What Are You Reading

"No Down Payment" by John McParkland. Published in 1957

I bought the book after having seen the movie on TCM. Like the movie, but with more graphic details and more hard punching, the book denounces the happy surface image of Americans living in post-WWII new-housing developments.

It's a very '50s-style big soap opera of a novel with aspirations to place the era's anxieties and fears into a larger philosophical framework of law, religion, faith and beliefs. It works well at building out interpersonal relationships, exposing the characters' inner strife, showing the daily stresses of "keeping up with the Jones" (if that's your thing) and the difficulty of finding faith and purpose in a "soft," "modern" life. It works less well in its efforts to build a substitute or superior system - to wit, it brutally identifies a lot of faults with America in the '50s, but it doesn't offer up many concrete alternatives or solutions.

In an odd way, "No Down Payment" has a reverse echo of an Ayn Rand novel. While - overall - aggressively opposed to Rand's philosophy, like Rand, the novel is preachy and the characters are archetypes who speak in, well, speeches and feel more like representative of ideas than living, breathing people. As with Rand, this approach can work if you're willing to accept it, but it also keeps the reader at a distance as you feel less of a connect to the characters than in a regular novel.

Whether or not a denunciation of the aborning American suburban lifestyle of the '50s is your thing, the good about novels like this is they remind us that many of the issues and problems we, sometime, think are new or unique to our times - automation replacing jobs (big fear in the '50s) or gender roles in a changing society - are not. Also, they just give you more insight - a better "feel -" for the thinking, culture and nuances of the time. That last one is my favorite part about novels like this one.

From 1949, Ross MacDonald’s “The Moving Target.”
The 1966 film “Harper” starring Paul Newman was based on this story.

I'm reading Ryan Ireland's 'Ghosts of the Desert', David Ohle's 'The Age of Sinatra' and Richard Yates' 'Eleven Kinds of Loneliness'. I'm waiting for Robert Penn Warren's 'Night Rider' to arrive from the US; I lent the last copy out and it never came back...

I tell you, reading at home is my absolute favorite to forget summer heat! Totally effective.

Finished Daniel Silva's latest, The Other Woman, and it didn't disappoint. Love his stuff!

Currently reading Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It's utterly fascinating.

After threatening to read it for years, I just started "Peyton Place," because my embarrassing taste for 1950s soap opera movies and books has resulting in my watching the movie version of PP way too many times. I'll report back afterward, but based on the first chapter - I doubt my untowardness will be disappointed.

Hines VA Hospital serves veterans coffee and free books, and last week when a volunteer book vendor wheeled
her cart over to me I balanced a cup of joe and dug in looking for a find. I've found Celine, Proust, Kierkegaard,
Tolstoy and others in VA carts but I discovered an altogether different jem: The Late Shift by Bill Carter which
chronicles the rivalry between David Letterman and Jay Leno for the right to inherit the Tonight show and the
incompetence of NBC brass throughout. A well researched study of network machinations and corporate psychology.

I just finished The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. A great read, and makes me appreciate the series even more.

"Out of the Clouds: The Unwanted Horseman and the Unlikely Colt Who Conquered the Sport of Kings" 2018, by Linda Carroll and David Rosner

There are two types of horse-racing books: those for hardcore fans that are about the inside-baseball of the sport and those for the general public / casual fan that are, mostly, about the people and horses in the sport. "Seabiscuit" is the best example of the latter - while "Out of the Clouds" is no "Seabiscuit," few books are, it is the engaging story of an unassuming man and, later on, an unsuccessful horse that happen to have met through, thrived in and, then, conquered the Sport of Kings.

The man - Hirsh Jacobs - was the dirt-poor son of immigrants that found his way to horse racing via the surprisingly popular, very low-brow early 20th-Century sport of pigeon racing (yes, it was a competitive sport with purses - no one had any money and they hadn't invented the internet yet, people did what they could to find entertainment). With the opposite pedigree of most who rise to the top of the sport, Jacobs became a trainer of the backwash of the thoroughbred racing world - all but unwanted claimers (losing horses sold for very little money).

After more than a decade of historic success turning losers into winers - but in everyday races not the prestigeous "stakes" races of the upper-crust of the racing world - Jacobs claimed (purchased for a low price) an abject failure of a well-bred horse - Stymie - that one of the top trainers of the day could do nothing with. As the title gives away, Hirsh turns Stymie around and the two went on to win major stakes races, beating many of the best horses of the time while, for a period, holding the all-time earnings record for one horse.

All that is a great rags-to-riches story, but the overarching verve of the book is the Runyonesque characters that populate Hirsh's world - including his good friend and, sometimes partner, Damon Runyon himself. Racetrack touts, bookies, gamblers and out-right hustlers - who live by their wits trying to figure out inscrutable horses and out-guessing the other scammers all around them - give the book a picaresque atmosphere of a world - early-to-mid Century horse racing (when it was one of the top sports in America) - that has now faded away.

And bringing it all together is the upstanding, never-places-a-bet-himself (legal or illegal), his-word-is-his-bond, solid-family-man Hirsh. His horse-training success makes him acceptable to the people - those touts and hustlers - that he likes and is comfortable with but stands in stark contrast to. While Stymie's story is an instructive one of patience and letting a horse do it his way versus forcing a method on him as his first trainer did, the magic of this story is not Stymie, it's the salt-of-the-earth Hirsh and his success, first, in the low-end world of race-track hucksters and, later (with Stymie), in the blue-blood world of stakes races not easily open to outsiders like Hirsh.

Mary McCarthy, How I Grew
The late writer's adolescence-young adulthood 1925-1933 memoir through Vassar.

About half-way through "The Monogram Murders" by Sophie Hannah. This is the first book in her series that revives Christie's Hercule Poirot. Being a big fan of Agatha Christie I was skeptical but am loving it so far. A great read and a great puzzler to test the "little gray cells."

Harp said:

Mary McCarthy, How I Grew
The late writer's adolescence-young adulthood 1925-1933 memoir through Vassar.

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Haven't read that one, but have read several stories of hers and always find them interesting and thought provoking (albeit, a bit depressing).

Fading Fast said:

... (albeit, a bit depressing).

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Mary M does evidence a discernible sadness; perhaps precocity bequeaths a certain despondence.

Just finished Love for Lydia (1952) by H. E. Bates.

A young lower middle class journalist falls in love with a young aristocratic woman, Lydia Aspen, in the England of 1929. The story follows them thru the next couple of years as, slowly, he come to realise that she, in turn, doesn't love him and has outgrown him emotionally. The relationship indirectly leads to the death of his two best friends and she leaves him after refusing his request of marriage. A couple of years later he finds her in a hospital and the book ends with them finally together.

A coming of age story set against a backdrop of changing society, between a dirty town and a country estate and of the natural world and the ever changing seasons.

"Peyton Place" by Grace Metalious, published in 1956

I have a weakness for soap-opera novels - heck, I've read all the Austin novels which are just well-written soap operas high-browed up by their fancy surface manners and, to us, historical setting. For me, soap-opera novels hit their sweet spot in the '50s as books are usually ahead of the other media in pushing the envelope on sexuality and salaciousness.

Hence, the '50s provided a breakout period for these types of books which, by the '70s (as with so much after the '60s) were too over the top and, in truth, had few taboos left to break, but in the '50s, explicit fiction writing about teenage and premarital sex, marital affairs, rape, incest, etc., was fresh and new. Of course, there are prior examples (there always are), but the bluntness and degree makes the '50s a clear highpoint.

And as noted in a prior post, after having watched the movie version of the book more times than I care to admit, I had high expectations for the novel and it didn't disappoint. It's a big, giant potboiler of everything most people try to keep under wraps amped up and splashed out there.

You probably know the story, so I'll be brief: a young middle-class girl coming of age in a small New England town reveals all the secrets and indiscretions (see my list above that started with "teenage and premarital sex" and add in, double dealing in business, biased juries and doctors and policemen taking the law into their own hands) that people like to keep tucked away. While there are moments of sweetness and poignancy in the young protagonist's life that humanizes the novel, you bounce along from one "Oh My God" moment to another with characters that, with a few exceptions, are more stereotypes - all good, all bad - than real, but you don't care as you're rooting for the good to win and bad to "get their's."

Shakespeare is out there for those who want literature and there are also tons of other wonderfully well-written books / books with a social conscience / books that educated us / books that lift us up or pull us through the muck in an edifying way - and many of those, when you're in the mood, are excellent reads, but when you want to escape with a big ball-of-cheese of a book, give me a '50s "novel" of life and times. (Now, sadly, I can't wait until TCM puts "Peyton Place" on again - there's a reason my parents are not proud of me.)

Fading Fast said:

"Peyton Place" by Grace Metalious, published in 1956

I have a weakness for soap-opera novels - heck, I've read all the Austin novels which are just well-written soap operas high-browed up by their fancy surface manners and, to us, historical setting.

Shakespeare is out there for those who want literature and there are also tons of other wonderfully well-written books / books with a social conscience / books that educated us / books that lift us up or pull us through the muck in an edifying way - and many of those, when you're in the mood, are excellent reads, but when you want to escape with a big ball-of-cheese of a book, give me a '50s "novel" of life and times. (Now, sadly, I can't wait until TCM puts "Peyton Place" on again - there's a reason my parents are not proud of me.)

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"Indian summer is like a woman: ripe, passionate...." Sure as all hell beats "Call me Ishmael"
or "It was the best of times and the worst of times..."

A former lit prof of Grace Metalious doubted she wrote Peyton Place, but the book has a real hardscrabble veracity.

Harp said:

"Indian summer is like a woman: ripe, passionate...." Sure as all hell beats "Call me Ishmael"
or "It was the best of times and the worst of times..."

A former lit prof of Grace Metalious doubted she wrote Peyton Place, but the book has a real hardscrabble veracity.

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It's not literature, but it's a rip-roaring good read. If not her, who did he or others think wrote it? It would be too good to be true for "Peyton Place" to have a tawdry "who wrote it" scandal.

"Missing Men," by John H. Ayers and Carol Byrd.

I pick up a lot of good reading at the swap shop at our local dump, and this 1932 volume is one of the more interesting recent finds. It's a detailed non-fiction look at the world of "missing persons" investigations, as seen thru the activities of the Missing Persons Bureau of the NYPD.

The early thirties were the era when "scientific investigation" -- what we call "forensics" today -- was really coming into its own, and the book shows how the Missing Persons Bureau functions from street level on up, with an emphasis on the use of advanced methods. But there's also quite a bit of examination of the "Whys" involved, as in why missing persons go missing, and the discussion of the specific reasons for why men and women disappear peels a lot of the nostalgic varnish off the latter-day idea of the "nuclear family." Desertion was rampant in the 1930s, to the point where the majority of cases investigated by the Bureau involved husbands or wives who, for reasons of their own ranging from alcoholism and/or drug addiction to domestic violence to just plain having gotten sick of their mates, decided to deliberately take a powder. The most famous missing persons case of the decade also gets a detailed exploration. The disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater, who vanished in August 1930, never to be seen again, was already notorious in 1932, and the authors give an exhaustive account of the state of the investigation at that time, little expecting the case would remain unsolved nearly ninety years later.

Perhaps the most unusual case history in the book is that of one "Camille Dietz," described as by the authors as "an unfortunate member of the Third Sex," who was raised as a girl, but in her teens ran away from home to live as a young man -- and when the police finally caught up with "Camille," now working as a soda jerk under the name of "Harry Black," it was agreed that no further action was required as long as "Harry" was happy in his present situation.

The scientific aspects of the Bureau's work are fascinating -- some cutting edge, some horrifyingly crude. In one memorable account, the authors discuss a bloated, decomposing corpse fished from a river in such poor condition that the skin sloughed off its fingertips when police tried to take prints -- rendering identification difficult until a detective hit on the idea of wrapping the shed skin around his own fingertips and getting the prints that way. I don't think they use that technique any more.

This probably isn't a book I would have picked out in a store or off a mail-order list, but it just goes to show you shouldn't walk by a random pile of discarded books without at least poking around a bit. Who knows what you might find?

LizzieMaine said:

"Missing Men," by John H. Ayers and Carol Byrd.
The scientific aspects of the Bureau's work are fascinating -- some cutting edge, some horrifyingly crude. In one memorable account, the authors discuss a bloated, decomposing corpse fished from a river in such poor condition that the skin sloughed off its fingertips when police tried to take prints -- rendering identification difficult until a detective hit on the idea of wrapping the shed skin around his own fingertips and getting the prints that way. I don't think they use that technique any more.

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Um, actually. . . yeah. I've seen it used in the past few years.

I am reading, actually rereading the Lord of the Rings. I usually read it once or twice a year, yes I'm a geek. Saw the movies and while I liked them they are different than the books in many ways.