By Bob Aldrich
During a recent medically enforced non-reading period, I got to thinking of some of the books I read in my dim and distant youth. I had one college course in European literature, and the prof told me he didn't care whether I came to class if I would read (at least portions of) and report on a list of books.
You might want to dip into one or more of these for your summer reading instead of the trash we all enjoy so much. By the way, W. Somerset Maugham once said it's no sin not to finish a book. If you find it a drag, cut out.
I wouldn't ask my worst enemy to read every word of Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe. Originally a Parisian newspaper serial, it's plotless and goes on forever, but the opening chapters, at least, have a fine lyrical quality. It concerns a young Beethoven-like musician and his conflicts between romance and rhapsodies. As I recall, Jean-Christophe gave up girls for his career. Was that a wise choice? Rolland (1866-1944) won the Nobel Prize in 1915.
The Magic Mountain (Der Zauerberg) by Thomas Mann. Another biggie. Germany's greatest novelist (1875-1955) takes his hero, Hans Castorp, to a tubercular clinic on a mountain top, but it's not as much a downer as that sounds.
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle.) Quite modern in style, this French novelist depicts young people, similar in some ways to those today, at the time of the Napoleonic wars.
The Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hasek. One of the first to counter the propagandistic blather of the First World War, this Czech novelist wrote of a Chaplinesque peasant soldier, dumbest of the dumb. Schweik emerges victorious from every crisis while his officers pile up corpses. It's both hilarious comedy and a scathing indictment of war's insanity.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Maybe you tried it in English 201 and found it slow. Try it again at your leisure.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Whether or not you caught the PBS version, this sharp-witted novel about a British Catholic family between the world wars is entertaining.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. A comic-shivery look at undisciplined science. Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan was reputedly suggested by the passing of William Randolph Hearst. Poor Hearst; and Orson, too!
I note with a blush that I haven't named any women authors. OK, for Britain in the 1930s, try Elizabeth Bowen. I must have been afraid of Virginia Woolf; never took to her. For America, Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence) and Willa Cather (My Antonia). I'm sticking to authors remembered from my youth.
Sinclair Lewis seems to have drifted into obscurity, but there's great humor in Babbitt and well-researched medicine in Arrowsmith.
You might like Thomas Wolfe's poetically styled Look Homeward, Angel or his You Can't Go Home Again, though he's a bit long-winded.
The Late George Apley by Thomas Marquand. On the surface, a Boston lawyer's respectful biography of his longtime client; beneath, a delightfully savage
thrust at my-folks-were-on-the-Mayflower snobbery.
Good reading!
Bob Aldrich is a Los Gatos Weekly-Times columnist and feature writer.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, July 24, 1996.
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