Reading lists and a love of books

My father was an avid reader from the time he was a young child. He kept a list of the books that he had read, and they were not few. The first book on his list was Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz; it was first published in 1895 in Poland as a serialized novel in several Polish newspapers. In 1896, it came out in book form and was subsequently translated into more than fifty languages (according to Wikipedia). My father would have read it in English since he did not speak Polish (he did however speak Italian, and studied Latin and Greek as well). He did not annotate his book lists, so I don’t know why he started with Quo Vadis; perhaps his father suggested this book to him. This was followed by Fortitude: Being a True and Faithful Account of the Education of an Adventurer by Hugh Walpole, published in 1913. And so on, until the last book that he read shortly before his death in 1985, which was Cal by Bernard MacLaverty, which came out in 1983. By the time he died, he had read close to a thousand books. It was not clear from his book lists when he started to keep them, but I’m guessing he started when he was around twelve years old. Since he was sixty-seven years old when he died, that means that in the space of fifty-five years of reading, he read about seventeen books per year on average. Many of the books were loaned from the Warner Public Library in Tarrytown; both my parents were frequent users of the library.

It struck me while going through my father’s book lists that he was already interested in organizing and systematizing books as a child, in preparation for his career as a librarian. He did not know that he was to become a librarian when he was twelve years old, but the signs were already there when you take a look at his lists.

Both he and my mother loved to read, and they instilled their love of books in us children. My mother did not keep extensive lists of the books she read like my father did, but both of them encouraged us to do so. So I have done so, all these years. I started keeping a list when I was around twelve years old, like my father. The first book on my list is The Hundred and One Dalmations by Dodie Smith, which was first published in 1956.

My father read widely—fiction, non-fiction, biographies, history, Catholic literature, and children’s literature. He shared what he read with me especially, since I would often sit at the dinner table with him in the evenings after dinner and discuss what he and I were reading. As I got older, we would often read the same book, sometimes at the same time, more often right after the other person had read it. We suggested books for each other; my father would cut out book reviews from the newspaper to share with me, or we would find a few books of interest in the weekly supplement The NY Times Book Review. As I get older, it strikes me that growing up in my family was a special experience. I learned to love books and to love discussing them. Nothing makes me happier than when I can sit and discuss the book I’m reading or have read with someone (I feel the same about movies). Some people would call it doing ‘post-mortems’ and don’t like to do this. In fact, most people I know don’t discuss the books they read. I respect that. We all have our own reasons for why we read and for reading the books we read. As long as the world continues to read, we’ll keep evolving and growing as human beings. That’s what is most important. But I’m glad I have my father’s reading lists, because as I peruse them, I see that we have a lot of the same tastes in literature. And that makes me feel close to him. In a future post, I will list some of the books he read as a teenager and young adult, and will include some of my own.  

Doubled in bulk—Making Norwegian Whole-Wheat Bread

This is Easter week—a job-free week, one that I am taking advantage of at home. The weather since Tuesday (a gorgeous spring day) has returned to something resembling late winter/early spring. It’s been rainy, windy, chilly, and gray--not so motivating in terms of wanting to be outdoors. But today is shaping up to be a nice day, so we'll see. I was looking through some of my old cookbooks on Wednesday, and happened upon one that I have used on occasion--Beard on Bread. On the cover, it states: “To: All Bread Lovers. My 100 favorite recipes, with variations. Everything you need to know about breadmaking”. So I decided that I would make some bread for Easter. James Beard (1903-1985) was an American chef and food writer, born in Portland Oregon. Beard on Bread (catchy title) was first published in 1973, and given to me by my aunt and uncle as a school graduation present, if I remember correctly. They knew already then that I loved making bread, both yeast and non-yeast. My mother never made yeast breads after a few fiascos; she said that the dough never rose for her. I cannot say the same; I have had good success with the yeast bread recipes I’ve tried. It’s all about not killing the yeast cells that are there to do the job of leavening. If conditions are right for them, your success is assured.

I came upon a recipe in his book called ‘Norwegian Whole-Wheat Bread’ and tried it. What surprised me was how fast the dough doubled in bulk and how it took over the bowl I had set it in (see photo)! You won’t be disappointed with the results. I’m including the recipe here as Beard wrote it (the comments in parentheses are mine).

Norwegian Whole-Wheat Bread

Taught in the Norwegian Government School for Domestic Science Teachers in Oslo, this recipe makes a very dense, coarse bread full of honest flavor, and it slices nicely. The dough will be stiff and difficult to knead, but I am sure you will find the results worth your labors. 

2 packages active dry yeast

4 cups warm milk = 100^o to 115^oF, approximately

8 cups whole-wheat flour

2 cups fine rye flour

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1-2 tablespoons salt

Cornmeal

Makes 2 free-form loaves

In a large mixing bowl dissolve the yeast in ½ cup of the warm milk. Allow to proof. Add the remaining milk, and gradually beat or stir in the three flours and the salt to make a firm dough (I used 7 instead of 8 cups of whole-wheat flour and 3 instead of 2 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour since I didn't have enough whole-wheat flour left). Remove the dough to a well-floured board and knead 10 to 12 minutes (I used an electric handheld mixer with dough hooks and that did a good job—it was a tough dough to knead). When you have a satiny, elastic dough, form it into a ball. Place in a well-buttered bowl, and turn to coat the surface. Cover and set in a warm spot to rise until doubled in bulk.

Punch the dough down, turn out on a floured board, and knead again for 2 or 3 minutes. Cut into two equal pieces. Sprinkle one very large baking sheet or two small ones with a bit of cornmeal. Shape the dough into round loaves, and place them on the baking sheet or sheets (I used two adjustable-size bread pans instead and adjusted them to long). Cover and let rise in a warm place until almost doubled in bulk, which will take as long as 2 hours, because this is a firm-textured bread………Bake in a preheated oven at 375^oF  for about an hour, or until the loaves sound hollow when you tap them with your knuckles. Cool thoroughly before slicing. This bread cuts beautifully and will remain fresh for quite a while if wrapped in a towel or placed in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.

The books of M. Scott Peck and Rollo May

Years ago, I discovered the writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, who wrote a book that helped to change my way of looking at some important aspects of my life. ‘The Road Less Traveled’ (published in 1978) was an eye-opener of a book, one that I have recommended to many people through the years. The book’s basic tenet is that life is difficult and that personal and spiritual growth is a lifelong process involving hard work, struggle, pain and introspection. Reading it made me realize at a fairly young age that it was possible to change your life; that the hand of cards you were dealt was not a permanent hand. It was possible to rise above personal and family problems and the inefficient and often stagnant ways of dealing with them. But the key was to be actively invested in doing so; it was important to understand and accept that the work involved would be difficult and that there would be no immediate gratification. Peck is one of the few authors to whom I have written; I was so enamored of his book. Even though I was disappointed to subsequently learn about his alcoholism, marital infidelities, and other problems, it made me realize that he probably wrote the book as much for himself as for his readers. I wanted him to be a person without faults; there are no such persons, and he would be the first to admit that. He was not always able to practice what he preached. I also read Peck’s ‘People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil’, published in 1983. It is a much more disturbing book since it presented and discussed his patients, albeit anonymously, who had chosen to live in the darkness of their problems (pathological lying, cheating, neuroses, anxieties, obsessions, banal evil) rather than seek the light of truth (facing themselves and their problems and fears), health and recovery.

Rollo May, another of my favorite authors, was a psychiatrist who wrote many excellent books, such as The Meaning of Anxiety, Love and Will, and The Courage to Create, published in 1950, 1969, and 1975, respectively. My father introduced me to his writings when I was a teenager. I read The Meaning of Anxiety when I was in my early twenties, and it was one of those light-switch books—books that have the ability to push you from darkness into the light. The power of the printed word never ceases to amaze me. Little wonder that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. Words can change your perspective on things, and in this case, May’s words changed my perspective on anxiety. Rather than viewing it as a major problem to be eliminated on the path to mental health, his view was that anxiety is necessary for personal growth, and that it forces us to act, in order to alleviate the anxiety or to help us confront what it is we are anxious about (what we fear?). Doing so allows us to live life to the fullest. In Love and Will, May discusses different types of love and how they should be intertwined. The ideas of purpose and responsibility related to love are discussed at length. In The Courage to Create, May writes about the importance of creativity and art in our lives; this quote from his book best describes his views, beautifully so:  

“If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols………They (the artists) have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world."

Saying goodbye to Ray Bradbury: Your books live on.

I have previously written about some of my favorite authors and books, both this year (February 8^th) and last year (August 30^th). I included sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury as one of my favorite authors and The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and The Illustrated Man as some of my favorite books. I think when I read The Martian Chronicles for the first time, I got hooked. Just plain hooked. Hooked on a genre of writing that drew me in and kept me engrossed for much of my life thus far. I couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old when I first read The Martian Chronicles. Even at that age I understood that we might not be alone in the universe. And even though there may not be Martians on Mars, Bradbury’s book was a fascinating entry into a world that has never stopped intriguing me. We wonder about what is out there in space, and we imagine all sorts of alien creatures and humanoids. In The Martian Chronicles, we as humans did not expect to be met by creatures who could read our minds in an effort to make us ‘feel at home’, only to turn on us in the darkness. The Martians we met on Mars looked like us—family and friends from home—and the travelers from earth, who missed home, were easily led down that path.

I wrote a post about The Martian Chronicles and Solaris on June 21^st, 2011. In honor of Ray Bradbury, who passed away on June 5^th at the age of 91, I am including part of this post today, the part that has to do with The Martian Chronicles. Rest in peace, Ray Bradbury and thank you for your wonderful books. For those of you who have never picked up his books, now is the time to do so. 

-------------------------------

(Excerpted from my post The Martian Chronicles and Solaris from June 21^st, 2011):

I have been a fan of science fiction since I was a teenager, probably from the time I first read The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I also read Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451, and enjoyed them all. Bradbury is a thought-provoking and outstanding sci-fi writer (90 years old and still with us), and his books have a haunting quality about them. You don’t forget them easily. I don’t recall all of the stories in The Martian Chronicles in detail, just that there were certain parts that were quite scary in that what was suggested was considerably terrifying. You just knew that something terrible was going to happen to some of the earthlings who made it to Mars, and it did (the third expedition was liquidated by the Martians who posed as dead family members such that the deluded (and lonely) crew ended up just giving in to the delusions). The following passage from the chapter ‘April 2000: The Third Expedition’ is an example of the type of terror Bradbury could instill in his readers: “And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during the night, perhaps my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift and become another thing, a terrible thing, a Martian. It would be very simple for him to just turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart……..His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid……..Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, ‘Where are you going?’…...’For a drink of water’. ‘But you’re not thirsty’. ‘Yes, yes, I am’. ‘No, you’re not’. Captain John Black broke and ran across the room. He screamed. He screamed twice. He never reached the door”.

This was all Bradbury wrote about the actual murder of Captain John Black and the massacres of the crew of the third expedition. You knew that murders were occurring in the rest of the Martian houses who had crew members staying with them because they were the ‘families’ of these crew members, but Bradbury didn’t have to elaborate at all about them, because it was left to our imaginations to figure out what was happening to them all. Superb sci-fi horror in a category all its own.

Some of my favorite books

As promised in my post about writers from a few days ago--some of my favorite authors and their books:

·         Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure; Tess of the d’Urbervilles; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far from the Madding Crowd

·         Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady; The Golden Bowl; Washington Square; The Wings of the Dove; The Turn of the Screw

·         Charles Dickens: Great Expectations; A Christmas Carol; A Tale of Two Cities; David Copperfield

·         Francois Mauriac: Viper’s Tangle; Therese; The Woman of the Pharisees; The Desert of Love

·         C.S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters; Mere Christianity; Surprised by Joy; Miracles; The Problem of Pain

·         Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea; Good Morning, Midnight; Smile Please; Quartet

·         John Le Carre: A Perfect Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

·         John Steinbeck: The Winter of Our Discontent; Of Mice and Men; Cannery Row

·         Dorothy Sayers: Whose Body?; Strong Poison; Have His Carcase; Hangman’s Holiday; Gaudy Night; Busman’s Honeymoon

·         Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Life is Elsewhere; Immortality

·         Rollo May: The Meaning of Anxiety; Love and Will; Man’s Search for Himself; The Courage to Create

·         George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss; Silas Marner  

·         Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

·         Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

·         Henry David Thoreau: Walden; Civil Disobedience

·         Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Fahrenheit 451; Dandelion Wine; The Illustrated Man

·         Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Strain; The Terminal Man; Timeline

·         Stanislaw Lem: Solaris

Publish Your Book using CreateSpace

I thought I would talk about how to self-publish your book if you want to try this publication route. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but since I have done it once with good results I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For starters, you learn the entire process of not only preparing your book for publication, but also marketing it once it is ‘out there’ for sale. The online publishing world is a fascinating place! All the things you learn along the way about how to sell your book are of course what you would pay a publisher to do for you and your book. But think of how valuable it may be to learn those processes yourself.

If you’ve written a book and you want to try your hand at self-publishing, I recommend CreateSpace (www.createspace.com), not only because I’ve worked with them and am pleased with the results, but mostly because this company is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Why is this good? Because once you have completed the requirements for publication on CreateSpace, your book can be set out for sale on Amazon.com at no cost to you. If you are a new author your chances of getting your first book published via a major publishing house are probably close to null. But ok, let’s say you’re lucky and your first book gets published by a major publishing house—then you may not need to read this post further. But for the rest of us who believe in our work and who want to see it out there in print, CreateSpace is the way to go. It’s a very easy website to use. You set up an account with them and prepare your book on your very own ‘dashboard’. CreateSpace will assign an ISBN number to your book. The preparation steps are clearly outlined in a kind of ‘checklist’ format—in essence, you can only proceed to ‘b’ if you have finished ‘a’, and so forth. They require the uploading of exactly two files in .pdf format—your text file and your book cover file. The latter must be prepared according to a template provided by them that you can download with instructions. I worked with a designer on my first book who prepared my book cover for me according to this template, and she did a great job. CreateSpace also offers free tools to prepare your book and ready-made book covers that you can use if you don’t work with a designer. Once the book was complete and ready for uploading to their website, I uploaded the text file and the book cover file, and waited no more than a day for them to get back to me with the message that a proof book had been created that I had to order and review carefully in order to make sure that it was satisfactory to me. The cost of a proof book was minimal. At no point along the way did I ever get the feeling that I was being ‘scammed’. My intuition told me that this was a good company to work with and it is. Once you approve the proof book, your book can eventually be sold via both CreateSpace on your own ‘eStore’ and on Amazon. I love Amazon for many reasons (it’s a great online bookstore and so much more), but it is also a company that is very generous to budding authors. The great thing about having your book sold on Amazon is that you can create an Amazon Author page that allows you to provide as much or as little information about yourself as you wish. Additionally, if you write a blog, you can feed it directly into your Author page (as I now do), thus generating more publicity for your writing and/or book. CreateSpace will publish your book only when it is ordered, that is, it is a ‘Print-on-demand’ company, and here is where the savings to you come into the picture. There are no requirements for hundreds or thousands of copies of your book to be produced upfront as would be the case if you worked with a major publishing company. CreateSpace states this clearly—that you as the author do not have to worry about ‘inventory or minimum orders’. The only real costs involved are the payments you make when you order copies (as many or as few as you wish) of your book for yourself and family or friends. And because you are the author, you pay much less to order your book than others will pay. You also get to choose how much you want your book to sell for (the list price). CreateSpace makes its money by keeping a fair share of the royalty you will get for each sale, but you can also increase your share of the royalties. There are two publishing plans within CreateSpace that deal with this topic, the basic plan and the Pro plan (slightly more expensive)—but you get to keep a larger percentage of your royalties by signing up for the Pro plan (the cost is minimal and it’s worth it).  I recommend it also because when you order copies of your book you pay less per copy than you would with the basic plan and also because this plan increases the extent of distribution to other book sellers.

If you want to market your book once it’s available for sale, I recommend that you send out a press release describing your book and its date of publication. I used www.prweb.com and was very pleased with their services. They offer several different packages that involve the use of different multi-media formats (online press release, podcasts, etc.) for press releases, but I went with the basic package (online release only) and it was well worth it. I also set up a simple one-page website to market my book, and spent some time learning simple web design (thanks to Microsoft Office Publisher) in order to achieve this; the only expenses involved with this aspect are the website hosting costs. There are a number of web hosting sites and I hesitate to recommend one simply because there are so many out there that offer very good packages at similar prices.

Of course it took some time for me to learn how to use all of the different online sites available to help an author publish and market his or her book, but once I did, I didn’t look back. The costs involved are minimal and the crash-course in the use of different online sites is challenging and fun. I don’t think I spent more than about three hundred dollars to publish and market my first book, and that included the designer’s fee, signing up for the CreateSpace Pro plan, ordering a proof book, ordering several copies of the published book, website hosting, and one press release. I’ve more than recouped my initial investment. If you’re a new author, you may want to choose this publication route at some future point and I can only say—go for it, you won’t regret it.  


Addendum 29 January 2015--I can now recommend Weebly for both web-hosting and website-building. It offers both for free, but if you want to obtain statistical information about your website traffic and get an idea of who is accessing your site, you will need to pay for that information. You can learn more about it all at www.weebly.com. And as far as book promotion, using social media (e.g.Twitter) is an excellent way to promote your book and an eventual author page on Amazon.