Over this Turkey Day weekend, I’ve begun reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s brilliant Love in the Time of Cholera (in this age of coronavirus, it seemed appropriate).

You don’t read Marquez, you climb on the sentences and paragraphs and ride them as if it were a roller coaster. The ups, the downs, the hard turns to the left and suddenly: Boom! You run into something you didn’t even see coming, even though it was foreshadowed about a page ago and you said….”nah….’.

Quite the ride.

It made me recall the only other Marquez book I’ve read, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I read back in college and is – to me – one of the best books of the 20th Century.

Which got me to thinking – what are the best, or more correctly, my favorite books?

Tried to keep it to the “Top Ten” of each (fiction/non-fiction); it’s what I feel right now.

Fiction

• Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky): — The quintessential Russian novel by my favorite Russian author.
• Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut): — This book, based in Vonnegut’s witnessing of the firebombing of Dresden in WWII, is part biographical, part science fiction, and a scathing indictment if men’s willingness to kill each other. It’s subtitled “The Children’s Crusade.” So it goes.
• The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow): — Set in Chicago (as am I), this book is probably Bellow’s most joyous. While Herzog is probably his richest literary endeavor, I prefer the tale of Augie March. The ending is a bit of a letdown, but the majority of the book is top shelf.
• The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway): — One of the Big Three of Hemingway’s novels (along with A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls), this long piece is closer to his brilliant short stories – think “Hills Like White Elephants” or “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Maybe novels should differ from short pieces, but who cares? This works. And the last few lines are achingly brilliant.
• The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner): — My first Faulkner novel; I could have picked many others (Light in August; the macabre As I Lay Dying etc.), but this mythological encapsulation of the South, like Dilsey (and by extension, all Southern blacks), has endured.
• Sophie’s Choice (William Styron): — A long, let-it-never-end book, this is an autobiographical tale that leans heavily on WWII and its aftermath. Sophie’s choice defines her (no spoilers). A book about immeasurable loss, madness, youth, missed youth, unbearable grief and how people manage – or fail to manage – same.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): — Read the first couple sentences. Tell me you’re not at least … intrigued. A magical, mythic tale of generations of a family (even comes with a family chart – and it’s necessary).
• To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf): — King Lear re-imagined, and even more terrifying. I read this in one sitting back in college (where my main complaint was that I did not have time for recreational reading, which this was); the stream of consciousness just washes over you.
• Ulysses (James Joyce): — Sure, Finnegans Wake is his masterpiece, but it’s basically unreadable. I once spent an hour-long AP English class where the teacher and students dissected the meaning, iconography and so on of one paragraph of this tome. Ulysses is not a walk in the park, either, but if you stick with it it’s worth it. Read the poetry that is the last (pages-long) paragraph. I still get chills when I revisit this portion of the book, which I do a couple of times a year.
• The Handmaid’s Tale (Magaret Atwood): — Today – 2020 – it is fashionable to celebrate this novel: The HULU miniseries is a huge hit, and the handmaid’s outfit is often used to protest the actions of the increasingly conservative (and some say, anti-woman) leanings of the US Supreme Court and the current (Trump) administration. But I read this book as soon as I could get it in paperback (published 1985; my softcover is from 1988), and was blown away by the writing and the subject matter. The other book of Atwood’s that I read, Surfacing didn’t do much for me (subject or style), but this book is put together in a meticulous, almost constitutional manner. Much as the founders of the fictional Gilead built a new form of (icky) government and society, this book is no so much written as built, constructed. And I mean that as a high compliment. And the building/society that can be seen, in its protean form, is terrifying.

Non-fiction

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes): — This door-stopper of a book won just about every award possible (including the Pulitzer Prize & National Book Award). It details the Manhattan Project and the aftermath of the Japanese bombings, but it begins with the physics that made it possible, going back to the turn of the 20th century with Clerk Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford and others. I had a friend who read the book comment, “You skipped over the boring science parts [neutrons, enrichment etc.], right?” No! Those were some of the best parts!
• Lab Girl (Hope Jahren): — The story of, in no particular order, the life of a female scientist (botanist), a mother with postpartum depression, and her work with her “work husband,” an odd but ultimately likeable fellow named Bill. It’s about living in Minnesota, Sweden and Hawaii. But – ultimately – it is about building labs to do the difficult, exhausting but ultimately rewarding work of pure research.
• Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates): — Written as a letter to his then 15-year-old, the book threw me in the beginning as the author discussed how his body doesn’t belong to him, or how he lost his body. What? It took me a few (too many!) pages for me (white dude) to understand Coates (black dude): Black lives matter less than white lives; I can do to/get away with to Coates that he cannot get away with doing to me. Disagree/agree; he makes a strong case for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and the whole history of black oppression. This is a Very Important Book. Powerful without falling back on hyperbole. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time 2.0, forty years later.
• The Discoverers (Daniel Boorstin): — A deep yet accessible (no math) of man’s search for understanding our world. Basically, a history of science. Boorstin is a brilliant, effortless writer and he patiently explains the hows and whys man tried to understand our world (and beyond). Boorstin has written a couple of other books in similar vein: The Creators (artists/creative types) and The Seekers (philosopy/religion), but these are less compelling. The Discoverers has more science, and I do like science…
• The Song of the Dodo (David Quammen): — A book about the newish science of Island Biogeography and an age of extinction, but title is premised on a simple fact: We have, fairly recently (~1800), casually wiped out a species, the Dodo. Yet we have no idea what it sounded like, because we just didn’t…care. While more than 600 pages, it’s a great, accessible read that I greatly enjoyed, even though I’m more into the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy).
• The Periodic Table (Primo Levi): — A collection of self-contained chapters, each of which is about an element (surprise!). Levi picks expected (gold, uranium) and unexpected (tin, vanadium) elements (21 in all) and spins interesting tales of each. Levi – a Jewish Italian chemist – was imprisoned in a German concentration camp (Auschwitz) during WWII, has a chilling chapter detailing his post-war dealing with what turns out to be one of his German captors (a scientist who worked at the camp with Levi).
• A Room of One’s Own/Moments of Being (Virginia Woolf): — OK, two titles for one slot. But both are slim essays, and each is about the same two subjects: 1) Women’s rights/need for equality, and 2) some are more creative than others (man or woman). In the latter book, Woolf gets a little too close to Nietzsche’s Superman for me, but – overall – on the money. The former details that a woman needs to equal what a man has – an office, no child care during the day etc. – is. Many years ago, I read an article about the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (the Holy Grail for wanna-be writers). The author – a workshop student/alumni(?) said that the workshop was great for many reasons: fabulous teachers, spit-balling with other brilliant students and so on. But the one thing she (I think) focused on was the best offering of the workshop: You got “the time, the space and the quiet” to write. Sounds like a room of one’s own, hmm?
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (James Agee/Walker Evans): — This book is almost impossible to explain. As part of a magazine assignment, Agee and Evens went to the mid-Depression Era South (1936) to interview sharecroppers. The article was never published, but this book – with text by Agee and photos by Evans – capture a moment in time with painful precision. At the very least, read the introduction by Evans re: Agee: Even if you don’t know Agee, you will after reading this concise and unapologetic snapshot of Agee at the time. An overlooked American Masterpiece.
• Broadsides From the Other Orders (Sue Hubbell): — Subtitled, “A Book of Bugs.” And it is! I wrote a “Pest Control” column for a magazine at one point. I like botanical nomenclature, the Latin, the bugs themselves. So does Hubbell, much more than me. And it shows.
• Coming Into the Country (John McPhee): — The heir apparent to the clean New Yorker factual prose (from, among others, E.B. White), this book is a little different than most of McPhee’s books, which are essay collections (read them all, especially Giving Good Weight, my introduction to his clean, clear, insightful writing) – this one is a full book about one subject: The attempt to move the capital of Alaska from Juneau to Anchorage (which ultimately failed, but long after the book was published). Beautiful slice of life in the 49th state.

Yes, this is a weird list: Where is Catcher in the Rye, any Tolstoy (Wand and Peace is the better novel; Anna Karenina is my fav), why are there two Virginia Woolfs? Where is Kafka, one of my favorites?

That’s what I think today – tomorrow, different books. Some I would have forgotten if they were not on a bookshelf a few feet in front of me. I have hundreds of favorite books (and I’ve read plenty of stinkers, and those that I’ve just forgotten).

I like reading, and this is just a glimpse into the books I’ve enjoyed.

I’ve read a dozen or so headlines/scanned articles that asked: How is the coronavirus virus affecting your Thanksgiving plans?

For me, it’s just the three of us – Romy, Lee and a turkey that gave its life so … we could eat it.

We’re the perfect COVID couple – not traveling, having dinner with only the household members blah blah.

And that’s how we have done it for a long time – we were ahead of this pandemic (not)!

OK, that’s us. What is the rest of the US doing for Turkey day?

More than is comfortable, people are traveling – by plane or other vehicle – to meet with relatives/friends that they have not visited with for many months/weeks. I get it – Parents want their kids see their grandparents; want to see siblings divided by geography and so on.

I understand their desire to chuck the whole COVID threat: One time visit etc.

And I understand when folks say, “Well, I might get COVID, but that’s my choice.”

And they are sorta right.

They might get COVID, but here is where I disagree: You might get COVID, but you may pass COVID onto anyone that you come into contact with, regardless of where that individual went to the ill-advised celebration or not. Family members that did NOT attend a Bday party might still get the COVID that was picked up at that event, because … contact etc.

Bottom Line: Your choice affects others, in potentially deadly ways. If it were just your choice to put yourself in danger, well, that’s one thing. But you are putting those who didn’t sign up for this in (potentially deadly) danger. And you might well be trading a nice turkey day for an ICU Xmas.

I’m not angry at those flouting CDC rules.

I’m, just, well, disappointed.

Happy Turkey Day!

And here’s to hoping that I’m totally off base about this (almost) re-normalized holiday.

From CDC.gov

My last Covid entry, back in June 2020, was just a short entry about how coronavirus and all that was impacting me.

In this entry – now that we are a little deeper into the pandemic and know a little more about same – I’ll be dividing this entry to 1) how it is affecting me, 2) My current opinions – big picture – about coronavirus & 3) Here are my, today, Coronavirus truths

How Coronavirus is affecting me

• Not yet a hardship to me: I’m not a very social animal, so the whole social distancing, not going clubbing or to the gym doesn’t impact me. I fully understand that it affects others differently, but I’ll admit that I’m on the low end of the “it’s annoying” scale.
• I don’t personally know anyone with COVID-19: Not a brag, just a fact. The last stats I read about this was somewhere between 20%-33% of Americans personally know someone that has had (or has) COVID-19. I guess me and my acquaintances are lucky/fortunate.
• Not going to Starbucks: Brew own coffee; not the end of the wold but difference in my heahavior.
• Not working from home: From late March through early July 2020, my office did a rotation where only one person was in the office on any given day. With Illinois rates soaring, we may have to go back to this, but not there yet. And I’m fortunate – working from home (basically on a computer with an occasional Zoom call) is no biggie for me one way or another (in/out of office).
• We did not take a vacation this year: I have not left the state; Romy visits her Dad/siblings occasionally in Indiana.
• We have not eaten out nor gone to a bar locally: We have done take-out locally (which I encourage to help restaurants especially the non-chains); Romy has eaten outdoors in Indiana.
• I always wear a mask…: In any store, when I’m in a car with someone besides Romy, always around my Dad (he’s 90+ and has/had respiratory issues). We don’t wear them at work because we have 3- to 3 1/2 people well-separated. I don’t get the whole non-mask religion (more on that below).
• This is not a year I’d want to repeat visa-vi the pandemic: Seems obvious, but some folks (again, see below) seem to be doing their damnedest to prolong this “hoax” (it isn’t).
• Do NOTHING: to my first point, I’m not a social animal, so doing nothing is easier for me, but this should have been a year of (amped-up) Lee – of doing nothing. Virus can’t transmit to folks who are not there. Read a book; take a walk; Netflix and chill.

My current opinions – big picture – about coronavirus

Coronavirus has become a political hot potato.

A “hoax.”

Something that is no worse than the flu, will be gone in few days, by Easter, when it gets hot or whatever.

And the divisions between those who believe those last two sentences and who don’t are a divide between those who put politics above science and those who trust science over politics.

For the record, I believe in (sound, replicated) science, even over however unfortunately the (possibly new) science impacts my gut/political beliefs.

One of the “science” touchstones is to socially distance, no large gathering (birthdays, graduation parties, Christmas parties and so on).

Does this suck?

Absolutely.

But let’s take a look at one smallish gathering that occurred in Maine in August 2020 (from LA Times [firewall], h/t: daringfireball.net):

Karen Kaplan, science and medicine editor for The L.A. Times:

If you want to know why public health officials are so nervous about how much worse the COVID-19 pandemic will get as the holiday season unfolds, consider what happened after a single, smallish wedding reception that took place this summer in rural Maine.

Only 55 people attended the Aug. 7 reception at the Big Moose Inn in Millinocket. But one of those guests arrived with a coronavirus infection. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 other people. Seven of them died.

None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party.

It sounds cold, but the attendees of that wedding killed those people. If you’re planning a “small” family get-together for Thanksgiving, it’s every bit as irresponsible as planning a “short” drunk drive.

Sobering.

Here are my, today, Coronavirus truths. Mock me as you see fitting:

• Coronavirus IS a pandemic: Duh, but some still see it as a hoax (really???)
• The science on coronavirus: believe the scientists/doctors: At the first peak of this pandemic, in April, the death rate was high. We’re – as a country/globe – getting better at treating patients. So, while the number of cases has risen (in July 2020) and skyrocketed (November 2020), the overall deaths per [date unit] has gone down. Good!
• The science on coronavirus: It may/probably will change. Don’t treat each new nugget of covid info as “they [who are they?] didn’t want to release that until [something].” Look at the previous point – science/doctors getting better at keeping deaths lower. No push back from the “hoaxers” about this.
• We still need federal leadership: By this, I mean getting the federal government to set standards (that can be overridden at state/local level) about how schools can open, gyms should close etc. Standards, dammit!
• We still need federal leadership/money: By foisting all this on the states (which led to, among other things, states bidding against each other for masks, PPE etc.), smaller (often Republican-leaning) states were at a disadvantage: Sure, California and New York will battle over masks, and Utah will never win. States have to balance their budgets; the Federal Government does not. Utah (and Idaho, Alabama…) can’t compete with NY, CA, IL….
• Wear a fucking mask: Yeah, some hate wearing pants, but still…no pants, no mask, no service.
• Federal leadership – shut it down: Right now, I’m in favor if a total shutdown if in-door bars and restaurants and gyms. These are nice to have, not needed. The federal government – which CAN afford this – should pay the bars, restaurants and gyms to shut down (but keep them alive with federal funding). I’m not the only idiot to suggest this.
• The science seems to favor opening schools (k-8): Close bars, open K-8 schools.

I get the pandemic fatigue, but this is a real issue.

You can’t “I’m tired/bored” out of this. Did you read the Maine example, above?

But this is what we are seeing.

And why COVID numbers are spiking.

My one big COVID take-away, that I’ve been saying to anyone who would listen since maybe April (re-emphasizing above):

This is the year we do NOTHING.

No vacations, no gatheringes.

Does it suck?

Yes.

Is it necessary?

Yes.

All I gots at the moment.

As I was reading Isabel Wilkerson’s brilliant Caste (see my review, here), I was struck by two passages, more than a hundred pages apart.

They both could have been written in the last five years, about now-President Donald Trump.

Please Note: The first passage is about Nazi Germany, particularly Hitler. I am not saying in any way that Trump = Hitler.

Hitler was evil and had a plan.

Trump is an incompetent carnival barker, who relies on instinct of the moment to drive his policies.

That said, the way Trump wormed his way into leadership is a bit like Hitler: Republican leaders didn’t take him seriously, he was good for TV ratings, and they woefully misread how he could galvanize his base.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal the conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support.

[…]

The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.”

By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitators, a cult figure enamored of the pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying tourches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of grievances and fears especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior running on instinct. He had never held a political office before

The second passage is from a chapter titled “The Insecure Alpha and the Purpose of an Underdog.”

The basic premise of the chapter is that, if you are not truly an Alpha (dictator wanna-be), you have to convince people you are one. And one of the simplest way to do that is find an underdog and turn your abuse on them. Find someone who, for whatever reason, can’t fight back. Faux Alpha.

In India, the Untouchables.

In Nazi Germany, the Jews.

In America, blacks.

You know that you are not seeing a true alpha or, put another way, you have encountered an insecure alpha, if he or she must yell, scream, bully, or attack those beneath them into submission. That individual does not have a loyalty and trust of the pack and endangers the entire group through his or her insecurities, through his or her show of fear and lack of courage.

I really don’t have anything to add to this.

In her extremely well-received and reviewed 2011 non-fiction book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration Isabel Wilkerson took a look at the great black migration from the Jim Crow South to the north in search of a better life.

Not entirely to their surprise, these southern immigrants found that there was plenty of racism is the North, as well.

In her new book, Caste, Wilkerson takes a closer look at the black vs. whites issues in America – past, present and possibly future.

Writing in a similar tome, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility has a fairly simple – yet disturbing thesis: All Americans, especially white Americans, are racist. Why? Simply because we are a racisty society and we’ve grown up in it.

Interesting.

But Wilkerson takes it to the next step: She equates racisn with actual hatred – active hatred, vs. the passive injustice of systemic racism.

She equates the 400-year-old chasm between whites and blacks – formerly slaves, now free – as a symptom of a caste system.

By that, she means (I’m greatly simplifying) that whites don’t necessarily hate blacks, it’s just that – in the fabrick of our society – blacks are assumed to be inferior in many ways. It’s not spoken; it’s just the way it is.

She compares and constrasts the American Caste with the centuries-old caste system in India (Brahmins down through the Untouchables [now Dalits]) and the short, terrifying caste that dominated Nazi Germany. This sudden change in mores led to the alleged superiority of Aryan and Nordic peoples, at the expense of the almost sub-human others (Romanians, homosexuals, and – especially – the Jews).

Caste is an extremely well-written book – an almost academic work of non-fiction (roughly 450 pages, including notes).

Its structure is interesting: While very precise and, as mentioned, scholarly, the books has short sections, self-contained, that offers personal insights by the author. These short sections are not integrated into the book flow, but are small, self-contained, all-italic asides where the professor steps out of the classroom as if to say, “I ran across this injustice personally. I was a reporter for…. Can you believe this still happens today, 400 years after th first slaves arrived on the East Coast?”

This is the book I expected White Fragility to be, but each serves it’s purpose.

White Fragility is a more accessible look at (the crappy state of) race relations in America; Caste drills in and shows how hideous this American Caste system is.

For example of the latter, Wilkerson writes of how the Nazis were fascinated with how America has subjugated its blacks, especially purity tests. In at least one southern state, having even one drop of black blood in you made you black. How to enforce that, back before DNA testing, is beside the point. The point was that the (white, of course) powers that be could make that impossible-to-prove determination. The Nazis marveled at how Americans had the cojones to do something so, well, arbitrary and get away with it. And these were the high ranking officials who were building ovens and gas chambers. Reminds one of the Salem witch tests.

Whether you buy into the premise of an American caste system or not, I expect Caste to end up on the Pulitzer and/or National Book Awards short lists. The books is dense but readable, and the subject matter is spot on for 2020, the year of Black Lives Matter.

I can think of only two other non-fiction books about the American black experience that transcend this one: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. That’s some heady company.