2014 The Year in Vintage Books - History, Mystery, and Biography

So here it is my year of reading vintage books. I managed to read some things I'd said I'd get to and make new finds. Out of the 20 or so books that I read there are few regrets. So here is the list in no special order.

Counterfeit Kill - Gordon Davis (aka E. Howard Hunt) - (1963)  I enjoyed it and thought the Washington D.C. setting was well done. I think of Hunt's character as a kind of American James Bond just as sophisticated (but in a more real way) and without the misogyny.

"Dear Mr. President ..." The story of fifty years in the White House mail room -  (1949) Ira R.T. Smith - Breezy and relaxing. I had never really thought about all the mail the presidents get from the citizens of the U.S.A.

The Man Who Paid His Way - Walt Sheldon (1955) - The story of a corrupt city police department and the officer who could not play along. Much better than I expected. Sheldon is a good writer but some of his characters are a little too stilted.

Too Dead to Swing : A Katy Green Mystery by Hal Glatzer - (2002 ok so its not really vintage) - A mystery story set in the 1940's that concerns an all girl swing band called the Ultra Belles. A premise loosely based upon Phil Spitalny's and Hour of Charm All Girl Orchestra. A so-so mystery. Somehow I found it a little hard to get through.

Murder in Stained Glass - Margaret Armstrong - (1939) Another passable mystery that I would rate as just ok. While reading I kept thinking that the action was actually taking place in 1900 not the 1930's, how odd. I have learned to be wary of these Bestseller Library editions as many are abridged versions of the original novel.

John Sloan: Painter and Rebel - John Loughery - (1997, not vintage reading either) A good biography of the painter and ashcan school member. It left me more informed about turn of the century radical politics and John Sloan's complex relationship with this wife Dolly.

The Counrty Kitchen - Della Lutes - (1936) - Lovely and well written about the author's rural 1800's childhood in Michigan and the food they ate. This book is half autobiography and half cookbook. It went through 22 printings to many copies are out there.

The Coffee Train - Margarethe Erdahl Shank - (1953) Another fine autobiographical book about about growing up in a close knit Norwegian community in North Dakota. Like the Country kitchen it contains many references to food and provides a view of life as it was.

My Year of Reading Vintage Novels / Vintage Mystery Books - Issue #3 - The Last Adam - James Gould Cozzens

The Last Adam - James Gould Cozzens

The Last Adam is about a small town in Connecticut as seen through the eyes of all its inhabitants, though chiefly through the eyes of the town doctor. To quote Kirkus Reviews "The central character is the country doctor, not the usual glorified, sentimentalized figure, but a rather surprisingly shoddy and at the same time appealing human being."

The major story line in The Last Adam concerns a typhoid epidemic that sweeps through the town. The epidemic is caused by unsanitary conditions in a workers camp. The workers have come to the town to erect steel towers and hang overhead power lines. The electric company is bringing progress to the town. The irony is that progress causes the outbreak of a disease only the doctor's elderly aunt can remember. Other major themes in this books include not only change and progress, but rich vs poor and "modern medicine".

Cozzens' writing can be positively lyrical at times as in this passage that describes a sunset and the cold weather: "It was perfectly light still, a sunless lucid light with no direct source. The sky was a hard northern blue; sun itself shone a bright sad orange on the crest of the cobble. Increasing cold could be guessed from an elusive, fragile clarity of air in the valley shadows."

Please don't miss this good book by another once well regarded and now largely forgotten author. I am looking forward to reading another of his books, a court room drama titled The Just and the Unjust, later this year.

My Year of Reading Just Vintage Novels and Vintage Mystery Books - 2014 - Issue #2

The Dark Wood - (period book club edition)

Photo of author Christine Weston

I recently completed The Dark Wood by Christine Weston originally published in 1946 by Scribner's. The story centers upon three people who lives intersect during one summer in NYC. First, we are introduced to Regan and Mark Bycroft. Mark is a returning WWII veteran who comes back to find that his wife wants a divorce because she has fallen in love with someone else.

Next, the reader encounters Stella Harmon, a war widow who can not get over the loss of her husband Alec. Depressed and listless, she can hardly makes an effort to get through the day. She's been a widow for two years now.

One day she encounters Mark sitting in a bar and is shocked by the physical resemblance between him and her dead husband. Her friend Miriam also sees the resemblance but not as strongly.

Here is how Weston describes one of Mark and Stella's early meetings: "She met his gaze, and to Mark it seemed as is she were perilously near to committing herself, and to him, to further responsibilities. In another mood, with another woman, he might have welcomed the danger out of sheer loneliness, but while this woman attracted him, she strangely repelled him. His feeling towards her were not whole feelings, and passion for her died almost at the moment of inspiration."

The lives of Stella and Mark now begin to intertwine and eventually they start a relationship. Of course all is not smooth sailing. Mark does not want Stella and her friends to see / treat him as some carbon copy of her deceased husband. Does she really love him or is he just a stand in for Alec?

Weston weaves together the characters' inner thoughts with dialogue and description in a seamless and non-obtrusive way. You get to know their inner thoughts and feelings but only as it relates to the plot. The Dark Wood is not a stream of consciousness novel! Reviewers of the day classified it as a psychological novel. I agree and would simply say it's a very good read.

My Year of Reading Just Vintage Novels and Vintage Mystery Books - 2014

This year I'm going to only read vintage novels and vintage mystery books. Hopefully I can find enough interesting ones!

Books I've Read in 2014:

The first novel of the year was A House - Boat on the River Styx by John Kendrick Bangs, published in 1895. It's a fantasy novel based upon the premise that a group of famous, but now deceased literary figures, gather together at a men's club afloat on the river Styx. In Greek mythology The Styx is a river that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld (also called Hades). The group on the house boat includes William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Baron Munchhausen, Noah, Adam, Napoleon, and Homer.

The book has no real plot but is instead made up of encounters between these literary figures, which elicit conversations or arguments centered around several topics. There are running jokes that weave their way through the story and help to tie it together. The main joke being that Shakespeare never wrote his own plays, the actual authors of course are present to to testify to this truth, and there's Baron Von Munchhausen who tells many unbelievable but totally amusing stories.

The novel is 171 pages long and at times I struggled to finish it. The premise wore thin and many a conversation was a little too precious and not so deep. It reminded me of watching Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which asks the viewer to pat themselves on the back for their knowledge of history and literature and for getting all the jokes. I think if Bangs had chosen to explore more serious ideas, along with the jokes, this vintage novel would have been a much better read. If you have an ebook reader A House - Boat on the River Styx can be downloaded for free.