Gratuitous Bookshelf Posting

I generally read three or four books at a time and have come up with a little system for doing so.

The first book is my Metro reading, the one into which I bury my nose to escape the squash of the half-hour train rides back and forth each day between the closest station to my little corner of the NoVA suburbs and downtown Dee Cee. Because conditions are not exactly conducive to deep thought, I generally pick only either light entertainment (e.g., Wodehouse, Somerville & Ross, Thurber, O'Rourke, Chris Buckley) or old favorites (Wodehouse again, Waugh, Graves, O'Brian, Tolkien) for this.

The second book is my after-dinner-and-odd-chunks-of-free-time reading. This is typically more serious, and can cover both nonfiction (usually history or music, but also odd subjects such as gardening) and what people like to call "serious liddashur". I say "book", although it is not unusual for me to have two or even three books in rotation in this second slot at the same time.

The third book (or books) often is another entry from one of the first two classes, although recently this category has been filled up with studies for Catholic class - Scripture, the Catechism, the Vatican's cliffnotes to the Catechism (really!) and the odd essay or passage from one of the Church Fathers. I generally do this reading later in the evening, although I also try to get in a fair bit on my days off and once in a while at lunchtime.

What keeps me from reaching the 27th Level of Master Dorkdom about this system is that my adherence to it is utterly arbitrary and inconsistent.

For the metro, I recently started reading John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, but found that I had to give it up. This is a novel-length post-9/11 Rumpole of the Bailey story in which Horace takes on the defense of a Pakistani doctor scooped up by HM Government on charges of terrorist activities. It wasn't many pages before I realized that the book had two problems, one substantive and the other stylistic. As for substance, I've long been aware of Mortimer's politics and generally not minded. Here, however, he is simply too shrill, using Rumpole as a mouthpiece to shriek and scold and blast the Brit government (and, by extension, Dubya). I could probably stomach this over teh course of one of his usual short stories (in fact, I have done so in Rumpole Rests His Case), but I don't see why I should have to plow through a couple hundred pages of it. As for the stylistic problem, Mortimer sets up the book so that while Rumpole narrates in the first person in the old usual way, alternate chapters are contributed by his wife, Hilda (known as She Who Must Be Obeyed). My experience of first-person narratives is that when the author starts introducing alternative points of view, they do nothing but disrupt the natural rhythm and flow of the story and distract the reader. Whatever such stunts may contribute to the story, I've never found them worth the annoyance. (Wodehouse experimented once with writing a Bertie and Jeeves short story from Jeeves' point of view. It was a dog and Plum never tried it again.) Finally, the truth of the matter is that John Mortimer is an old man (indeed, I was surprised to learn recently that he's still alive). He's been writing Rumpole stories for thirty-odd years now and, frankly, they're getting tired - hackneyed, predictable and, when not being used for ranting purposes, by the numbers. I'd much rayther go back and read the older stuff than bother with the new.

So having taken the unusual step of throwing Rumpole overboard, I am now working instead on Dudley Pope's Ramage and the Drumbeat, one of about a zillion stories Pope wrote about the adventures of Lord Ramage, a young Royal Navy officer fighting the good fight against the Frogs and the Dons. (Pope was also a naval historian. I have several of his books on the period and find them well-written and informative.) I tried another of these novels some time ago and found it okay but uninspiring. The reason for this is that I've been so horribly spoiled by Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels that the adventures of all other fictional heroes of the time (including both Horatio Hornblower and Richard Sharpe) seem pale, flimsy and cardboard by comparison. I promised myself to keep this bias in mind and check it this time, although I don't know if I'll be able to do so.

As for my evening book, I'm back in Civil War mode again. Having just polished off John J. Hennessy's excellent Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas, I've gone straight on to Stephen Sears' Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. I have read Sears' very good account of Chancellorsville, in which he points out that "Fighting Joe" Hooker's main fault was not tactical (his manouver across the Rappahanock to the west of Lee's defenses at Fredericksburg was, in fact, brilliantly pulled off), but a loss of nerve at the critical moment, so am truly looking forward to this account. So far, Sears is covering the same ground as Hennessy (which is hardly surprising, given that Second Bull Run was the immediate strategic predecessor to Antietam), namely the incompetance of poor John Pope in letting Lee and Jackson utterly out-manouver him, the swinish and calculating incompetance of George McClellan's dithering around in the Peninsular Campaign, and the baffled frustration and fury of Lincoln and members of his Administration in having no choice but to deal with "Little Mac" after the pig's-breakfast Pope left them in front of the Washington defenses. I've yet to read a modern history or biography of McClellan that didn't paint him as a tactical boob and a political bastard, and I already get the distinct impression that this book will be no different. Nor should it be.