel like they are, and this novel offers two realistic portraits. Another trait of great literary novel is setting. We often think of London when we think of Dickens, or Russia when we think of Tolstoy, or Ireland when we think of Joyce. Ferrante has made her book about Naples and Italy.

If you’ve only read the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, you should tell yourself that you never finished the novel. The Neapolitan Novels boxed set runs 1,965 pages. On audio the four books run 78 hours and 52 minutes. To give perspective, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy averages about 60 hours in the various audio editions. Different translations of The Bible run 82-102 hours. The seven volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past runs 154 hours and 14 minutes. In other words, the whole My Brilliant Friend is a literary heavyweight.

Most novels that come out in a series are never artistically heavier than a single volume. That’s why when I finished reading the single volume entitled My Brilliant Friend, I couldn’t understand why the writers polled by The New York Times considered it the top book of the 21st century so far. It was good, but not that good. That’s because it’s only one-fourth of a whole. Now that I’ve read all four volumes, I can easily see why it was voted the top novel of this century.

Will it Become a Classic?

Whenever I read a highly respective modern novel I’ve wondered if it will someday be considered a classic. I’ve never felt sure about any modern novel to predict one before. However, for the whole of My Brilliant Friend I felt like it was at least an equal to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. That novel only runs 36-40 hours in audio, so it’s about half the size of the full version of My Brillian Friend. The Ferrante novel is far more ambitious, at least in being a biography of two women, so maybe it needs twice the space that Tolstoy used to tell us about Anna Karenina. However, Anna is never developed in such detail like Lenù and Lila.

We follow Lenù and Lila from being little girls to old women, and that makes a huge difference in storytelling ambition. This novel is primarily about friendship, even though it says almost as much about kinship. Men do not come across well in this story. This novel is feminist at a visceral level. I’d also say this book is an anti-chemistry book in the sexual sense. Time and time again, hormones overwhelm Lenù and Lila into making bad life-changing decisions. The great loves of their lives are the same evil Mr. Right. Nino Sarratore is no Mr. Darcy. Ferrante makes Nino one of the detestable bad guys of literary history. I can’t believe that Lenù and Lila didn’t immediately recognize that he was a clone of his father, Donato, the slimy seducer they knew from childhood.

The Prose

It’s hard to judge the writing of a translated novel. I do know that Ann Goldstein’s translation of Ferrante’s Italian prose is clear and precise, and the writing comes across as vivid and impactful, but the style is plain and unadorned. It lacks the colorful authorial voice of two recent novels where the prose enchanted me, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Nor does it have any the wonderful authorial commentary like old literary writers Dickens or Tolstoy since Ferrante’s story is told in the first person.

A lot of modern bestsellers have the highly refined writing style taught by MFA programs. Readability and clarity are valued over wordy digressions and colorations. This is one reason why I have a hard time predicting if a novel will become a classic a century from now. The classics we’ve crowned from the 19th century all have distinctive writer’s voices. Ferrante’s voice comes across through the characterizations of Lenù and Lila, and it’s confusing to distinguish Elena the author’s voice from Elena the character.

Final Judgment

I liked this story tremendously. It may have ruined me for reading lesser novels, especially for reading science fiction, which seldom achieves any kind of deep character development. The whole story of My Brilliant Friend reminds me of two other multi-novel sequences about characters as they age.

The first is A Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-volume series by Anthony Powell which he wrote from 1951 to 1975 using his own life and friends for inspiration. I reviewed them here, here, and here.

And the other are books by Elizabeth Strout. Collectively, they follow the growth of two women too, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. I’ve reviewed them here.

This first reading of the entire My Brilliant Friend story will not be enough to truly appreciate this novel. Even though it’s told in a straightforward manner, it is quite complex in what it has to say. I listened to the books this time. Next time I’ll read them with my eyes. Luckily, I have a one-volume Kindle edition that includes all four books.

Ferrante made me think about my life as a whole. She also makes me think about aging. And she has quite a lot to say about the relationship between men and women. Her novel might be the perfect illustration as to why we don’t have free will. Whether or not it becomes a classic in future centuries, it is worth reading and contemplating now. It gives us lot to meditate on.

JWH

The Mathematics of Book Buying

Can you resist a great bargain? Especially when buying something you particularly love? Every day Amazon emails me the Kindle Daily Deals, of which they have five ebooks on sale, usually for $1.99. Sometimes it’s $2.99, and sometimes it’s even .99 cents, but usually it’s $1.99. And I’ve gotten some amazing books for $2 – fantastic bargains! At Audible.com, also owned by Amazon, they often have audiobooks on sale for $4.95. Plus, I love going to my Friends of the Library Bookstore, where it’s not uncommon to find great hardback books for just $3.

If I read one book for every ten I buy though, the real price of that Kindle ebook is $20, or $50 for the audiobook, and $30 for the used hardback. That isn’t a bargain, is it? If I think of myself building a library, then getting as many books as cheap as possible is a book shopping thrill. But if I think of myself as buying books to read, then buying books I don’t read is wasting money.

Since I’ve recently retired, how much I spend each month is very important. Every dollar I spend now is one less dollar I’ll have in the future. My real goal should be to spend little, and read more. Now I have time to read all those unread books in my library, but not the money to keep building the library.

Another way to rationalize the numbers is to think of myself as enjoying book buying. That shopping for books is the pleasure I’m actually budgeting, and ignore whether or not I read the books. By that measure if I spend a $100 a month and get 25 books, rather than 3-7 at new prices, then yes, I’ve been having a great time bargain hunting for books.

To be honest, owning books is not my goal, so I have to face the fact that I am wasting money. That’s sad. Maybe what I shouldn’t completely give up something I love, but just lower the budget. I wonder how many great books I can get for $25 a month? Save money, start a challenge!

JWH – 1/16/14

What Does it Cost to Read a Book? How Ebooks will Change Book Buying Habits.

With hardback and paperback sales sliding down the charts while ebook sales rising, it appears the new paperback book is the ebook. Unlike the past, where readers had to wait months or years for the paperback edition to come out, the ebook and hardback are now published simultaneously. This is great news for readers until you realize what has happened is the price of a paperback has been increased. You get to read it sooner, but it costs more – but the whole point of mass market paperbacks was to read books for less.

It used to be a book would come out in hardback, say for $25.99, and then months later, a $14.99 trade edition would come out, and finally after sales for the trade edition tanked, the $7.99 mass market edition would appear. The cost of reading a book depended on how soon you wanted to read it after first publication. Now we’re seeing $9.99-$12.99 or more for the ebook, but we get to buy it right away. On one hand this seems like a very fair price, because it’s such a savings off the hardback cost, but on the other hand, you get nothing but electrons for your money.

When you buy a hardback you have something physical that will last, that’s collectable, or nice to look at on a shelf, and makes a great gift, or is wonderful to lend to your friends, or even sell. Even if you didn’t read the book, you had something when you bought a book.

Most people only read a book once, and if you’re buying ebooks, all you’re really getting is to read it. An ebook will last, but if you only read a book once, it’s more like renting the book.

By the way, from now on when I mention pricing, I’m going to use Amazon’s for sale pricing and not list.

You’d think pricing would be based on what you get for your money. The ebook would be the cheapest, then mass market paperback, then trade paperback and then hardback, because of the production costs and materials that go into creating the book. And sometimes this happens. For example The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is $6.35 ebook, and $7.99 mass market paperback. But Isaac Newton by James Gleick is $11.99 ebook and $10.20 trade paperback – WTF? Does that mean a mass market paperback only costs $1.64 to produce and the ebook costs $1.79 more than a trade paperback to create? I don’t think so.

James Gleick’s newest book, The Information is $17.21 for the hardback and $12.99 for the ebook. What Amazon is asking the reader, are you willing to pay $4.22 more to have a hardback copy, or would you just prefer to read it on your Kindle for $12.99.

The list price of The Information is $29.95, which is probably what you’d pay at a brick and mortar store. So the publisher probably thinks $12.99 is a great bargain for the reader, with $16.96 savings. The author is probably thinking, at what price and royalty rate do I earn the most money. The pricing of a book is a really hard math problem, isn’t it?

Me, I’m thinking something different. I’m thinking: What does it cost to read a book? Once we enter into the world of ebooks, I’m essentially paying to read the book. I don’t own anything. I can’t sell my copy when I’m done with it. I can’t lend it to a friend (even though they are working on that, but it’s not like owning a real book which I could lend over and over again). I can’t put it on the shelf for others to admire my large library of great books. I read the book, and more than likely, I’ll move it to archive on the Kindle, or even delete it so I have less cluttered interface to deal with.

You’d also think ebooks would be priced by the word, to take into account the cost of writing and editing the book, so that a 100,000 word book would cost twice as much as a 50,000 word book. That doesn’t happen either. Basically publishers are charging whatever they can get, and each has their own system for pricing. With ebooks I think they are guessing what the demand will be, and if they think it’s high, they will raise the price accordingly – so a new ebook off the press might be priced $12.99. But if they think they can sell more copies at the $9.99 price they sell it for that. When demand goes way down, they will think about lowering the price. That’s all understandable.

But ebooks is changing the habits of bookworms. I’ve always bought lots of hardbacks, and never read many of them because I sit them on my shelf thinking one day I’ll find time to read them when I retire. I’m just not going to do that with ebooks. I’m going to buy just before I start reading. I’m not even sure I could save an ebook for twenty years before I got around to reading it, but there’s just no pleasure in owning a bunch of books I can’t see.

And since I don’t feel “buying” an ebook is like “owning” a book, when I see the price at Amazon for the Kindle edition, I’m going to check the library first to see if there is a copy I can “borrow” because reading a book on the Kindle feels a whole lot like borrowing a library book – I’ll only see it as I read it.

Recently Amazon announced that they were selling more ebooks than hardback and paperback books combined. I’m not sure the world is really ready for the implications of this. Essentially bookstores, both news and used, are the side effect of bookworms, and not book collectors. Real, hardcore book collectors are rare compared to the ordinary everyday bookworm that consumes books. If we bookworms can get our reading electronically, what happens to the bookstore? And once bookworms realize they are only paying to read a book, and get past the illusion of owning books, how they judge what a fair price is for a book will change. I’m not sure if publishers are ready for this.

Finally, the move to ebooks is changing me in other ways. When I shop for books now I realize I was fooling myself. I’m not going to read all those books I bought. I don’t really need my shelves of books because I’ve learned I’m a consumer of words, and not a collector of books. Several times lately I went to buy a book and stopped myself, because I knew if I didn’t read the book right away there is little chance I’d read it at all. I can’t plan for future reading because I read by what I’m hungry for at the moment. This is also why I don’t buy ebooks when I see one I want to read. That impulse is different from the impulse for picking a book to read right now. With a Kindle, you can finish a book and download another and start reading immediately, and since finding books electronically is so easy, why not wait until it’s time to read the next book.

The future price of a book won’t be based on what the publisher thinks the book is worth, but on the price readers are willing to pay to read it next.

JWH – 5/24/11