A Losing Streak: Three Recent Reads

This January I set a goal of reading 150 books in 2018. This total is unprecedented for me, and about four months in it’s still a bit too early to tell whether I’ll succeed. However, at finishing three books a week, so far I’ve been able to stay on track.

One downside to reading at such a pace is that if I’m halfway through a book and start disliking it, I feel obliged to finish anyway or else admit the 50% I did read was a waste of time. Fortunately, most of my books have been “keepers,” or at least weren’t books I regretted reading once I’d finished them.

This lucky streak did not hold true last week, where all three of my books were duds.

They Were Strong and Good is a book by Robert Lawson, an author I enjoyed as a kid reading the historical fictions Ben and Me, Mr. Revere and I, and Captain Kidd’s Cat. These books are narrated by animals that follow the exploits of historical figures: Most obviously Captain Kidd and his cat, Paul Revere and his horse, and—before Pixar’s Ratatouille made it cool for rats to go around hiding in human’s hats—Benjamin Franklin and a rather opinionated rodent. Lawson is also author of the Rabbit Hill books; in fact, he’s probably best known for these books, although personally I haven’t read them.

They Were Strong and Good intrigued me because in this book Lawson talks about his family and how they experienced American history—and were part of it. It also had the benefit of being rather short, which was good because I was running a bit behind this week. But its brevity turned out to be the only positive thing I could say about this book.

Written in 1941, the original text of this book was later revised to supposedly gloss over some of the more bigoted stereotypes Lawson made, not only in text but also his illustrations. I say “supposedly” because even in the bowdlerized edition I read, I was always uncomfortable and sometimes outright angry at Lawson’s attitude toward African Americans (and slavery), as well as Native Americans, and his blasé attitude about the Civil War.

His ancestors, it turns out, were racists who “didn’t like Indians” and slave-owners who fought in the Confederate army. Granted, I’d say the majority of people in that time were racists, and one can hardly fault Lawson for his southern roots. What I do find fault with is that he makes these people out to be heroic. It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth when I read “my father owned a slave” in one sentence, and “he was strong and good” in the next. This is exactly the sort of book that gives other books of that era a bad name, and makes modern readers want to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” by dismissing all literature written pre-1970s.

I took an omnibus of H.G. Wells’ novels to work for reading on my breaks. I’ve read four out of seven in the collection. When my sister learned of this plan, she recommended I read In the Days of the Comet first, because, she said, she HATED that one and if I felt the same way I could “cleanse my palate” by reading the other ones.

In the Days of the Comet contains some science fiction elements, but for the most part is a sort of manifesto for Socialism, Free Love, and pretty much all the things Wells believed. In it, a nameless narrator has a sort of vision of the future, where he comes across a Man in a Tower who is writing his memoirs. The Man in the Tower is an old man by the name of Leadford, who lived through a Great Change: a comet passes by Earth, leaving behind a green haze that transforms all humanity into one good little coop. Essentially, the Green Haze brainwashes every character to believe what Wells thought was the right way of living—A.K.A. his own. This includes not only his socialist views—Leadford is constantly reminding people that he’s a socialist, so much so that eventually it becomes unintentionally funny—but also his idea of open marriages.

Frankly, though, if Wells was really trying to convince his readership that these things were the best possible future, he shot himself in the metaphorical foot. Leadford is such a pompous elitist, always considering himself better than every other character (he treats his mother like a servant, talks down to religious people, even judges his own “true love” Nettie on her ability to write or reason), that he illustrates the worst faults of socialism: the underlying desire for every individual to be better—or be perceived as better—than other people. As for the Free Love thing, Leadford is also so sexist (again, the one woman he actually cares about genuinely he considers irrational and uneducated) that his open marriage at the end comes off more as a way to excuse his own infidelity than as a way to liberate men and women from loveless, arranged marriages.

Moral opinions aside, In the Days of the Comet is also just not Wells’ best work. Throughout other works, he tends to “nest” narratives like Matryoshka dolls, with one narrator meeting the main character, who then narrates his own life in past tense. With this novel, however, it is handled so clumsily that one doesn’t really care about either narrator. Add to that his style is terribly unbalanced: he takes four pages to describe a room, the carvings on a desk, the cracks in the floor…and then glosses over a ton of other more interesting details, like the comet itself and the “science” of why its coming would have any psychological effect on humanity. Also, he introduces a foil to Leadford in the character of Parload, a fellow student and socialist who becomes obsessed with watching the comet as it comes toward Earth, and theorizes what will happen when it arrives. While a rather important character in the first few chapters, Parload eventually fades away with no payoff to his character’s existence. I was left wishing that Parload had been the protagonist instead of Leadford. Also I sort of wished that the comet had destroyed Earth by the time I finished this book.

Riley’s Farm-Rhymes is one volume in a series of poetry books by James Whitford Riley. There were several individual poems I liked in this collection, but they were far outweighed by the unrelenting “vernacular” language that Riley uses throughout most of them. Poetry is hard enough to read when written in standard English, much less having to decipher “country” accent spellings. I had intended to read another of this series, Riley’s Child-Rhymes. A quick perusal of its contents, however, revealed that in this other volume, Riley trades in his “country” accent for baby-talk.

I think I’ll pass.